In this part of Act 3 Scene 1, Ophelia goes to return the gifts Hamlet gave to her in the past. He confuses her with mixed messages. 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.
Hamlet is cruel to Ophelia because he has transferred his anger at Gertrude's marriage to Claudius onto Ophelia. In fact, Hamlet's words suggest that he transfers his rage and disgust for his mother onto all women. He says to Ophelia, “God has given you one face and you make yourselves another.
"The nunnery scene"
At the beginning of the play, as Hamlet has decided to pretend madness, he pretends he does not love Ophelia anymore, he even rejects her and insults her (Act 3, scene 1).
Hamlet confesses that he loved her, but then goes on to say that he never loved her. This could be due to the fact that Hamlet knows his conversation with Ophelia is being watched. There is evidence to prove this when Hamlet immediately asks Ophelia after they are done talking, “Where's your father?” (III. i.
He offers to “lie” in Ophelia's “lap,” and when she refuses, he assures her he meant only to rest his head there.
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. All through the scene Claudius and Polonius, Ophelia's father, are hiding and watching what happens.
People can stage Hamlet that way, but there is no evidence in the script that Ophelia is pregnant. The best evidence that she has had sex with Hamlet is the song she sings that ends: “Quoth she, 'Before you tumbled me, you promised me to wed.
Enraged, Hamlet curses her, predicting a disaster for her dowry. He tells her again to go to a nunnery. As Ophelia frets over his apparently fled sanity, he says that he knows that women are two faced and cannot be trusted; they all deserve to be cast aside. Then he leaves.
Hamlet betrays Ophelia by refusing his love for her and being the cause of her madness with words such as “I loved you not” (III. I. 119) and “get thee to a nunnery” (III.
Hamlet insults her virtue and tells her that, while he may have loved her once, he certainly doesn't love her now. After Hamlet departs, Claudius and Polonius reenter, newly suspicious that Hamlet's madness isn't lovesickness after all.
It is obvious he truly loves her at first. Evidence of that is shown by many love letters they share. In his first letter (Act 2, scene 2, 116 – 119), he asks Ophelia to “never doubt I love.”
Hamlet shows throughout the play that he is really in love with Ophelia. One piece of evidence showing that Hamlet really did love Ophelia is when he tells her, “I did love you” (Act 3 scene 1 line 126). Hamlet confesses that he truly loved her, but then goes back on his word and says he never loved.
A court gentleman reports that Ophelia has become pitiably insane. Gertrude refuses to see the girl, but Horatio points out that Ophelia's mental state may attract undue attention to herself and the crown.
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.
Hamlet uses Ophelia for his own personal gain, he toys with her emotions by making to seem as though she is the cause of his madness. Hamlet emotionally abuses Ophelia with no regard for her psychological well-being.
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).
While she lives in the same patriarchal society that demands that she subjugate herself to her father and her brother until she is married, Ophelia has fallen in love with Prince Hamlet. There is strong evidence that she has even had sexual relations with him.
At the top of Act Three Polonius forces Ophelia to return Hamlet's letters and renounce his affections.
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.
Then, in Act 1, Scene 3 of Hamlet, the audience learns that father and son both like giving long-winded and sexist advice. Ophelia is introduced in this scene, and the audience learns that she has an unofficial romance with Hamlet. In her few lines, Ophelia is shown to be intelligent, perceptive, and sensitive.
Angrily, Hamlet denies having given her anything; he laments the dishonesty of beauty, and claims both to have loved Ophelia once and never to have loved her at all. Bitterly commenting on the wretchedness of humankind, he urges Ophelia to enter a nunnery rather than become a “breeder of sinners” (III. i. 122–123).
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.
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.
In the movie, Ophelia does not die. Instead, after realizing that Hamlet's quest for revenge against King Claudius could prove hazardous to her own health — and deducing that she is pregnant with Hamlet's baby — Ophelia fakes her drowning death.