Oh boy I get to talk about the psychology of fictional characters I actually do this too much so this'll be fun

Once again, I must discuss Hamlet. But instead of Hamlet, I'm going to talk about Ophelia! Because she seems like the most fun to overanalyze!

Let's talk ladies in Shakespeare. More often than not they're reduced to relatively minor roles, and if they aren't, they tend to be pretty bland and/or crazy.

Ophelia is unfortunately relegated to a minor role as the helpless daughter of the king's adviser who's also helplessly in love with Hamlet, and unfortunately for her, he stops returning her affections after some time. This...also leads to her suicide.

(Why do they always seem to end up killing themselves out of love? I mean I barely know Shakespeare but out of the 3 plays I do know only one involves happy ladies at the end and that's A Midsummer's Night Dream, which isn't anything like the other two...)

Anyways, Ophelia.

So she kills herself by throwing herself off a cliff, and with the way things have been going for her, it's not really hard to see why she wouldn't do that. Hamlet's been in love with her too, until he's gone insane, and now she's got unrequited love and it's making her insane.

Personally, I find Ophelia to be just another one of the women in Shakespeare’s writing. She kills herself out of love, but it’s a lot more meaningful and drawn out than Juliet killing herself for someone she knew for literally THREE days. THREE!

At least Ophelia knew Hamlet for at least a few months by that point, they had been in love since before the start of the play.

(In hindsight, this was probably a pretty bad scene to choose, considering Ophelia never speaks. Regardless, we do get to see how her death affects other characters, and frankly I don’t feel like it has much of an immediate impact compared to a long term or plot-relevant impact, and her death definitely carries plot impact.)

While Ophelia’s suicide feels a bit cliched to me, I do sincerely think that the way that it impacted all the other characters in a long term way is genuinely well handled. Even if Hamlet loses all will to live other than revenge since the sighting of his dead father, Ophelia’s death gives him further motive and causes him to continue on his ultimately self-destructive path of revenge once he had lost the only person he still loved, as it’s arguable he stopped loving his mother.

I think I stopped overanalyzing Ophelia by accident. Oops.

Thank you for reading.