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View Full Version : Hamlet's relationship? For everyone



ole32
04-05-2008, 11:25 PM
What kind of relationship do Hamlet and Ophelia share?

Gladys
04-06-2008, 07:25 AM
Like Romeo and Juliet's, until Papa Polonius intervenes, transforming the relationship into a distant one.

ole32
04-06-2008, 09:59 AM
Thank you! T'is true Polonius does speak words of such.

jaymrobinson
05-15-2008, 07:16 PM
Hamlet has proposed marriage to her.

Darkwingpuck
05-26-2008, 05:00 PM
I have an opposing thought on this matter but I'll hold my tongue until my other post has been replied too. I want to know what other people think before I reveal my opinion on it.

Darkwingpuck
05-26-2008, 06:19 PM
I will post this question to those of you agreeing with the "Romeo and Juliet" analogy.

Why does Hamlet never mention Ophelia in any of his soliloquies? If his love for Ophelia was so strong, wouldn't she be a large part of his self-pity filled thoughts?

Gladys
05-26-2008, 07:46 PM
"Love will never die" is only a song.

Romantic infatuations fade in the face of betrayal (Claudius, R & G, Gertrude and Ophelia's) and more important life-and-death issues. Killing the king and 'To be or not to be' henceforth preoccupy Hamlet.

JBI
05-26-2008, 09:23 PM
Hamlet has promised to be faithful, and she thinks she has turned him away from her, by first rejecting him (on the request of her brother/father) and then by trying to save the relationship (at this time he calls her a whore, causing her to believe that he thinks she was unfaithful) and then later by him killing her father (which she believes to be because of her father's request that she stop seeing him), which utterly destroys her by both a)granting her wishes of sexual liberation and the ability to be with him, and b) the death of the father, and duty to him, which she owes him/wants to give him, because, after all, though imperfect, he was still her father. This causes Ophelia's insanity.

To Hamlet Ophelia first represents his mother, in that they both have similar aspects, but then after the Hamlet's dad scene, which Ophelia doesn't know of, she rejects him, and she feels this causes his madness, which actually was caused by his father's ghost. Hamlet, because of his mother's proven infidelity to his father (as Hamlet thinks, really there is no proof in the play) begins to question the constancy of all women, and proceeds to call her a whore, rather than reconcile. Hamlet's view on women becomes that of a misogynist, and I think it isn't really until her death that he actually breaks out of it - after she drowns herself he separates the concept of Ophelia from that of his mother, and has that big public outburst at the burial scene.

Throughout this though, there is far more going on; Hamlet actually seems to be on a journey with inevitable death at the end, and everything that occurs in the play seems to be readying him for the final moment. By the end of the play he seems to know all the answers, and is finally ready to give in to the death that is upon him.