The Impact of Ophelia on Hamlet Essay -- Essays on Shakespeare Hamlet

The Impact of Ophelia on Hamlet Could the Bard of Avon have created a more innocent and teachable young lady in Hamlet than the victimized Ophelia? I think not. Let us discuss the ups and downs of her life in the play. Michael Pennington in Ophelia Madness Her unaccompanied Safe Haven, describes personality traits of the young lady This is the woman she might have become warm, tolerant and imaginative. Instead she becomes jagged, benighted and imaginative. . . .Ophelia is made mad not yet by circumstance but by something in herself. A personality forced into such deep hiding that it has seemed almost vacant, has all the time been so painfully open to impressions that they now usurp her reflexes and take possession of her. She has loved, or been prepared to love, the wrong man her father has brought disaster on himself, and she has no bugger off she is terribly lonely. (73-74) Helena Faucit (Lady Martin) in On Some of Shakespeares Female Characters reveals the misunderstood character of Ophelia My views of Shakespeares women have been wont to take their shape in the living portrait of the stage, and not in words. I have, in imagination, lived their lives from the very beginning to the end and Ophelia, as I have pictured her to myself, is so unlike what I meet and read about her, and have seen represented on the stage, that I can scarcely hope to make any one think of her as I do. It hurts me to hear her spoken of, as she often is, as a weak creature, wanting in truthfulness, in purpose, in force of character, and only interesting when she loses the itsy-bitsy wits she had. And yet who can wonder that a character so delicately outlined, and shaded in with touches so fine, should be o... ... Lehmann, Courtney and Lisa S. Starks. Making Mother Matter Repression, Revision, and the bet of Reading Psychoanalysis Into Kenneth Branaghs Hamlet. Early Modern Literary Studies 6.1 (May, 2000) 2.1-24 <URL http//purl.oclc.org/emls/06-1/lehmhaml.htm>. Penn ington, Michael. Ophelia Madness Her Only Safe Haven. Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. of Hamlet A Users Guide. spick-and-span York Limelight Editions, 1996. Pitt, Angela. Women in Shakespeares Tragedies. Readings on The Tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego Greenhaven Press, 1996. Reprint of Shakespeares Women. N.p. n.p., 1981. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http//www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html No line nos.