Hamlet Responding to Criticism:
Without second thought I've aimed thus far to "move [my] mad [self] to centre-stage," as Grace Tiffany suggests, but it is not as if I have foregone my sanity in the hopes of putting on "an antic disposition," (1.5.192). I may seek my incestuous mother's and uncle's attention but that doesn't change my desire "that this too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew." (1.2.133-136). Am I not what I am? No doubt am I an actor - a man of my own mode - but this can never change that way in which I have so deeply been hurt by the very incidences which have my father reduced to a pitiful ghost. For am I not the very reflection of my own actions? In this place of madness, in this Bedlam, there are man "people for whom the distinction between role and player no longer exist," (Tiffany). While I know in myself it to be true that I cannot lie to my own reflection, perhaps it is out of my control, perhaps I have no power over the "strange or odd some'er I bear myself," and the spilling of my own sanity into a pool of my own verse and mockery (1.5.190). I know myself not to be mad, or perhaps this knowing is merely a product of my own madness, my pretend-madness. If in pretending I have brought myself past of point of salvation and up unto the intersection of reality and feigned misconstuations of the real world, then am I worth of the halls of Bedlam? My own mother has said to me "Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper
Sprinkle cool patience," but I know in myself that my father's ghost is no product of my antic disposition, rather, it is a reflection of the incestuous horrors that have been committed among my own kind (3.4.18). Although, if these notions of fact I hold myself to be true are mere product of my rationalization, perhaps I do, in fact, deserve to be in a place "designed with the intent to cure mad folk." (Tiffany). Such a location seems to me so dim and dismal, but what in my own house is different than Bedlam - friend and foe come here to help and to mock me, to seek me out and to push me away, perhaps for entertainment, perhaps for study, perhaps for their own dispositions, perhaps for their own dispositions, perhaps for their own dispositions.
As little as I may know about my own mind, my own sanity, I can take comfort in knowing that the "Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds," that surround me are not a product of my own madness (4.5.2). Perhaps, though, my own dangerous conjectures pose more of a threat to me than these externalities combined.
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