Interpreting Hamlet’s Ophelia Essay examples -- GCSE English Literatur

Interpreting Hamlets OpheliaWas Ophelia in love with Hamlet, or did she have more feeling for her set about than for her boyfriend? In Shakespeares Hamlet was Ophelias unrestrainedness contributed to by the princes rejection of her? The answers to these and other questions about this tragic figure will be given. Rebecca West in A Court and World Infected by the Disease of Corruption argues that Ophelia has no love for Hamlet, but only for her sustain For the myth which has been built round Hamlet is never more contrary than when it pretends that Ophelia went mad for love and killed herself. No line in the play suggests that she felt up either passion or affection for Hamlet. She never mentions him in the mad scene, and Horatio says of her, She speaks much of her father. Indeed she was in a situation which requires no versed gloss. Her father had been murdered by a member of the majestic house, and she tack herself without protection, since her brother Laertes was in France, i n the midst of a crisis such as might well send her out of her wits with fear. For the Danes hostile to the kingly house made of her wrong a new pretext for their hostility, and the royal house, noting this, turned against her, helpless though she was . . .. (109) Beginning now with the play, the reader/ witnesser sees that the protagonist of the tragedy, Prince Hamlet, initially appears dressed in solemn black. He is regret the death of his father, supposedly by snakebite, while he was away at Wittenberg as a student. Hamlet laments the hasty remarriage of his mother to his fathers brother, an incestuous act thus in his first soliloquy he cries out, Frailty, thy name is woman Ophelia enters the play with her brother Laertes, who, in parting for s... ...ies. Readings on The Tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego Greenhaven Press, 1996. Rpt. from Shakespeares Women. N.p. n.p., 1981. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Techn ology. 1995. http//www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html Ward & Trent, et al. The Cambridge taradiddle of English and American Literature. New York G.P. Putnams Sons, 190721 New York Bartleby.com, 2000 http//www.bartleby.com/215/0816.html West, Rebecca. A Court and World Infected by the Disease of Corruption. Readings on Hamlet. Ed. fag Nardo. San Diego Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Court and the Castle. New Haven, CT Yale University Press, 1957. Wilkie, Brian and pile Hurt. Shakespeare. Literature of the Western World. Ed. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. New York Macmillan Publishing Co., 1992.