The fleeing from marraige, I thought was caused do to a lack of purity in Ophelia. I assumed her song at 4.5.62-64, insinuates an alleged intimacy she had with Hamlet, and his promise to marry her if she were to agree to intimacy. Hamlet ridiculed her and her father, I’m assuming a person closest to her as there is no mention of a mother, dies unexpectingly. Ophelia’s maddness I believe, like you, is caused be her loss of her loved ones. Ophelia is forced to give up the one she loves due to what other’s are telling her to do so, and because of her father’s prying he ultimately dies. She is used as a ploy by her father to test Hamlet’s maddness. In the begining of the play Ophelia knows that Hamlet loves her yet decides to keep her distance because her brother tells her to. Although she is tragic, she is also used at will with the men around her. Hi Sam, I like your post and your analysis of Ophelia’s character. I also wondered why she doesn’t reach out to her brother for comfort, with him being so determined to seek revenge for their father, and I wonder how the plot would have changed as he stepped in to comfort her like he should have. I still don’t know if I see Ophelia’s death as a suicide because of the fact that her clothes led to her death and all, but with all of the circumstances around her, I think that she definitely did not fight her death for a purpose. I never picked up on those lines of her song in relation to Hamlet breaking his promise of marrying her. I think that the most obvious cause that leads to Ophelia’s death is her father’s murder, but I like your point that it could indeed be because of her obsession with Hamlet, who has gone “mad”. Ophelia seems to be much a more complex character the more that I read about her and I think she is underrated because of that. I really liked the points you brought up about Ophelia, I wrote about her in my blog post as well. ![]() ![]() Ophelia exists as a tragic character in Hamlet and one that is entirely pitiable because of unfortunate circumstances that she has been put through. It is likely that Ophelia has fixated upon Hamlet’s “detestable” oath breaking so much so that in not requiting her love, Hamlet has broken both her heart and her poor mind. Though the man in the song has promised the speaker that they will soon wed, he has left her for no apparent reason and like Hamlet’s alleged claims of love and marriage to Ophelia, so too has Hamlet broken those vows for reasons unbeknownst. This is compounded on by a following line, “You promised me to wed, / So would I ‘a’ done, by yonder sun, / An thou hadst not come to my bed.” and it is this part of Ophelia’s song that likely damns Hamlet as a cause of her mental fracturing (4.5.62-64). With lines like “Young men will do’t if they come to’t / By Cock, they are to blame” signifies a strange and perhaps oblique reference to a promiscuous or simply flighty man who promises love (or sex here with the word “cock”) but backs out after a brief time (4.5.59-60). However, the explicit sexual references in Ophelia’s songs perhaps account for her obsession with the now absent Hamlet, as in “promising his love” to her earlier in the play and then being scorned, she is doubly heartbroken alongside the death of her father. Because Polonius was such a vital figure in her life, she is likely bereaved beyond help and thus does not recognize her brother. Ophelia’s madness is perhaps overtaking her so much so that she does not even recognize whom she is talking to in this instance–her brother Laertes. They say a made a good end.” give more credence to Ophelia’s shattered mental state, as she is constantly fixating on the death of Polonius, so much so that every single thing reminds her of his passing (4.5.180-181). Further explicit references to Ophelia’s father, such as “I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. This line directly references an older man and because of this detail, Polonius’s death has obviously taken its toll on Ophelia’s psyche, causing her to spout such wild and woeful songs. ![]() The evidence suggesting that she is simply mourning her father is obvious, as lines from one of her many “songs” points towards grieving over an aged relative “His beard as white as snow / All flaxen was his poll” with flaxen here indicating a white or grayed head of hair (4.5.190-191). While it is evident that Ophelia is grieving over the death of her father, Polonius, as Horatio says of her “She speaks much of her father, says she hears / There’s tricks in the world, and hems, and beats her heart” (4.5.4-5), a secondary cause of Ophelia’s madness may be in fact about her failed relationship with Hamlet as well. ![]() Ophelia in the fourth act of Hamlet is demonstrably insane, but the direct cause of her slipped sanity is something that remains debatable.
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