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\2. I think Ophelia committed suicide because she had hard time throughout the play. She encountered a lot of rejections and tragedies in her life. Hamlet treated her terribly, telling her he does not love her anymore and she was always controlled by Hamlet, her brother and father. Being trapped in the amount of control and dominance the men she loved gave her, she must have had a hard time living. In addition, even though her father Polonius was controlling, Ophelia was willing to obey his directions because she loved her father and he was all she had left. In the end, she is likely to have committed suicide because of grief from the loss of her father.
3. I believe Hamlet follows his father and goes to Purgatory, halfway between
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The movie She’s the Man depicts the modern storyline of Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night. In both movie and the play, the main character Viola pretends to become a male but for different purposes. In Twelfth Night, Viola does it to protect herself by disguising herself as a boy and renaming herself as Cesario. She falls in love with Orsino. In the movie She’s the Man, Viola does it to be a part of the soccer team by disguising and renaming herself as her twin brother Sebastian. Viola and Sebastian are twin in both the movie and the book. In addition to playing soccer, Viola falls in love with Duke Orsino. In the play, he depicts the Duke of Illyria, Orsino. Both The Duke of Illyria in Twelfth Night and the soccer captain in She’s The Man are in love with Olivia. However, love triangle forms when Olivia falls in love with Viola, who was disguised as Cesario in Twelfth Night, and Sebastian, her twin brother in both movies, in She’s The Man. Both are different ways to depict Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night. The movie one is more modernized and attracts younger teenager girls and boys who are at the age of being interested in falling in love and learning about the responsibilities in a relationship. The story line conveys the same theme of love, in which the main characters are connected in a love triangle. Then encounter love involving disguise, jealousy and complexity, and love and appearances versus
The life of Hamlet is without a doubt very interesting, he suffers from unfortunate events in his time that are often major blows to his ego. His father dies while he’s away at college, Hamlet is next in line to be king until his “uncle-father” steals it from him; but it is to be known his “uncle-father” would not have stolen it if his “aunt-mother” hadn’t allowed it. It’s very apparent from the beginning of the play that he is very well obsessed with his mother and her doings. He harasses, humiliates, and abuses her because she has done such an unforgivable act by marrying Claudius. His thoughts and feelings towards his mother are very strong and well known, he even describes the odd pair as “little more than kin and less than kind.” That’s not all with Hamlet; his mother remarrying is just the tip of the iceberg so deeply rooted in the ocean of his emotions. His relationship with Ophelia is twisted, Hamlet goes through episodes of
People have mostly seen women inferior to men because women have been thought of as simple-minded and could not take care of themselves. Shakespeare’s Hamlet shows how men treated and thought of women during the 1500s. There was an order most did not interfere with; however, some did. In the 1500s, women were supposed to conform to men’s wishes. Throughout the play, Ophelia first obeyed her father and brother’s wishes, ignored the social norms later, and then went mad, which caused her to never gain her own identity.
...She had lost her father and her lover while her brother was away for school, and she was no longer useful as a puppet in a greater scheme. Ophelia was displaced, an Elizabethan woman without the men on whom she had been taught to depend. Therein lies the problem - she lacked independence so much that she could not continue living without Polonius, Laertes, and Hamlet. Ophelia's aloneness led to her insanity and death. The form of her death was the only fitting end for her - she drowned in a nearby river, falling beneath the gentle waters. She finally found peace in her mad world. That is how Ophelia is so useful as a classic feminist study - she evokes imagery of the fragile beauty women are expected to become, but shows what happens to women when they submit as such.
Ophelia in the fourth act of Hamlet is demonstrably insane, but the direct cause of her slipped sanity is something that remains debatable, Shakespeare uses the character Ophelia to demonstrate how women during this time were unable to break away from social norms. While it is evident that Ophelia is grieving over the death of her father, Polonius, as Horatio says of her “She speaks much of her father, says she hears / There’s tricks in the world, and hems, and beats her heart” (4.5.4-5), as lines from one of her many “songs” points towards grieving over an aged relative, “His beard as white as snow / All flaxen was his poll” with flaxen indicating a white or grayed head of hair (4.5.190-191).
It was not considered suicide because she was not the one who caused her grief. Suicide was only considered suicide back then if you killed yourself for something you had done, for example, if you had murdered someone. As you can see, Ophelia is a great example of a tragic hero. Her loyalty to three men caused her final destruction, death. Also, her death caused the final destruction of the death of her brother and Hamlet as well.
