Ophelia

Characteristics: (depending on way she is played)

• Likes/loves Hamlet
• Obedient to father/King
• friendly with her brother Laertes
• ready to spurn Hamlet for her father
• becomes mad
• sweet innocent being torn apart by the rottenness of Denmark
• does not stand by her man
• awakening sexuality
• Ophelia is the receiver of seemingly unending verbiage, sometimes advice, sometimes instruction, sometimes abuse (C. R. Resetarits)
• She is Hamlet's emotional antithesis, not overthinking but overfeeling

• often, she merely stands onstage, and like the audience, watches the actors play to her
• observer role in the play creates a link between Ophelia and the audience that Shakespeare then exploits during her mad scenes to heighten the audience's own empathic involvement
• she not only feels the madness which threatens Hamlet, she empathically takes it on
• Her relationships treated as family matter
• Dane argues, "Madness releases Ophelia from the enforced repressions of obedience, chastity, patience, liberates her from the prescribed roles of daughter, sister, lover, subject"
• Even in her death, the characters of Hamlet-all but Ophelia-mold Ophelia's identity
• Ophelia, with her willow tree and her flowers serves as a representative of the natural world within the artificial construct of the court at Elsinore

Important Quotes:
'I do not know, my lord, what I should think'
'I shall obey, my lord'
'while up the primrose path of dalliance tred'
'I was the more deceived'
'Gifts wax poor if givers prove unkind'
'Indeed my lord you made me believe so'
'I think nothing my lord'
'they withered all when my father died'