If Ophelia Went to Therapy

While Hamlet centres around the titular character and his journey, Ophelia has a deeply disturbing and tragic arc as well. She lives in a world where her father and brother try to control her and her beloved, Hamlet, sees her as an afterthought. She’s being obedient in the face of control and kind in the face of neglect. She’s doing everything correctly by society’s standards. But in the world of Hamlet, which is fractured and deteriorating, such a woman is punished and hurt, until her mind slowly detaches from reality and she dies. She has no friends, no mother, no confidant. Even the audience is kept at a distance from her, since she’s given no soliloquies and no way of sharing her inner world with the viewers. She represents purity in a convoluted world, submissiveness in an aggressive world, manners in a corrupt world. The play is set in a bleak world where a soft and gentle woman like her is made to feel like she doesn’t matter much. In a broken world that is inherently opposed to someone like Ophelia, finding help is also a challenge. She is never allowed to be a whole person. And thus, the deepest tragedy is that her death is almost a non issue; it’s collateral damage.

Throughout the play, Ophelia keeps her emotions and opinions to herself. We never get a glimpse into her inner world. What if there was someone to sit her down and hear her out? In such a case, today, that role might be filled by a therapist. Therapy represents exactly what Ophelia is denied -- a space to speak, be heard and understand the inner workings of her own mind. But if Shakespeare had known that roughly two hundred years later psychology would be invented and therapists would exist, he would perhaps have found a way of eliminating that option for her as well. Because the world Shakespere has built is one where someone like her doesn’t matter, isn’t helped or even seen. Opheloia’s isolation is inherent to her downfall. The isolation is the tragedy.

But

What if Ophelia went to therapy?

Session One - You’ll Be Fine Either Way

Ophelia’s story starts in a way that’s familiar to most women. A man has expressed his love to her and made her deep and intense promises, but her brother Laertes and father Polonius warn her against getting too drawn into that affection. 

As Laertes 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.”

-- Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3

Laertes tells her that Hamlet’s flirtation is a phase, a force of his youth, and that it won’t last, calling it the matter of “a minute” and “no more.” He explains to her that since Hamlet is the future king, and his choices affect all of Denmark, he can’t take such big decisions lightly. He must do what’s best for the country and marrying her might not be the way to go for him. Once Laertes has left, Polonius also tells Ophelia to spend less time with Hamlet and not make herself so easily available to him in the future. 

What’s going on in her mind at this point? The two men in her life have told her what to think and how to behave. They have decided they know the relationship she shares with Hamlet better than she does, that this is just how men think. They’re subtly messaging to her that she’s not good enough for Hamlet.¹ Women are often kinder. But where are the women? Today, we deeply value female friendships and the sense of sisterhood we feel with all women, everywhere.² In other plays, Shakespeare has exhibited playful and genuine female friendships, like Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It. But he’s given Ophelia no female camaraderie and support.

On stage, Ophelia is obedient and quiet. But what might have been going on in her heart? Perhaps her family’s words have planted a seed of doubt in her about the validity of Hamlet’s love, one that didn’t exist before. Here is a man that claims to love her. And not just any man. The prince, the future king. He’s giving her attention and affection, calling on her often, and wooing her with charm. Enough that she tries to make a case for him in front of her family. But both her brother and father assure her it's temporary. The dialogues end with Ophelia promising both men that she’ll obey them, and she does. What was formerly a happy situation is now something to stress about and mull over. Maybe she even felt a blow to her self confidence. Since Hamlet is the future king and that’s Laertes’ explanation for why Hamlet won’t choose her in the end, maybe she’s thinking less of herself, like she’s not worthy of being a queen. 

It would not be a hard guess to imagine she might be spiralling inside, keeping it all to herself and going over every word and thought obsessively, repeatedly. But if she had a therapist, she’d have someone to speak with about everything going on in her mind. Someone to assure her that she is worthy of a prince’s love, and more importantly, that she’ll be fine even if Hamlet does leave her high and dry. 

