harm her directly. But soon, through his words and his actions, he shatters the mask that served to protect her from his assaults, “O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!/ . . . And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,/ That sucked the honey of his music vows,/ . . . O, woe is me/ T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see.”(III, i, 160-171) When Hamlet kills her father, truth and reality finally get to her, and she breaks under its pressure and commits suicide. Today, we have a term for this kind of mask, it is called denial. People who are being abused or who are facing other problems often try to hide behind it. Gertrude, the other woman in the play, has a much stronger mask. She refuses to see or believe the truth that Hamlet shows her, the truth that Claudius murdered her husband for the kingdom, “O Hamlet, speak no more!/ Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul,/ And there I see such black and grained spots/ As will not leave their tinct.”(III, iv, 99-103) She is also convinced of Hamlet’s madness, but that does not affect her much at all. Even at her death she does not realize or see the truth of Claudius’s betrayal. Her mask is one that puts herself into her own world. As long as she lives her life unaffected, she is happy, and she will not let anything shatter her fantasy. This is also a form of denial, it is used by people who refuse to accept change and the truth of what is happening around them. The most complicated and one of the best examples of a mask is Hamlet himself. The line between Hamlet’s mask and his reality is very fine and difficult to discern. His mask is his madness. Whether his madness is real or not, it is still a mask to cover his real self and his real plans. In his mad delusions he hurts countless people with his verbal attacks. No matter how his madness is looked upon, it still acts as a mask of his real self, an undecided...
