Reviving Ophelia--Hamlet Blog #4

Ophelia has gone mad. I guess we should have seen it coming, "the critics who are so concerned to salvage her innocence tend frequently to forget that it was not Hamlet alone who sullied it" (Seng). It is true, that my dear Hamlet has gone mad, but he is not to blame for poor Ophelia's lyrical gibberish. Laertes was first. Maybe he was jealous, he tried to convince his sister that Hamlet's offers of love were "Forward, not permanant, sweet, not lasting,/The perfume and suppliance of a minute;/No more" (1.3.8-10). Polonius was no better. With no prior knowledge of his daughter's romance he began to get protective, telling her to "not believe in [Hamlet's] vows; for they are brokers" (1.3.127). Maybe this is why Hamlet did not like Ophelia's father.

I heard about her little 'episode' last week in the main room--with a King like Claudius the news sure spreads quickly. She is quite the singer I guess. If Hamlet were there with her he would have known the meaning of her songs, but it was Gertrude, instead, who attempted to make sense of them. Ophelia sings to the Queen; "Larded all with flowers;/Which beswept to the grave did not go/With true-love showers" (4.5.38-40). Ophelia "chides Gertrude for her inadequate mourning for King Hamlet" (Seng).

Everyone believes she is mourning the loss of her father, and this is true, but much of her sadness comes from the loss of Hamlet, her lover. He had "made many tenders of his affection to [her]" (1.3.100-101), and she wanted so badly to get her father's approval to proceed with Hamlet. She told Polonius that she did not "know [...] what [she] should think" (1.3.104), but that was not true. No, she knew what she thought, but "the habit of mistrust, so ingrained in her father and brother, is something new to her" (Seng). She trusted her father, because she knew no other way to be, and this is consequently what led to her own father's death.

Ophelia's songs, sung in times of madness and confusion, are snip-its of how she has felt all along. I believe, and I am sure Hamlet would agree with me as well, that Ophelia was so deprived of her own voice that they only way she felt she could use it was in her decent to madness--through song.