Ophelia: Obedience and Its Cost

Ophelia does what every man in her life asks of her. She returns Hamlet's letters when her father demands it. She lets herself be used as bait to test Hamlet's madness when Claudius and Polonius arrange it. She has no ally and no refuge. When Polonius is killed and Hamlet is sent away, she breaks.

Her madness in Act 4 is one of the most disturbing sequences in Shakespeare, not because it is wild, but because it is lucid. Her songs are bawdy, her flower-giving pointed. She is saying things in the only mode left to her that she could not say before.

Shakespeare gives her almost no moments to speak her own thoughts. We experience her almost entirely through what others say about her and what she suffers. That is partly the point: she is a woman who has been denied interiority by the world she lives in, and the play makes us feel the injustice of that.