While modern psychology distinguishes between psychiatric illnesses and character flaws in that the former is involuntary and the latter is relatively controllable and ameliorable, the boundary between the two is not clear-cut and is as much a subject of debate today as it was in Shakespeare’s time. Indeed, in literary and dramatic works, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, psychiatric illnesses and character flaws have often been presented as indistinguishable for dramatic effect, and such presentations themselves have been instructive for psychologists and psychiatrists for hundreds of years. In this connection, this essay employs Hamlet as a case study and employs Aristotelian dramatic theory to illustrate how and why the boundary between psychiatric illnesses and character flaws has sometimes been made vague—especially when it comes to what is known as a ‘fatal’ character flaw (hamartia).

Shakespeare in psychology

Shakespeare in psychology Shakespeare’s works, especially Hamlet, have been closely associated with the field of psychology since its conception. Shakespeare has been held as a “master of representing the human character”, which led early psychologists to use his works to develop and even use them in support of their theories (McKnight, 2020). Among early psychologists, Hamlet was perhaps the most popular because the protagonist exhibits symptoms of madness, the treatment for which they were especially interested in. Madness, used as an umbrella term for all mental disorders, began to be studied more closely from the late 18th century, with Hamlet being cited as a case study in insanity as early as 1778 (Bennett, 2001). Benjamin Reiss writes that at the time “no figure was cited as an authority on insanity and mental functioning more frequently than 1 William Shakespeare,” (The Madness of King Lear and Hamlet: Defining Insanity in the Courtroom, 2020). John Mason Good wrote about the condition “melancholia attonita,” a 19th century definition similar to modern day major depressive disorders, based on Hamlet. Psychiatrists also cited Hamlet and other Shakespearean plays in court as evidence to support the diminished mental capacities of a person who had committed a crime or written a will that was being disputed.

In Act I Scene V of the play, Hamlet and two others, Marcellus and Horatio, see atop the castle wall the ghost of Hamlet’s late father, who tells him that he has been murdered by his uncle Claudius. The spirit of the late king implores Hamlet to exact revenge on Claudius, who has now married Hamlet’s mother and taken the throne. After his encounter with the ghost, in Act I, Scene V, Lines 171–172, Hamlet says to Marcellus and Horatio, “As I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on—”, which most modern scholars have taken as Hamlet deciding to fake insanity at the beginning of the play to disguise his plan to kill Claudius, only descending into true madness towards the end of the play, after he has killed multiple people in his desire to exact vengeance for his father’s murder McKnight (2020).

In this connection, in Act III, Scene IV of Hamlet, Hamlet sees the ghost of his father again after he kills Polonius, the father of his lover Ophelia. During the initial encounter with the ghost, in Act I Scene V, Hamlet, Marcellus, and Horatio all see the apparition. This time, however, the Queen does not see the ghost and exclaims, “Alas, he’s mad!” (Act III, Scene IV, Line 105). This prompts the audience to question whether there is indeed a ghost, ponder whether the apparition is simply a manifestation of the grief, confusion, vindictiveness that Hamlet is experiencing after his father’s murder and his mother’s remarriage, or, in the case of multiple characters seeing the ghost, a mass hallucination (Joseph, 1961). In any case, Hamlet begins to exhibit signs of true madness at the beginning of Act III. For Hamlet’s intention was to exact revenge for his father’s murder by killing Claudius, but now he contemplates suicide: in the famous soliloquy, he ponders whether it is better “to be or not to be” (Act III, Scene I, Lines 56–89).

The fatal flaw

While Act I Scene V invites doubt over whether Hamlet really sees his father’s ghost and sets the story of Hamlet’s revenge and mental collapse in play, it also exposes Hamlet’s fatal character flaw (hamartia, or ἁμαρτία in Greek). According to Aristotle in his Poetics, hamartia is the “error or frailty” that eventually leads the tragic hero to his downfall, and Hamlet’s hamartia is his vengeful and Machiavellian nature. Again, it also acts as a turning point or reversal of fortune, known in Aristotelian dramatic theory as the “peripeteia”, setting into motion a series of events and beginning with Hamlet’s conception of a plan to kill Claudius and culminating with the deaths of nearly all the characters, including Hamlet himself. While the majority of modern scholars maintain that hamartia is an error of judgment of which the hero is unaware and cannot be responsible for, an alternative interpretation asserts that hamartia derives from an inherent character flaw of the hero of which he is aware, rendering them at least in part responsible for their downfall (Vinje, 2021).

In Hamlet’s case, his passion for vengeance leads him to become callous and cruel, willing to go to any means to achieve revenge. In Act III, Scene IV, Hamlet is with his mother the queen in her room when he, mistaking Polonius for Claudius, kills the former. Upon realizing that he has killed Polonius, Hamlet not only shows no remorse but insults Polonius, saying, “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! / I took thee for thy better. Taken thy fortune; / Thou find’st to be too busy is some danger,” (Act III, Scene IV, Lines 31–33). It is here that the effects of Hamlet’s vengefulness and, more importantly, his Machiavellianism—one element of what is known in psychology as the “dark triad” of negative personality traits, along with narcissism and psychopathy (Paulhus & Williams, 2002)—become apparent. However, it is unclear whether Hamlet’s increasingly cruel and remorseless actions are a consequence of his 3 madness, or whether he makes himself mad by intentionally malevolent actions, knowingly worsening his inner turmoil.

