Hamlet’s Melancholic Imagination

This article presents an interpretation of Hamlet's psychological condition through the prism of early modern ideas about the melancholic imagination. It begins with an account of what Shakespeare took from one of his principal sources, Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, on the subject of 'Amleth's' melancholy (part I). It proceeds with a summary of the relationship between melancholy and the imagination in ancient and early modern medicine, and its reception in Shakespeare's England (part II). It then turns to the role of the imagination in Hamlet (parts III and IV). It suggests that Shakespeare used the relationship between melancholy and imagination to create, in the world of the play, a melancholic 'imaginary reality', where Hamlet's 'diseased' imagination is an unsettling and corrupting force not only in his own mind and body, but also in the wider environment of Elsinore.