is one of the most tragic figures in English literature. As the daughter of Polonius, the chief counsellor to the treacherous King Claudius, she becomes enmeshed in the fatal rivalry between the King and his vengeful new son-in-law, Prince Hamlet.

Hamlet had once professed his love for Ophelia and would have married her with the blessing of his mother the Queen, but his affections turn to suspicion and cruel bitterness when he learns that his mother married the very man, Claudius, who murdered his father in order to ascend to the throne.

Ophelia languishes in sorrow near the fateful brook. By John William Waterhouse

Ophelia is deeply in love with Hamlet, but her loyalties are torn between her love for the Prince and her devotion to her father, a devotion made deeper because she was left motherless as a child. Her paternal loyalty leads her to tell a lie to Hamlet regarding the whereabouts of her father. Hamlet, already imagining betrayal all around and suspecting Ophelia of spying on him, turns on her in a rage over his perception of her valuing her father over him.

Hamlet brands both Ophelia and his mother as 'whores,' and to her face, he rejects his love for the young girl.

In a final crushing blow to Ophelia's tender emotions, Hamlet mistakenly kills her father by thrusting his sword through a curtain behind which Polonius was standing. She descends into madness, exhibiting signs of frustrated sexual desire over her loss of Hamlet and grief over the death of her father.

While wandering alone on an embankment bedside a stream gathering flowers, Ophelia falls into the water and surrenders to her fate, at first floating upon the stream and singing to herself until her water-soaked dress pulls her down to her death.

Ophelia's final moments are recounted to her brother Laertes and King Claudius by Queen Gertrude in Act 4 of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

QUEEN GERTRUDE:

     There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
     That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream;
     There with fantastic garlands did she come
     Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
     That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
     But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
     There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
     Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
     When down her weedy trophies and herself
     Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
     And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
     Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
     As one incapable of her own distress,
     Or like a creature native and indued
     Unto that element: but long it could not be
     Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
     Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
     To muddy death.

The best known depiction of Ophelia. By John Everett Millais - 1854

J.W. Waterhouse - 1910   Paul Steck - 1890