Ophelia (/əˈfiːliə/) is a character in William Shakespeare's drama Hamlet (1599–1601). She is a young noblewoman of Denmark, the daughter of
Hamlet, Laertes tells Ophelia, is of a higher rank than she and cannot choose with whom he will spend his life. To protect her heart and to safeguard her honor, Laertes asserts that Ophelia should reject Prince Hamlet before he deflowers her.
Gertrude is Hamlet's mother and Queen of Denmark. She was married to the murdered King Hamlet (represented by the Ghost in the play) and has subsequently wed Claudius, his brother.
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.
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.
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).
Ophelia Timeline and Summary
1.3 Polonius and Laertes tell Ophelia that Hamlet just wants to sleep with her, and that she should break up with him. He's out of her league. 1.3 Ophelia agrees when her father orders her to stop seeing Hamlet.
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).
Ophelia is Polonius' daughter and Laertes' sister. She has been in a relationship with Hamlet. Claudius is the newly crowned King of Denmark and husband to Gertrude. He is Hamlet's uncle.
Some see Ophelia's death as an accident; others see it as a suicide resulting from the accumulation of a series of unfortunate events: her rejection by her boyfriend, her father's murder, and her possible pregnancy.
Background: Ophelia's syndrome is the association of Hodgkin's Lymphoma and memory loss, coined by Dr. Carr in 1982, while it's most remembered for the eponym in reminiscence of Shakespeare's character, Dr.
(1) Hamlet was at one time sincerely and ardently in love with Ophelia. For she herself says that he had importuned her with love in honourable fashion, and had given countenance to his speech with almost all the holy vows of heaven (I. iii.
In Sigmund Freud's concept, which Shakespeare was familiar with, it is proposed in Hamlet that he and his mother kiss because Hamlet no longer wants to allow his mother to sleep with Claudius.
One moment he says 'I did love you once', the next 'I loved you not'. He goes on to insult Ophelia and tells her to go to a nunnery. He tells her that this will be the best place for her and, by being a nun, Ophelia won't have children and produce wicked men like his uncle.
The combination of her former lover's cruelty and her father's death sends Ophelia into a fit of grief. In Act Four she spirals into madness and dies under ambiguous circumstances. Ophelia's tragedy lies in the way she loses her innocence through no fault of her own.
He tells her that the only way she will be able to protect herself from her female nature – the fickleness and betrayal that he attributes to women – would be to lock herself away in a nunnery where she will not have any contact with men and therefore be unable to betray them.
Ophelia's drowning is the consummate representation of an eternal retreat into the feminine, trading an individual voice for eternal silence in union with feminine essence. In turn, her death expresses the danger of reducing an individual to his or her gender and disregarding the voice of the marginalized.
This chapter, however, seeks to unearth the mirror, or double to Hamlet's mother, the mother of Ophelia, never mentioned, never referenced, and never invoked, yet made present through absence as her daughter's tragedy unfolds.
Hamlet, Ophelia's boyfriend, and Laertes, her brother, treat her much the same as her father. The other woman in the play is Hamlet's mother, Gertrude.
He watches as Laertes leaps, sobbing, into his sister's grave. Hamlet steps forward, claiming his sorrow is deeper than Laertes's, and also jumps into Ophelia's grave.
A funeral procession approaches. 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.
Ophelia's brother, Laertes, comes home and finds Ophelia has gone mad with grief. She kills herself and Claudius and Laertes plot to murder Hamlet. Hamlet agrees to fight Laertes. During the duel, Gertrude drinks poison and both Hamlet and Laertes are fatally wounded.
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.
Hamlet curses himself for his failure to pursue revenge against Claudius, when in reality his murder of Polonius was a decisive act of revenge, so Hamlet should instead curse fate for placing the wrong man behind the arras.
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.