Session Two - Don’t Jump to Conclusions

In act two, we learn that Ophelia has not been meeting Hamlet, in obeyance of her brother’s and father’s wishes. But she’s had a meeting with Hamlet off stage that has shaken her up pretty well, and she’s come to report it to Polonius. 

“My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,

Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced;

No hat upon his head; his stockings fouled;

Ungartered, and down-gyved to his ankle;

Pale as his shirt; his knees knocking each other;

And with a look so piteous in purport

As if he had been loosed out of hell

To speak of horrors-he comes before me.”

-- Hamlet, Act II, Scene 1

The last time we saw Hamlet, at the end of Act I, he was speaking with his father’s ghost. It makes sense that now, he’s panicked and disheveled. And it’s interesting to note that in that state of utter confusion and dissociation, it's to Ophelia he comes.³ From here, it’s not a far leap to imagine that his love for her might have been genuine, before he got consumed by other matters. But we never did get to see the two of them together before. Shakespeare isn’t really pulling at our heartstrings for the lost love, because he never shows us the love they shared. Ophelia is denied the empathy that backstory would inspire. She’s to be left unseen, unheard. She’s meant to matter less than the others around her.

The next time they speak, in Act III, Hamlet clearly says to her, “I did love you once” and in the very next dialogue, declares “I loved you not.” By this time Hamlet is thoroughly consumed by his father’s murder and any softness he might have had around Ophelia is long gone. So here, when Hamlet, having just seen the ghost, comes to Ophelia, it’s the last time he has a moment of vulnerability around her.

But Ophelia doesn’t know any of this. She doesn’t know about the ghost or the reason for Hamlet’s behaviour. And so, when she reports the meeting to her father, he immediately asks, “Mad for thy love?”. And not having reason to think of anything else, she replies, “My lord, I do not know. / But truly, I do fear it.”

In this Act, everyone has noticed Hamlet’s odd behaviour, and is believing that it’s the distance Ophelia has created between herself and him that’s causing his madness. And quietly, somewhere, hope must have arisen in Ophelia’s heart. She’s human. When people who previously warned her against Hamlet are now sure that he’s madly in love with her, it’s not hard to imagine that she must have felt a moment of joy. 

Finding love is always a moment of joy. Having your beloved’s love for you confirmed by everyone certainly is a moment of joy too. When it comes to love, until it is clearly expressed by both parties, there is constant interpretation and misinterpretation. We talk to our close people about our beloved, everyone has an opinion and a conclusion, suitable to the temperament of the person in love, is reached. Ophelia is here led to believe that Hamlet is maddened by his love for her. That fact that she reached this conclusion shows that somewhere, she wants to believe it too. She wants to believe that they share love, still. She wants to stand by Hamlet and help him out of the chaos of his inner world.⁴ 

A therapist might have warned her that Hamlet’s behaviour could be about something completely unrelated to her. Even a friend might have warned Ophelia not to jump to conclusions, and to wait and see what Hamlet’s behaviour is like when he’s levelheaded again. Both might have advised against trying to save or fix Hamlet and instead focus on someone else. They could have reminded her that the world is a big place with many eligible men. But Shakespeare has given Ophelia no one who can be a sounding board and offer her a fresh perspective. No one who can pull her out of the limited, unstable world of the play, out of her own slow spiral. And so we must witness this young girl being completely lost and empathise with the heartbreak she never expresses.

