Two things that really hook an audience and make them interested in a character are complexity and ambiguity. Complexity, because we always like finding yet another interesting layer to a character, and ambiguity because it keeps us guessing—the character never feels "figured out." Hamlet and his madness fulfill both of those things for us—his madness, real or feigned, makes his behavior complex and unpredictable, and the question of just how mad he truly is lends ambiguity—just what is really going on with him, anyway? Could anyone who keeps insisting on his own sanity really be as sane as he claims? Could someone truly insane behave with such calculated care to appear "mad"? In fact, the question of Hamlet's madness or sanity is one of his most compelling attributes: if Shakespeare gave us, with absolute certainty, an answer to whether Hamlet was mad or not, the play would lose a great deal of the strangeness that has kept people fascinated by it for centuries.
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