During their argument Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius, Ophelia's father. Hamlet will not tell anyone where Polonius' body is. Claudius sends him to England but he doesn't arrive. Ophelia's brother, Laertes, comes home and finds Ophelia has gone mad with grief.
At Ophelia's next appearance, after her father's death, she has gone mad, due to what the other characters interpret as grief for her father. She talks in riddles and rhymes, and sings some "mad" and bawdy songs about death and a maiden losing her virginity. She exits after bidding everyone a "good night".
Ophelia knows only that he is dead - and no-one will talk about it.
When Hamlet kills Ophelia's father, she goes mad. In her madness, she sings songs that seem to dwell on the causes of her grief. Some of her songs are about old men or fathers dying.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Act 4, Scene 5 | myShakespeare.
Hamlet is cruel towards his mother and ex girlfriend because of his mother's affair with his uncle and Ophelia's obedience to her controlling father. Ophelias father, Polonius, is always spying on his children. Polonius sends a man named Reynaldo to France where he is to spy and spread rumors about his son, Laertes.
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.
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.
Shakespeare's Ophelia always seems to do as she is told, even if it is strongly against what her heart says. She is found constantly betraying her one true love, Hamlet, by merely obeying her father, Polonius, and later the king, Claudius, who believe that Hamlet has gone mad.
The man she loves appears to lose his grip on sanity, condemning her to “get thee to a nunnery” and later murdering her father. In retaliation, her brother swears revenge against Hamlet. By the end, Ophelia loses her family, the man she loves, her sanity, and the life she may have once imagined for herself as queen.
The actors perform the story of the murder of a sleeping king and Claudius storms out. This confirms Hamlet's belief that Claudius killed his father. Hamlet and his mother Gertrude argue about his behaviour. During their argument Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius, Ophelia's father.
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.
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.
She tells her father that Hamlet was acting totally insane, and he looked the part, too. Polonius thinks that this madness is evidence of Hamlet's love for his daughter, and he decides to fill Claudius in on his stepson's behavior.
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 ...
After giving Ophelia a long list of what he sees as women's faults, Hamlet confesses: “It hath made me mad” (III. i). The fact that Hamlet's biggest emotional outbursts are directed against the sexual feelings of the women in his life suggests that his mad behavior is not just a ploy to disguise his revenge plans.
They argue whether Ophelia should be buried in the churchyard, since her death looks like a suicide. According to religious doctrine, suicides may not receive Christian burial.
Ophelia's death results from Hamlet's madness and his telling Ophelia that she needs to go to a nunnery. The cause of Ophelia's suicide was mainly from Hamlet's madness. Hamlet's madness came first from seeing the ghost of his father.
Perhaps the most descriptive sexualization of Ophelia is when Gertrude describes her dead body as “mermaid-like” (4.7. 201) with “her clothes spread wide” (4.7. 200). Describing her clothes as “spread-wide” is especially suggestive, as to reference the act of removing clothing before sex.
Introduction: The association between memory loss and Hodgkin's lymphoma has been given the eponym of Ophelia syndrome, in memory of Shakespeare's character in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Nevertheless, there are differences between the disease and the character.
' Despite his negative treatment of her, Ophelia defends Hamlet and loves him.