Session Three - You Need to Express Your Feelings

Ophelia and Hamlet’s next meeting is arranged by the other characters, who place Ophelia alone in the room to see how Hamlet reacts to her.⁵ Once their dialogue begins, and Hamlet has gone from telling her he once loved her to telling her he never did, he insists, three times, that Ophelia should go to a nunnery. He talks about how no one should be allowed to marry because all women cheat on their husbands anyway, and that he absolutely does not wish to see his bloodline continue. Later in the act, he talks about how all women have brief love, thinking again about his mother betraying his father and marrying his uncle. His mother’s part in his father’s death has absolutely eroded his faith in all women, and in love. In every sense, Hamlet is taken over by his father’s murder, and the role his mother played in that outcome. He’s not really seeing the woman standing in front of him. He’s not clearly seeing anyone or anything. He’s drowning in the thoughts of what happened to his father, entirely consumed by the murder and the plotting.

But again, Ophelia knows none of what’s going on in his mind. She simply sees the man she loves saying deranged things all of a sudden. After he exists, Ophelia has a short speech to herself, the longest she’s spoken in the play before the delirium sets in. And all she can do is mourn the man she had once known.

“Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!-

The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,

Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,

The glass of fashion and the mould of form,

Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite down!

And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, 

That sucked the honey of his music vows,

Now see that noble and most sovereign reason

Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;

That unmatched form and feature of blown youth

Blasted with ecstasy. Oh, woe is me,

T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see!”

-- Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1

Ophelia is thinking about how smart and sharp Hamlet was before, how he was the perfect heir to the throne, and how he’s now deteriorated. And how, of all women who once enjoyed his attention, she’s the most miserable, because she’s seeing him now, in this state, after having first seen him at his finest. When Polonius comes out from hiding, he reaches the conclusion that Hamlet is not in love. That that’s not the source of his sadness, and that although he was a bit scattered, he wasn’t speaking like a madman.

Speaking with a therapist would have been most helpful for Ophelia here. After all the false hope everyone gave her, Ophelia has to face the fact that Hamlet does not in fact love her. That maybe he once did, but whatever he might have felt for her is truly gone now. That’s a deeply harsh reality to face, especially for a woman who is so connected to him and who still feels so strongly about him, who cares about his wellbeing and happiness. She sits in a corner and laments about his state, while he doesn’t give her another thought, caught up as he is with other matters. 

She must have felt so many things going through her all at once -- the sadness of seeing him upset, the love and care for him that she certainly hasn’t shaken off yet, the heartbreak of facing the fact that whatever they had is truly over now, the finality of their relationship ending, the embarrassment of everyone assuming her beauty was the cause of his madness but then realising it wasn’t. Ophelia must have been a whirlpool of emotions. And she had no one to talk through all of it with. We don’t hear her speak again for the rest of the scene. She keeps her mind to herself, always quiet around others, not opening up with anyone. And with no outlet, the emotions all slowly start to eat into her from the inside. 

Session Four - Tell Me What’s Going on Inside

The two meet again, later in the same act, when Hamlet has arranged the play. He goes to sit by her side and indulges in some sexual innuendos at her expense.⁶ Again here, Ophelia is well mannered and ‘proper’ throughout her dealings with Hamlet. But inside, perhaps she’s happy. After being strange around her for so long, Hamlet is finally sharing a moment of intimacy with her. He is still crude and distracted, but for Ophelia, it must have felt like a breath of fresh air after suffocating under water since the start of the play. He’s spending a moment alone with her, engaging her in conversation, sharing banter with her. When someone is so confused about where they stand in their beloved’s life and heart, a few breadcrumbs of attention can feel like a feast to gorge on. Although she remembers her manners, inside, one can imagine a shrivelling hope being watered and slowly nursed back to life. 

Not much later in the scene, the attention is taken away from her and onto Claudius’ response to the play. We see no more of her in Act III. So we must either sit with a frustrating confusion about her emotional state or simply push her to the back of our minds and forget her till she comes back on stage next. We’re given a moment of connection, and then Shakespeare expertly turns the lens away from her. We’re subtly being told that however she’s processed the exchange doesn't matter, that she doesn't matter. It’s the absurdity of the world she’s living in. With murder, intrigue, plotting for the throne, ghosts, pirates, skulls, so much going on, a simple girl’s heart getting broken simply isn’t worthy of being noticed.

