#  Chapter Eleven -- The Hamlet Syndrome (with Henry F. Fradella) 

 



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**Abstract**

Bringing together legal, literary, and cultural studies, this article builds from a close reading of madness in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet to some psycho-social theories of malingering and the insanity defense in the modern United States. The basis of these theories is the notion that feigned madness – whether purposeful malingering or a failed insanity defense – often signifies actual madness of a lesser sort. When someone is found to be “faking it,” however, that discovery can result in a widespread assumption of mental health in the person on trial, an assumption that often turns out to be wrong.

**Bibliography**

Robert Schug and Henry F. Fradella, *Mental Illness and Crime* (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2015)

Lindsey Row-Heyveld, “Antic Dispositions: Mental and Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern Revenge Tragedy,” in *Recovering Disability in Early Modern England* (Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, eds) (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2013), pp. 73–87.

Eleanor Prosser, *Hamlet and Revenge* (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967)

Harald Merckelbach et al., “Exaggerating Psychopathology Produces Residual Effects That Are Resistant to Corrective Feedback: An Experimental Demonstration,” in *Applied Neuropsychology: Adult* 22(1) (2015), 16–22.

Michael L. Perlin, “‘The Borderline Which Separated You From Me’: The Insanity Defense, the Authoritarian Spirit, the Fear of Faking, and the Culture of Punishment,” *Iowa Law Review* 82 (1997), 1375–426.