Grief-stricken and outraged, Hamlet bursts upon the company, declaring in agonized fury his own love for Ophelia. He leaps into the grave and fights with Laertes, saying that “forty thousand brothers / Could not, with all their quantity of love, / make up my sum” (V.i.254–256).
What do Laertes and Hamlet do at the funeral? They fight; Hamlet is upset because he thinks he loved Ophelia more than Laertes did.
In this way, Ophelia's drowning, surrounded by flowers with her last breath in song, is her surrender to her overwhelming femininity. In an ironic twist, her watery suicide, which plunges her into the impersonal eternal female essence, works to remind the characters of her humanity and individuality.
Readers know Hamlet wrote love letters to Ophelia because she shows them to Polonius. In addition, Hamlet tells Ophelia, “I did love you once” (3.1. 117). He professes his love for Ophelia again to Laertes, Gertrude, and Claudius after Ophelia has died, saying, “I loved Ophelia.
Hamlet acts out against Ophelia as a result of her rejection and denounces all women, showing his insanity. Save your time! Hamlet exhibits his madness to Gertrude when he confronts her about her marriage to Claudius.
However, in an earlier scene Hamlet learns that Ophelia betrayed him by luring him so that Polonius and Claudius could spy on him. His reaction shows a darker side of Hamlet and Ophelia's relationship. He tells her multiple times to get to a nunnery, implying that she is as worthless as a prostitute.
By this point, Ophelia would be well aware of her pregnancy, and well aware that she would soon begin to show outward signs of it.
Grief-stricken and outraged, Hamlet bursts upon the company, declaring in agonized fury his own love for Ophelia. He leaps into the grave and fights with Laertes, saying that “forty thousand brothers / Could not, with all their quantity of love, / make up my sum” (V.i.254–256).
By the way he acted around Ophelia when he was alone with her, he showed that his feelings for her were true. Hamlet's actions throughout the play show that he was really in love with Ophelia. The audience can see that Hamlet really did love Ophelia when he told her, “I did love you” (Shakespeare III 125).
For the Elizabethans, Hamlet was the prototype of melancholy male madness, associated with intellectual and imaginative genius; but Ophelia's affliction was erotomania, or love-madness.
She died because of her virtues, while others perished because of their faults. She did nothing wrong, but so many wrongs were dealt to her. Therefore, it was these factors, especially the loss of her father, which caused her to become mad and seen as a tragic figure.
Ophelia's final words are addressed to either Hamlet, or her father, or even herself and her lost innocence: “And will a not come again? / No, no, he is dead, / Go to thy death-bed, / He never will come again. / … / God a mercy on his soul. And of all Christian souls. God buy you.” Next, she drowns herself.
Carlisle's essay, “Hamlet's “Cruelty” in the Nunnery Scene: The Actors' Views, “Hamlet, whose mind is absorbed with a master passion (grief for his father and desire to avenge his death), feels that he must give up Ophelia in order to fulfill his vow to his father's spirt” (132).
In the midst of her inner turmoil, her depression worsens as she learns that Hamlet, the man she loves departs to England. When she dies, Gertrude reports her death to Claudius and Laertes. Gertrude, The Queen of Denmark, is responsible for Ophelia's death.
He insists that she should seclude herself in a convent, away from men. Ophelia prays for Hamlet's sanity once more, but he harshly claims that women like her deceive men with makeup and cause them to sin. Hamlet blames their promiscuity for his madness and wishes for an end to all marriage.
Hamlet soon realizes that the corpse is Ophelia's. When Laertes in his grief leaps into her grave and curses Hamlet as the cause of Ophelia's death, Hamlet comes forward. He and Laertes struggle, with Hamlet protesting his own love and grief for Ophelia.
As we have seen, both seem to have genuinely loved each other prior to Old Hamlet's death but after that stage, Hamlet loses his affection for her because of his mistrust towards women which was caused by his mother's haste remarriage as well as by Ophelia's rejection of Hamlet and her betrayal to him by allowing her ...
Bidding his sister, Ophelia, farewell, he cautions her against falling in love with Hamlet, who is, according to Laertes, too far above her by birth to be able to love her honorably. Since Hamlet is responsible not only for his own feelings but for his position in the state, it may be impossible for him to marry her.
Hamlet is distraught and suspicious. He professes his undying love to Ophelia, and they are secretly married. Soon afterward, he tells Ophelia that he plans to murder Claudius.
In response to Ophelia's withdrawal from his affections, Hamlet grows furious and unleashes his anger by telling her that he never loved her. Ophelia responds with these few words, implying that Hamlet's actions both in the past and the present indicate that he did love her and likely still does.
He has recently died but visits Hamlet as a ghost during the play. Polonius is a counsellor to the new king and queen. He is Ophelia and Laertes' father. Laertes is the only son of Polonius and brother of Ophelia.
Ophelia offers rue to Queen Gertrude and keeps some for herself, with two different intentions. The queen “must wear [her] rue with a difference,” meaning as a token of repentance while Ophelia will wear her in regret at the loss of both her father and her lover.
“Ophelia: There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts. . . . There's fennel for you, and columbines.
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.
Ultimately she is silenced by death (Mowat, 1992). Over the course of time, the musicality of Ophelia's role has been subjected to the influences of changing taste and stage practices.