Ophelia
Ophelia,Polonius' daughter and Laertes' sister, is warned away by them from Hamlet, who has been wooing her. Polonius orders her to speak to Hamlet while he and the King spy on them in the ‘nunnery scene’ (Hamlet 3.1) and she also appears in 3.2. In 4.5, now insane, she is brought before the King and Queen. Gertrude describes her death by drowning, 4.7, and there is a confrontation between Laertes and Hamlet at her burial, 5.1.
On one level Ophelia's madness is easily explicable: her father forces her to betray Hamlet and he has apparently gone mad, rejected her, and killed her father. However, none of the characters links her madness with these events explicitly, and her part is lightly sketched, leaving it tempting to fill in the gaps. Laurence Olivier is by no means alone, for example, in declaring that Hamlet ‘is not just imagining what is beneath Ophelia's skirts, he has found out for himself’ (1937, though he seems to have changed...
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