SARAH:  It’s fitting, isn’t it, that Gertrude is the one to tell us that Ophelia has drowned.

RALPH:  What do you mean, Sarah?  Why is that fitting?

SARAH:  Well, on a superficial level, Gertrude and Ophelia are the two women characters in the play – but more importantly, with both of them, we see only partially into their characters.  There’s so much we don’t know about either of them!

RALPH:  I see what you mean, Sarah, they do have a lot in common.  And we’re usually so focused on Hamlet, for obvious reasons, that we often don’t even realize what it is that we don’t know about them.  One critic, Elaine Showalter, had this to say about what the Romantics thought about Ophelia:  “The romantic critics seem to have felt that the less said about Ophelia, the better; the point was to look at her.”

SARAH:  Indeed.  The 19th century critic William Hazlitt said about Ophelia that she “is a character almost too exquisitely touching to be dwelt upon."

RALPH:  But you’re right to say that our focus on Hamlet is often what draws us away from Ophelia – somehow Hamlet’s enormous presence just seems to make Ophelia even smaller, even less noticeable.

SARAH:  Ellen Terry, an actress from the late 19th century who gave famous dramatic interpretations of Ophelia, said that “Her brain, her soul, and her body are all pathetically weak.  It is not surprising that she should think Hamlet mad, for all he says in the scene where she returns his presents is completely beyond her.”

RALPH:  And the great Sarah Bernhardt played both Hamlet and Ophelia on stage, and she greatly preferred playing Hamlet – who wouldn’t? – she said:  “it is not male parts, but male brains I prefer… it is unquestionably a great delight for an artist to be able to interpret such a complex character as Hamlet …. but Ophelia brought nothing new to me.”

SARAH:  I can’t help but think this is primarily Shakespeare’s doing – as many have pointed out, there is really no one in the play who is truly present for us except Hamlet himself.  He is given almost 40% of the lines of the entire play.

RALPH:  And as we’ve seen so often in our discussions here, even when he’s not on stage, he’s still the only thing everyone talks about.

SARAH:  One critic, Lee Edwards, said that “We can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet.”

RALPH:  And yet, this very brute fact give us some insight into Ophelia and her fate in the play.  Ophelia’s lack of independent story is an echo of her lack of independence more generally.  When she becomes estranged from Hamlet, and then loses her father at the end of Act III, there’s literally no place for her any longer.

SARAH:  This brings to mind the cause of Ophelia’s madness, Ralph – why does Ophelia lose her sanity?  It must be primarily because of her father’s death – she doesn’t go crazy simply because Hamlet doesn’t love her, does she?

RALPH:  Most critics agree that it’s the death of Polonius, Sarah.  The critic John Draper says this quite concisely:  Ophelia goes crazy “because that father, whom she loved so dearly, came to a sudden and shocking end.”

SARAH:  And I suppose that anyone who did think that Ophelia’s romantic difficulties caused her to go mad would have to deal with Claudius’s own assessment of the issue.  You’ll remember that in Act IV, scene 5, when Claudius sees her wandering about the castle, singing, he tells Gertrude “O, this is the poison of deep grief; it springs

All from her father's death.”

RALPH:  That’s true, Sarah – although he then does go on to at least mention Hamlet as a secondary problem:  “First, her father slain:

     Next, your son gone; and he most violent author

     Of his own just remove.”

SARAH:  Ah yes – and come to think of it, Claudius is interpreting Ophelia’s behavior just as we are – there’s no reason why he’d be an absolute authority on the matter, now, is there?

RALPH:  No, there isn’t.  In fact, all we have to go on here is Ophelia’s own actions and words.  And in that same scene, Act IV scene 5, Ophelia sings little bits from folk songs that are famously difficult to make any sense of.  Some are clearly about death… but others are more vulgar, and even sexually explicit – and this seems to suggest some connection with all of Hamlet’s innuendos when we last saw Hamlet and Ophelia together.

SARAH:  Some of the double entendres in Ophelia’s songs were considered to be so crude that critics complained that the scene wasn’t realistic – where would such a well-groomed girl have learned such songs?

RALPH:  At any rate, the cause of Ophelia’s madness is not spelled out for us in the play.  There are critics, like Carroll Camden for example, that believe Ophelia becomes unbalanced because of her difficulties with Hamlet, and that her grief plays a secondary role.

SARAH:  Yet others suggest that neither her father dying, nor Hamlet treating her so roughly, are really sufficient to make Ophelia go mad – and that she must have already been prone to mental instability.

RALPH:  Perhaps Ophelia’s insanity is just one more strikingly excessive element in Hamlet, to use T.S. Eliot’s word – just like Hamlet’s own angry outbursts and moments of suicidal despair earlier in the play, Ophelia’s descent into madness is another mysterious, slightly inexplicable event that keeps us returning again and again to the play.