Article: The problematic relation between reason and emotion in Hamlet

HAMLET opens on a state of incipient alarum, with martial vigilance on the battlemented "platform" (act 1, scene 2, line 252) of Elsinore and conspicuous "post-haste and rummage in the land" (1.1.110).1 For the sentries, this apprehension is heightened by the entrances of the Ghost-a figure whom Horatio eventually associates with a threat to the "sovereignty of reason" (1.4.73). In the immediate context, loss of the "sovereignty of reason" entails "madness" (1.4.74). In turn, madness is here associated with the disastrous inability to control emotional impulse (exemplified in this instance as either terror induced by the Ghost's monstrous metamorphosis at "the summit of the cliff' [1.4.70] ...

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