Inferring and Explaining

92 Shaw now proceeds to show how the text clearly shows Hamlet manifesting these clinical indicators: InferrIng and exPlaInIng e 1 . Hamlet exhibits anhedonia—for example, “He speaks at length to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, saying he has lost all mirth and that man does not delight him.” 10 e 2 . Hamlet expresses negative beliefs—for example, “He calls Denmark a prison. His comments to Ophelia on women are bitter.” 11 e 3 . Hamlet “alludes to sleep disturbance ‘were it not that I had bad dreams.’” 12 e 4 . Hamlet “has experienced events likely to precipitate depression: his father’s sudden death, his mother’s hasty marriage, and his disappointment in the succession.” 13 t 0 . Hamlet sufered from depressive illness. Shawargues further that it is no embarrassment whatsoever that depressive illness only entered the clinical paradigm centuries afer the play was written. We certainly grant that people sufered from this devastating condition long before psychology and medicine cataloged and began to treat it. Shakespeare was an excellent student of the human condition. Just as a per- ceptive author can recognize overly ambitious characters, jealous lovers, and power-mad lead- ers, Shakespeare can recognize a person exhib- iting the behavior brought on by depressive illness—what his contemporaries would have called melancholy. Further, he can locate his depressive lead character in a play with perhaps larger and diferent artistic motives. We can only assess the quality of Shaw’s depressive illness interpretation, of course, by comparing his explanation of key parts of the play to the many rival interpretations that have been ofered in the past three hundred years. I make no claim that Shaw’s explanation is the best explanation for two reasons. One is that I am not a qualifed critical scholar, and this is a book about evidence evaluation, not Shakespearian critical analysis. Te second is a kind of intel- lectual confession. I fnd the play both aestheti- cally and intellectually fascinating. Every time I read a thoughtful interpretation of Hamlet , I fnd myself being won over to that critic’s point of view. I recognize, of course, that all these crit- ics can’t be right, since many consciously write to refute one another. I suspect that my problem lies with the whole notion of truth—truth in science, truth in literary analysis, and truth in constitutional interpretation, a topic we will return to in later chapters.