“The Dead-Beat”, set in a front-line trench, and “Mental Cases”, set in a mental hospital, were both written by Wilfred Owen and describe situations involving people who have been mentally scarred by their experiences during the First World War. Pat Barker, in the novel “Regeneration”, suggests that Siegfried Sassoon aided Owen in the construction of [...]

In Act III of “Hamlet”, Shakespeare presents to the audience several occasions where Hamlet’s “antic disposition” is clearly present. However, is Hamlet pretending to be mad in all these situations, or do we start to see Hamlet being presented as a character with a genuinely degenerating mental state? Hamlet’s soliloquies and interactions with other characters [...]