12/9 Hamlet (#14)

Ophelia’s Madness
Ophelia goes mad due to the compound effect of the death of her father and Hamlet's rejection of her love. When she meets the King and Queen, Ophelia sings lyrics about her father dying and mixes in with it stories of love, flowers, and miscellaneous lines. The phrases "He is dead," "at his head a grass-green turf," and "go to thy death-bed, he will never come again" makes it clear she is grieving her father's death (2474). The songs of love almost remind one of her love for Hamlet, as a woman was promised to marry a young man but the young man replies "so would I ha' done, by yonder sun, An thou hadst not come to my bed" (2475). In the previous acts, Hamlet rejects Ophelia's love to deal with his own crisis, which leaves Ophelia hurt and could have pushed her to her intense despair and madness. She does not fully understand why either of these things happened. At the end of Act IV, Ophelia drowns herself. Her madness and death symbolizes the state of the kingdom of Denmark. While Ophelia is singing, the King is plotting with Laertes to get revenge on Hamlet for his father's death. Leartes decides to "anoint [his] sword. [He] bought an unction of a mounteback, so mortal that but dip a knife no cataplasm so rare...can save the thing from death" (2483). During the duel, both Hamlet and Laertes get struck by that sword and and die. The Queen and King also die in the crossfire. The madness that drove Ophelia to her death is similar to the madness from Hamlet's father's death that took all the royal family to their deaths.

Hamlet’s Madness 2
Hamlet is not quite as mad as Ophelia as he still has some restraint in his actions at the start of Act V. Hamlet is in despair when he learns that Ophelia is being buried. He is so distraught that he leaps into the grave and admits that he loves Ophelia so much that "forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up [his] sum" (2490). Laertes tries to fight Hamlet, but Hamlet admits that he has "in [him] something dangerous, which let thy wisdom fear" (2489). Though he is upset, he restrains his emotions until a later, more appropriate time. Ophelia, on the other hand, sings at will and shows no restraint in demonstrating her depravity.