Mental illnesses and personality disorders

Contemporary psychologists and psychiatrists posit a boundary between mental illness and normal behavioral deviations and reactions to irregular events, called the “normal–disordered boundary,” which forms the basis of diagnoses and treatments (Wakefield & First, 2013). Following the American Psychiatric Association’s addition of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–III) in 1980, there has been increasing acknowledgement that sudden, radical life changes and traumatic events may lead to the blurring or breaking of the normal–disordered boundary.

Yet normal reactions to sudden, radical changes to one’s life and traumatic events also often overlap with symptoms of mental illnesses such as anxiety and major depressive disorders. Debates over the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5) have demonstrated how it is difficult yet critical to define this boundary so that those with psychiatric illnesses can receive treatment while also not pathologizing normal behaviors and reactions. However, other than in cases of PTSD, the boundary also becomes blurred in the case of personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder. The DSM–5 defines the essential features of a personality disorder, including “impairments in personality functioning and the presence of pathological personality traits,” (American Psychiatric Association, 2012).

Nevertheless, personality disorders are themselves difficult to diagnose, treat, and categorize. In fact, there remains debate within the field on whether personality disorders should be classified as mental illnesses at all. One of the major characteristics of a mental illness is that its development and effects are beyond the individual’s control. But since the majority of those with a personality disorder are believed to be in control of their behavior and often appear to be deliberately manipulative, some experts are reluctant to consider personality disorders as mental illnesses (Kendell, 2002). Despite this, the majority of psychiatrists and publications do classify personality disorders as mental illnesses due to the lack of control over their own behavior.

Hamlet’s case

Bringing these insights together and applying them to the case of Hamlet, it is clear that Hamlet has undergone traumatic experiences, but there is also an underlying vengefulness and Machiavellianism of which he is aware and can help to ameliorate. What allows us to make this claim is that while Hamlet has been read through an Oedipal lens—insofar as Hamlet appears to be infuriated by his mother’s second marriage and the emergence of another, more problematic father figure with who, he has to contend with—there is an underlying misogyny that Hamlet entertains and willingly exacerbates to extreme levels (Miyawaki, 2012).

Hamlet’s resentment towards his mother for marrying Claudius expands to hatred for women as a whole. This is displayed in Hamlet’s soliloquy in Act I, Scene II, Line 146, when he exclaims, “Frailty, thy name is woman!” after lamenting his mother’s marriage to his uncle. Later, he takes this unwarranted hatred for all women out on his lover Ophelia, saying: “Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” (Act III, Scene I, Lines 121–122). With his mother’s marriage in mind, he continues: “God hath given you [women] one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig and amble, and you lisp, and nickname God’s creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on’t; it hath made me mad.”, claiming that the deceitful nature of women has driven him mad (Act III, Scene I, Lines 143–147).

As Mullaney has pointed out, misogyny was entrenched in Elizabethan society, and there are good reasons to believe that the presentation and critique of Queen Gertrude in Hamlet, as an elderly woman remarrying, can be read as a representation of common attitudes and seething hatred towards the elderly Queen Elizabeth (Mullaney, 1994, pp. 150–151). Mullaney proposes that the widowed Gertrude’s remarriage poses a threat to the patriarchal and monarchical system by maintaining both economic independence and her aged female sexuality, similar to Queen Elizabeth. Given the common view of Elizabeth and women in Elizabethan society, reflected in Gertrude, and the Oedipal reading of the play, Hamlet’s misogyny is unsurprising.

Shakespeare’s blurring of boundaries

What is surprising, however, is the extent of Hamlet’s misogyny—so extreme that it contributes to the ambiguous nature of Hamlet’s sanity. In this connection, Shakespeare uses dramatic irony regarding Hamlet’s madness to create tension and foreshadow the events to come. This is done through characters such as Ophelia and Hamlet’s relationship to and the effect of his actions on her.

In Act II, Scene II, Polonius recounts how Ophelia rejected Hamlet’s advances according to his own instructions, but laments that these rejections have caused Hamlet’s apparent madness. This creates dramatic irony, since the audience knows that Hamlet’s madness, feigned or otherwise, may be caused by the murder of his father and marriage of his mother (modern day PTSD or another trauma–induced mental illness), and not unrequited love for Ophelia. Quite the opposite, in fact, for he demeans her by saying she should not have believed him when he said he loved her. This completely debases Ophelia as she, contrary to Gertrude, is the ideal of an Elizabethan woman: fragile, docile, and subject to the men in her life. This also serves to foreshadow Ophelia’s death; she falls in a river and does not make an attempt to save herself, which many have read as suicide due to Hamlet’s treatment of her (Smith, 2008).

Shakespeare leaves the audience to wonder not only whether Hamlet is truly mad but also whether it is his madness—perhaps caused by traumatic events and his hamartia—his extreme misogyny, or a mixture of both, that lead Ophelia to her death before Hamlet is killed in a duel to which Laertes challenged him for Ophelia and Polonius’ deaths, destruction that he brought about.

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