ues that once enticed Hamlet now hardly satisfy him. In Act II scene ii while Hamlet is conversing with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his mood changed dramatically within the course of a few lines. Hamlets eloquent praise of the earth, sky, and man, followed immediately by intense world-weariness and disaffection from the human predicament of being reduced to dust.3 Essentially, all of life, and all that was good and beautiful in life (e.g. the garden), is tainted. Hamlet, the disillusioned idealist, continues with the motif when he, disheartened, declares: [...] the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave oer hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire- why, it appeareth nothing to me but a fouled and pestilent congregation of vapors.4Those lines represent Hamlets cosmic view on the planet. He finds the world to be empty andlifeless, dirty and diseased, and his particular place in it to be desolate and lonely. Indeed, hefeels so isolated and entrapped in his native land that he says Denmarks a prisonin which there are many confines, wards, dungeons (II. ii.264-6). These feelings of loneliness and isolation are common to those people suffering from melancholy and/or depression. Shakespeare represents Hamlets melancholy as genuine rather than stereotypical.5 Shakespeare did not attempt to have Hamlet conform to any criteria of the time, and with his non-conformity Hamlet appears as a true character and not someone who has been forced to be a certain way in order to generate a fixed response from the audience. Even though it is presumed to be unintentional, Shakespeares p...
