Blog Assignment #5

The other day I was walking around the castle when I came across a recent newspaper article concerning Ophelia.  I must admit that at first I was outraged.  Our dear Ophelia has just left us and this reporter feels that he has the right to write about her like this!  I wanted to go out and find this Peter Seng right then and there.  The only reason that I didn’t go out to find him at that moment was that the article caught my attention and I started reading it.  My fury slowly left me as I realized that Seng was right in his assessment of Ophelia.  I truly believe that he was correct when he said, “The distorted vision of the world that Polonius and Laertes impress on Ophelia in the episode is clearly the beginning of her tragedy.” (Seng 222) because they “had their share in the spoliation of her mind’s purity and her child-like trust.” (Seng 220) along with Hamlet.  They are the ones that first told her that she shouldn’t trust everything that people tell her.  Laertes is the first to confront Ophelia about Hamlet when he says, “For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favor, hold it a fashion and a toy in blood, a violet in the youth of primy nature, forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting, the perfume and suppliance of a minute, no more.” (1.3.6-11).  Up until this point Ophelia has had no reason to believe that Hamlet’s love for her wouldn’t last and I believe that she was truly shocked when Laertes spoke of this with her.  I can’t really blame her though.  This was her first love and she probably wanted to believe that it would last forever.  Polonius then reinforces what Laertes has already said when he says, “I do know, when the blood burns, how prodigal the soul lends the tongue vows.  These blazes, daughter, giving more light than heat, extinct in both even in their promise as it is a-making, you must not take for fire.” (1.3.124-129) after she tells him that she believes that Hamlet is telling her the truth when it comes to his feelings for her.  He also says, “In few, Ophelia, do not believe his vows, for they are brokers,” (1.3.135-136) meaning that Hamlet doesn’t intend on keeping his promises.

All of Laertes’s and Polonius’s comments to Ophelia concerning Hamlet’s intentions seem to have been unnecessary though because it is later revealed that Hamlet did in fact love her.  I never doubted Hamlet’s feeling for Ophelia and so I was proud of him when he stood up to Laertes in the graveyard and declared his love for her when he said, “I lov’d Ophelia.  Forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum.” (5.1.285-287).  I know that his declaration of love for Ophelia might be surprising when you look at all the rude comments Hamlet made towards Ophelia, but his reason for making those comments became clear to me when Seng said that Hamlet’s “actions [were] motivated by the sense that she had already betrayed him.” (Seng 222).  It seems that Hamlet was aware of Claudius’s and Polonius’s plan to “loose [Ophelia] to him” (2.2.176) and hide “behind an arras” (2.2.177).

While I was at first outraged that Peter Seng felt that it was okay for him to write about our dear Ophelia so soon after her untimely death, I have realized that he has affectively uncovered the reason for her descent into madness.  I am thankful that this has been discovered and that the blame does not solely lie with Hamlet’s careless murder of her father, Polonius.

 

Your Loving Queen,

 

Gertrude