Hamlet
While King Claudius and Polonius spy on Hamlet, what does he tell Ophelia?
hamlet
hamlet
In his scenes with Ophelia, Hamlet is relentlessly cruel, charging her with a lustful nature, a dishonest heart, a dissembling appearance, and so on. He builds up, in scene three, to an utterly misogynistic rant, beginning, “I have heard of your paintings well enough.” Men in the English Renaissance were obsessed with women’s make-up, which they took to be a symbol of feminine wiles, excuses, manipulations, artifices, and hypocrisies. Shakespeare, especially, has a long rhetorical history with this line of vitriol; it shows up in many of his plays and features strongly in his Sonnets. Readers have long sympathized deeply with Ophelia’s position in the play; as far back as 1765, Samuel Johnson wrote, “[Hamlet] plays the madman most, when he treats Ophelia with so much rudeness, which seems to be useless and wanton cruelty.”
Up to this point, Ophelia has been given few lines and hardly a will or mind of her own; she has done her father’s will, her brother’s will, and Hamlet’s will. All three of the men in her life have defined her almost exclusively in terms of her sexuality and her beauty. Remember Laertes’ parting instruction to Ophelia, that she should not open her “chaste treasure” to Hamlet? Here, throughout Act Three, is Hamlet’s own iteration of the same patriarchal order, only now in a mocking, sarcastic, ghastly tone. The young and presumably innocent Ophelia is besieged and defined by fantasies of female lewdness and she has little power to do anything about it.
From the text:
OPHELIA
90 Good my lord,
91 How does your honor for this many a day?
HAMLET
92 I humbly thank you; well, well, well.
OPHELIA
93 My lord, I have remembrances of yours,
94 That I have longed long to re-deliver;
95 I pray you, now receive them.
HAMLET
95 No, not I;
96 I never gave you aught.
OPHELIA
97 My honor'd lord, you know right well you did;
98 And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed
99 As made the things more rich. Their perfume lost,
100 Take these again; for to the noble mind
101 Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
102 There, my lord.
HAMLET
103 Ha, ha! are you honest?
OPHELIA
104 My lord?
HAMLET
105 Are you fair?
OPHELIA
106 What means your lordship?
HAMLET
107 That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should
108 admit no discourse to your beauty.
OPHELIA
109 Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than
110 with honesty?
HAMLET
111 Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner
112 transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the
113 force of honesty can translate beauty into his
114 likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the
115 time gives it proof. I did love you once.
OPHELIA
116 Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
HAMLET
117 You should not have believ'd me, for virtue cannot
118 so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of
119 it. I lov'd you not.
OPHELIA
120 I was the more deceived.
HAMLET
121 Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder
122 of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I
123 could accuse me of such things that it were better my
124 mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful,
125 ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have
126 thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape,
127 or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do
128 crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves,
129 all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery.
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