How Does Hamlet Judge A Mask

People are not always what they appear to be. The saying “don't judge a book by its cover” really applies to most of the characters in the play. Some of them appear to be genuine and caring when, in reality, they are rotten and angry on the inside. However, they are great at masking their true selves. It is where the reader really needs to read between the lines and decipher the true feeling each character possess. The mask Hamlet himself portrays in the play is one of the biggest and easiest to see. Hamlet admits that he will use a mask to hide his true self, “How strange or odd some’er I bear myself...to put antic disposition”(Shakespeare 67). That “antic disposition” Hamlet talks about is him pretending to go mad, so that Claudius won’t suspect he knows about the murder. Hamlet is hurt and angry, as anyone would be after
Well not Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, all they care about is pleasing the king and Hamlet knows it, “Besides to demanded by a sponge...that soaks up the king's countenance, his rewards, his authorities” (Shakespeare 191). Throughout the whole play, whatever the king told these two men to do they did not think twice to do. Not once did any of the two stop to think about their supposed friend Hamlet, or even care enough to truly ask why he was going mad. Mother’s are supposed to be there too, Gertrude however, only thought about herself, thankfully when she finds out Hamlet isn’t really crazy and finds the truth about Claudius she hides it, “O’er whom his very madness shows itself pure” (Shakespeare 189). Gertrude now has to pretend she doesn't know the whole truth and treat her husband the same way she has done. Even though at first, she refused to believe it, for the first time in the play she stuck to her son and kept Hamlet’s revenge strategy to herself. A revenge strategy that clearly did not work out and instead caused the rest of the deaths to