Hamlet in the Hospital

One of the books I happened to have with me during my first stay in a hospital psychiatric unit was a volume of Shakespearean tragedies, but it would seem that, despite my suicidal depression, I was in more of a dryly comedic frame of mind.  Plagued by insomnia and lack of appetite as side effects of my new medication, my intelligence insulted by the banality of the literal-minded professionals around me who offered a chemical solution to everything, I found myself envying Hamlet, whose purported "madness" was regarded with a certain awed solemnity, and whose suicidal crisis constitutes one of the best-known and most poignant passages in all of literature.  I doubted even the melancholy Dane would be taken seriously in the modern mental-health system.  With the play in hand, I sat down to vent my frustrations in parody.  Nearly every line in this is lifted directly from Shakespeare, with a few obvious tweaks . . . and what isn't Shakespeare was borrowed almost verbatim from conversations I seemed to have on a daily basis in the hospital.

SCENE ONE: Dining room, Elsinore.

(Ophelia, Prince Hamlet, Queen Gertrude, King Claudius, and Polonius are seated around a circular table, eating breakfast.)

HAMLET (to Gertrude): Who would bear the whips and scorns of time, th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of th'unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin?

GERTRUDE: I would!  The pleasures of life are so much greater than the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

HAMLET (to Ophelia): Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?

OPHELIA: I would, my lord!  Of course I would!

POLONIUS (to Claudius): Your noble son is mentally ill.  Mentally ill call I it, for, to define true mental illness, what is't but to be nothing else but mentally ill?  That he is mentally ill, 'tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true.  You would do well to start him on an antidepressant.

SCENE TWO: Courtyard, Elsinore.  Two hours later.

(Hamlet stands alone in the courtyard.  Claudius and Polonius watch him secretly from around a corner.)

HAMLET: To be, or not to be - that is the question.

(Hamlet unsheaths his dagger.  Before he can plunge it into his chest, Gertrude walks into the courtyard and Hamlet quickly restores the dagger to its sheath.)

POLONIUS: He's a danger to himself.  I recommend that you confine him where your wisdom best shall think.

CLAUDIUS: It shall be so.  Mental illness in great ones must not unwatched go. (He exits.)

HAMLET (with a sudden start): A king of shreds and patches - save me and hover o'er me with your wings, you heavenly guards!  (To the air in front of him)  What would your gracious figure?

GERTRUDE: Alas, he's mentally ill.  To whom do you speak this?

HAMLET: Do you see nothing there?  Nor did you nothing hear?

GERTRUDE: Nothing at all.

HAMLET: Why, look you there!  Look how it steals away!  My father, in his habit as he lived!

GERTRUDE: This is the very coinage of your brain.  This bodiless creation psychosis is very cunning in.

CLAUDIUS (re-entering): How does Hamlet?

GERTRUDE: Mentally ill as the sea and wind when both contend which is the mightier.

CLAUDIUS: His liberty is full of threats to all, to you yourself, to us, to every one, and especially to himself.  If anything should happen, it will be laid to us, whose providence should have kept short, restrained, and out of haunt this mentally ill young man.

GERTRUDE: But so much was our love we would not understand what was most fit, but, like the owner of a foul disease, to keep it from divulging, let it feed even on the pith of life.

CLAUDIUS: Hamlet, for thine especial safety, which we do tender, we must send thee hence with fiery quickness.  Therefore prepare thyself.  The ambulance is ready, the paramedics tend, and everything is bent for the hospital.

SCENE THREE: A small conference room in the psychiatric ward of the hospital.  Later that day.

(Hamlet and a doctor sit facing each other.  Hamlet's sheath is empty; the dagger was taken away and put in a storage room.)

DOCTOR: Hamlet, do you know why you're here?

HAMLET: I will tell you why.  I have of late - but wherefore I know not - lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire - why it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.  What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!  And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?

DOCTOR: Will you sign yourself into the hospital voluntarily?  (Offers Conditional Voluntary Hospitalization form.)

HAMLET: Gentlemen, with all my love I do commend me to you.  (He signs it.)

