Paranoiac Anxieties In Hamlet

Hamlet, one of Shakespeare's greatest and most well known tragedies. Now, Shakespeare did not create the concept of revenge and crazy princes but he did write in such a way that makes the reader question everything. However, as Michael Neill states “… it barely glances at the ethical argument raised by a hero’s taking justice into his own hands…” Shakespeare then “goes on to discover a quite different kind of political interest in his plot…help explain the paranoiac anxieties…capable of arousing in a dictator…” Neill has a statement that he follows for the rest of “The Cheer and Comfort of Our Eye”, “… Shakespeare used Saxo’s story of Hamlet’s pretended madness and delayed revenges to explore the brutal facts about survival in an authoritarian state.”
He lived in a time when you could be killed for anything by the monarchy. Everyone was watched by her “inside people” so it made sense that Claudius always had people watching. “… nothing and no one in Claudius’s Denmark is allowed to do ‘unwatched’ …” The dead King always listened into conversations and so did Polonius. Hamlet even starts with anxious watchers even, “ … begin with a group of anxious watchers on the battlements walls of the castle….” It exposed the “... the wholesale corruption of social relationships…” Hamlet even describes Denmark as “a prison” because no matter where you go anyone can be watched, corrupted, and even “locked in” just like Ophelia and Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and even