Hamlet a hardy man, courageous, and worthy of eternal commendation, who arming himself with a crafty, dissembling, and strange show of being distract out of his mind, under that pretense deceived the wise, and crafty, thereby not only preserving his life from the reasons and wicked practices of the tyrant, but by an new and unexpected kind of punishment revenged his fathers death many years after the act committed "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a hand saw" (II.ii.376-7). This is a classic example of the "wild and whirling worlds" (I.v.134) with which Hamlet hopes to persuade people to believe that he is mad. These words, however, prove that beneath his "antic disposition," Hamlet is very sane. indeed. Beneath a strange choice of imagery involving points of the compass, the weather, and hunting birds, he is announcing that he is calculatedly choosing the times when you appear mad. Hamlet's madness was faked I think for a purpose. He warned his friends he intended to fake madness, but Gertrude as well as Claudius saw through it, and even the slightly dull-witted Polonius was suspicious. His public face is one of insanity but, in his private moments of soliloquy, through his confidences to Horatio, and in his careful plans of action, we see that his madness is assumed. After Hamlet has discovered the truth about his father, he goes through a very traumatic period, which is interpreted as madness by readers and characters. With the death of his father and the hasty, incestuous remarriage of his mother to his uncle, Hamlet is thrown into a suicidal frame of mind in which "the uses of this world" seem to him ;weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable." Many ironies and misunderstands of the play cannot be understood without a proper awareness of this gap between Hamlet's knowledge and the most others' ignorance of the murder. For, according to their own lights, Polonius and the rest behave as normally...