Many believe that Ophelia genuinely lost her mind and became suicidal towards the end of the play. This is very self explanatory due to the fact that both her father and brother died and they seemed to play a big part in her life. Ophelia’s genuine madness exposes Hamlet’s counterfeit madness because Ophelia shows signs. In Act 4, Scene 5, Ophelia is constantly singing songs about death and basically ignores anything that anyone says to her. For example, in Act 4, Scene 5, she sings, “He is dead and gone, lady, he is dead and gone. At his head is a patch of green grass, and at his feet there is a tombstone.” This continues on and on until one day she is in a meadow and she ends up drowning. She ends up dying before she can even see her brother, Laertes ever again. When Laertes finally returns, he wants to say his final goodbyes to his younger sister and while he’s doing this, Hamlet is hiding in the bushes listening and he begins to cry. This is another way that Hamlet exposes that he isn’t truly mad the way he made himself seem. He forced himself to treat Ophelia poorly so many times throughout the play and it was all just a part of his madness act. Him releasing his emotions for Ophelia in this moment showed everyone that he truly did care for her. Even if he wasn’t madly in love, he definitely cared for her. This is the last main event that shows that Hamlet wasn’t truly a mad, emotionless, heartless
Hamlet is a Shakespearean play written at the end of the sixteenth century. Throughout this tragedy, the life of the prince of Denmark, named Hamlet, is closely followed after the death of his father. Hamlet eventually discovers that his father has been murdered by his own brother and Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, who has already wed Hamlet’s mother. Furthermore, Claudius crowned himself as king, even though Hamlet was the successor to the throne. After Hamlet is confronted by his father 's ghost, he vows revenge on Claudius. Though he intends to take Claudius’s life, Hamlet is eventually so obsessed in his own plot of revenge that he becomes insane and hurts many of the people around him. Ophelia, Hamlet’s lover, is one casualty of the plot to kill Claudius when Hamlet accidentally murders her father, Polonius, and disowns her.
It is impossible to get around Hamlet's murder of Polonius being a trigger for Ophelia's decent into madness. However, upon closer examination it is not this trigger alone that is the cause for her madness and it is surely not only this that leads to her eventual suicide. Ophelia is expected to be a perfect lady, which in part meant following the orders of the men in her life. In addition to that pressure and cruelty is the added cruelty of how often those men change their minds about her and what she should do. Adding to that the repeated abandonment and the murder of her father by her lover, it is no wonder she went into a madness that ended in her death.
The story of Hamlet is a morbid tale of tragedy, commitment, and manipulation; this is especially evident within the character of Ophelia. Throughout the play, Ophelia is torn between obeying and following the different commitments that she has to men in her life. She is constantly torn between the choice of obeying the decisions and wishes of her family or that of Hamlet. She is a constant subject of manipulation and brain washing from both her father and brother. Ophelia is not only subject to the torture of others using her for their intentions but she is also susceptible to abuse from Hamlet. Both her father and her brother believe that Hamlet is using her to achieve his own personal goals.
Apart from the ambiguity surrounding her death and her love for Hamlet, Ophelia is described by all as an innocent child, grappling with situations her youth is unprepared for. Even if she had consummated her love for Hamlet, I can still picture Ophelia as a vulnerable and innocent child who has to cope with situations beyond her control in a world where the role of the female is passive. It is this helplessness which Gertrude wants to look after as she “hoped thou should’st have been my Hamlet’s wife” and her madness which Gertrude wants to save her form by allowing Ophelia to make the decision over life and death.
Melancholy, grief, and madness pervade Shakespeare's great tragedy, Hamlet. The emotional maladies presented within Hamlet, not only allow the audience to sympathize with prince Hamlet, but also with the tragic lady Ophelia as well. It is Ophelia who suffers at her lover's discretion because of decisions she was obligated to make on behalf of her weak societal position.
Sweet and innocent, faithful and obedient, Ophelia is the truly tragic figure in William Shakespeare's Hamlet. "Her nature invites us to pity her misfortune caused not by any of her own self-initiated deeds or strategies"(Lidz 138). Laertes tells us convincingly how young and vulnerable Ophelia is, (act I. iii.10) likening her budding womanhood's destruction from Hamlet to a process as "the canker galls the infants of the spring,/ Too oft before their buttons be disclosed, /And in the morn and liquid dew of youth / Contagious blastments are most imminent". "He advises her to stay away and she lovingly banters back, typically like a young teen, reminding him to act as he advises" (Campbell 104). We then learn more of how pure and innocent she is as her father counsels her (Act I.iii.90). Telling her that she is a "green girl" and to think of herself as "a baby" in this matter, he insists that she must stop seeing him.
In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia is the most static character in the play. Instead of changing through the course of the play, she remains suffering in the misfortunes perpetrated upon her. She falls into insanity and dies a tragic death. Ophelia has issues surviving without a male influence, and her downfall is when all the men in her life abandon her. Hamlet’s Ophelia, is a tragic, insane character that cannot exist on her own.
Frail Ophelia of Hamlet Throughout Hamlet, Shakespeare makes it evident that Ophelia is very unstable. She continuously changes her mind about the way she feels. Laertes and Polonius command her to do things that she does not agree with, but she does them with no argument. Afraid to stand up for herself, she stands back and watches everyone else control her life.
In Hamlet suicide is an issue of controversy and question. Hamlet is a confused man from everything that he has experienced in such a short period of time. And even though Hamlet contemplates suicide he is not the one who suffers from it. Ophelia is actually is the victim of the actual act of suicide. His morality, religion, and philosophical views on suicide keep him from committing the dreaded act.