If she had a space like therapy where she could share her emotions, she would be choosing to stand up and make space for herself in that world. In a world that doesn’t care about your existence, choosing to look after yourself is a type of rebellion. But Ophelia does not have the tools to fight back.

Session Five - You Need Time Travel

This meek dialogue is the last time we see Ophelia in her senses. By the time Act IV rolls around, her father has been killed by Hamlet and she has lost touch with reality. She’s singing short ditties, some about a man being dead, and handing out flowers and herbs to everyone around her.

To lose touch with reality so completely takes time. From the start, she has bottled up her emotions and kept it all inside. She’s been convinced that Hamlet will never marry her, then that his love for her is the cause of his strange behaviour, then that he doesn’t, in fact, love her. She’s been led to believe different things by her brother and father, authority figures in her life. Hope -- crushed, reignited, crushed again. Hamlet’s mixed signals. The lack of women in her life. The lack of empathy for her state. In an already vulnerable state, losing her father. The final blow. It tipped her over into a false sense of reality, a type of madness. And no one is really concerned enough about her to wonder how they can help her. The lack of community, the isolation, needn’t have been her undoing. She could have seen a therapist. But in her world, there are no therapists. No time travel for Ophelia.

So what Shakespeare is doing here is simply signalling her deterioration to us. While everyone thought Hamlet was losing it, Ophelia is actually the one who has truly lost her footing on reality. Later in the same act, she passes away by drowning, not being in the mental state to realise she was dying. But it’s a bewitching, breathtaking scene that has been rendered by several artists, among them the 19th century painter Sir John Everett Millais. There’s a brook, above which slants a willow tree. When she misses a step and falls into the brook, her dress balloons out, holding her for a few moments. But soon the heaviness of those same clothes pulls her down, and she drowns.

In giving Ophelia such a picturesque death, and in giving her that one moment of floating before she drowns, Shakespeare is honouring the character. Her death was a side effect of someone else's mental deterioration and of the cruel, uncaring world she was part of. She did not deserve this. That last breath she takes is chock full of tragedy for the viewer. After getting only glimpses of her, after largely neglecting her for the length of the play, she’s suddenly gone. The innocent girl is dead. 

What’s left to do now but feel the pain of that loss?

*******

Footnotes:

1. Even today, men feel a sense of entitlement, like they know better. They believe that it is their place to be harsh with a woman, all because they love her so much. They seek to protect women from pain by hurting them.

2. Yes, this includes trans women too.

3. There’s no clear timeline between Hamlet seeing the ghost and the encounter Ophelia had with Hamlet, that she’s here reporting. The assumption is that Hamlet, in a deranged state, not knowing what to do or who to turn to, made his way straight to her chamber.

4. Instead, Hamlet stays rather focused on his goal, and it’s Ophelia’s mind that slowly starts to deteriorate.

5. It’s then that he launches into his soliloquy “To be or not to be”. There’s no clarity about where Hamlet was speaking these lines. Was Ophelia able to hear him? Some productions do place her on stage. But many don’t. It would make sense for her to not be a witness to this. Because Shakespeare was excellent at writing tragedy. And hearing Hamlet’s innermost thoughts might have given Ophelia some indication that he’s troubled. Whereas not knowing what’s going on in his mind and just dealing with his moods and whims is more heartbreaking for Ophelia. So this writer is going to carry on assuming that Ophelia did not hear that.

6. It’s a short dialogue and it makes sense that Shakespeare might have added it for reasons other than building upon their connection. For one, it offers some comic relief for his audience, who have been watching a pretty heavy play. Some fun at the expense of the innocent woman’s sexuality is crude but would have worked for an Elizabethan audience. And two, this scene has a play within a play. So the players inside the play might have needed some time to set up, even though they’re doing it on stage. So the dialogue might be to draw attention away from the set up and give them some time to settle in.