Tests of Insanity from Hamlet

BENJAMIN REISS: One of the most important things that the psychiatrists drew from Hamlet in legal terms was something that they took from a procedure called Halford's test. Sir Henry Halford was an English physician who, in the 1820s, turned to a famous scene in Hamlet, when Hamlet visits his mother's chamber—barges in on his mother's chamber—and confronts her. And in the middle of confronting her, he's killed Polonius, who's hiding behind the screen, which is the first sign that something is wrong with him to his mother. And after he's killed Polonius, he's visited by the Ghost, and he begins to talk with the Ghost. And his mother says, who are you talking to? He says, I'm talking to my father. Don't you see him? He's just leaving through the door.

And his mother says,

This is the very coinage of your brain.
This bodiless creation, ecstasy
Is very cunning in.

In other words, you've gone mad, and this is a sign of madness—mad people often talk to ghosts. And Hamlet says,

Ecstasy?
My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time
And makes as healthful music. It is not madness
That I have uttered. Bring me to the test,
And I the matter will reword, which madness
Would gambol from.

What he's saying there essentially is, I'm going to tell it to you just as I've told it to you, but I'm going to use different words. And that will be evidence enough that I'm in possession of my faculties, because if I were mad, I wouldn't have understanding of what I've just told you, and wouldn't be able to paraphrase it.

Well, Sir Halford thought that this was a tremendously clever device, and so he established a procedure by which, if somebody had written a will which was contested, you would simply have the person rephrase the will, and if he could do it satisfactorily, the will would be legally binding. Now, this procedure took off in the United States, but at a certain point, American asylum superintendents began to question it and say, wait a minute—we've already established that Hamlet is insane. The fact that he can say something and then rephrase it clearly, is not an indication that he's sane. It's only an indication that he's able to function competently in this particular instance.

What's interesting about the case is that rather than testing out this procedure with a range of patients who had varying degrees of mental illness and seeing if they were able to rephrase something that they had written, in the way that we might expect modern experimental science to do, they turned back to Shakespeare and said, no—it's in the logic of the play. He is insane, therefore the test can't really work. And so they scrapped the procedure.