DOCTOR: You'll probably have to stay here for a couple of weeks while you're getting stabilized on the medication.  We're going to put you on Zoloft for depression and Risperdal for psychosis.

HAMLET: Psychosis?  My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time and makes as healthful music.  Just ask the nurse who took my vital signs earlier.  It is not mental illness that I have uttered.  Bring me to the test, and I the matter will reword, which mental illness would gambol from.

DOCTOR: Okay, here's the test.  Tell me what you see in this inkblot.

HAMLET: Do you see this mark that's almost in shape of a camel?

DOCTOR: Hmmm . . . show me.  Ah!  By th' mass and 'tis, like a camel indeed.  Here's another one.  Tell me what you see.

HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel.

DOCTOR: Where?  Indeed, it is backed like a weasel.

HAMLET: Or like a whale.

DOCTOR: Very like a whale.  Now how about this one?

HAMLET: That's a hawk.  No . . . wait . . . I think it's a handsaw.  Or is it a hawk?

DOCTOR (nodding his head several times in a self-satisfied way): Hamlet, you are mentally ill.  Do you wish to know how you have been diagnosed?

HAMLET: I am tame, sir; pronounce.

DOCTOR: Major Depressive Disorder, severe, with psychotic features.

HAMLET: Is't possible?

DOCTOR: Our time is up.  My honorable lord, I will most humbly take my leave of you.

HAMLET: You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal - except my life, except my life, except my life.

DOCTOR: But can you contract for your safety?

HAMLET: I do not set my life at a pin's fee, but conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.  So, unfortunately, yes.

SCENE FOUR: The conference room.  Two weeks later.  (With apologies to Macbeth.)

(Hamlet and a counselor sit facing each other.)

COUNSELOR: Do you know me, my lord?

HAMLET: Excellent well.  You are a fishmonger.

COUNSELOR: Not I, my lord.  I'm a counselor.  We met last week.  How does my good Lord Hamlet?

HAMLET: O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter.

COUNSELOR: So I take it things could be better.

HAMLET: O God, God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!  Fie on't, ah, fie, 'tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed.  Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.

COUNSELOR: What is the matter, my lord?

HAMLET: Between who?

COUNSELOR: I mean, why are you so unhappy?

HAMLET: I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thought to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.  What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?  To die, to sleep - no more - and by a sleep to say we end the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. . . .

COUNSELOR: But, Hamlet, you have so much to live for.  You're a student at one of the finest universities in Europe, and you're next in line to the throne of Denmark.  I don't understand why a young man who has so much going for him would want to die.

HAMLET: There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.  To me 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

COUNSELOR: I understand your father passed away not quite two months ago, and you're still quite upset about this.  How is it that the clouds still hang on you?  Thou know'st 'tis common.  All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity.

HAMLET: Ay, madam, it is common.

COUNSELOR: If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?

HAMLET: Seems, madam?  Nay, it is.  I know not "seems."

COUNSELOR: Let's not bicker over words.  'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, to give these mourning duties to your father.  But to persever in obstinate condolement is a course of impious stubbornness.

HAMLET: He was so excellent a king, so loving to my mother that he might not beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly.  Heaven and earth, must I remember?

COUNSELOR: We can change the subject, if you like.  How have you been responding to the medications?  Have you noticed any difference?

HAMLET: Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more!  Zoloft does murder sleep" - the innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care, the death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast.

COUNSELOR: He's still hearing voices!

HAMLET: Still it cried "Sleep no more" to all the house; "Zoloft hath murdered sleep, and therefore Hamlet shall sleep no more, Hamlet shall sleep no more."

COUNSELOR: Who was it that thus cried?  You do unbend your noble strength to think so brainsickly of things.  Go get some water and I'll have the doctor give you some Risperdal.

HAMLET: My appetite is much decreased, too.  But what is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed?  A beast, no more.

COUNSELOR: I have to go now.  Is there anything else you want to say?

HAMLET: The time is out of joint.  O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right!

COUNSELOR: Ah!  A delusion of exaggerated self-importance!