1.244-247).
When Hamlet is feigning madness and wishes to tweak Laertes, he claims to have loved Ophelia, though his actions previously have not shown much love for her:
lov'd Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not (with all their quantity of love)
Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her? (V.1.280-282).
Laertes certainly does not see Hamlet as a lover for his sister and instead believes that Hamlet is only trifling with her, and he warns her of this:
For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favour,
Hold it a fashion, and a toy in blood;
violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent? sweet, not lasting;
The perfume and suppliance of a minute;
No more I.iii.7-12).
Her father, Polonius, asks her openly what is between them, and she answers, "He hath, my lord, of late made many tenders / Of his affection to me" (I.iii.109-110). Her father also warns her about Hamlet, but she states that Hamlet "hath importun'd me with love / In honourable fashion" (I.iii.120-121).
Ophelia's madness is real and contrasts with that of Hamlet. In addition, while Hamlet always seems much concerned with his own mortality and given to bouts of depression which bring him to think of suicide, Ophelia actually carries out her suicide. Hamlet's response to her death shows that his feelings are deeper than he has shown earlier in the play, for he leaps into her grave in grief:
What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis? whose phrase of sorrow
Works Cited
Frye, Roland Mushat. The Renaissance Hamlet. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Harrison, G.B. Shakespeare: The Complete Works. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1952.
Hobson, Alan. Full Circle: Shakespeare and Moral Development. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972.
Prosser, Eleanor. Hamlet & Revenge. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971.
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