faking. The king is suspicious of Hamlet from the very beginning. He denies Hamlet permission to return to university so that he can keep an eye on him close by. When Hamlet starts acting strangely, Claudius gets all the more suspicious and sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on him. Their instructions are to discover why Hamlet is pretending to be mad: " And can you, by no drift of circumstance, / Get from him why he puts on this confusion, [my italics] / Grating so harshly all his days of quiet / With turbulent and dangerous lunacy" (III.i.1-4). The reason Claudius is so reluctant to believe that Ophelia's rejection has caused Hamlet's lunacy is that he doesn't believe in his madness at all. When Claudius realizes through the play-within-the-play that Hamlet knows the truth about his father's death, he immediately sends him away to England. The prevailing piece of evidence demonstrating Claudius's knowledge of Hamlet's sanity is the fact that he feels threatened enough by Hamlet to order him killed by the king of England: "For like the hectic in my blood he rages, / And thou must cure me: till I know 'tis done, / Howe'er my haps, my joys were ne'er begun" (IV.iii.67-9). In the scene in his mother's bedroom, Hamlet tells Gertrude that his insanity is assumed: "[I]t is not madness / I have utter'd: bring me to the test, / And I the matter will reword, which madness / Would gambol from" (III.iv.143-6), but even without his confirmation, the queen has seen through his act. While Hamlet is reprimanding her, she is so upset that she describes his words as "daggers" (III.iv.98) and claims, " Thou hast cleft my heart in twain" (III.iv.158). The words of a madman could not have penetrated her soul to such an extent. The queen takes every word Hamlet says seriously, proving she respects him and believes his mind to be sound. Furthermore, she believes Hamlet's confession of sanity immediately. She does not question him at...
