NO ONE TELLS OPHELIA that Hamlet killed her father (Ophelia Postlude)

Ophelia and Laertes know their father’s burial was abbreviated and secretive [1]. Claudius says,

For good Polonius’ death, and we have done but
greenly
In hugger-mugger to inter him… [2]

Claudius confides in Laertes that Hamlet killed his father [3]: This suits his purposes, to enlist the help of Laertes to kill Hamlet without Claudius revealing that he killed his brother, the king.

But Claudius does not reveal to Ophelia how her father died. While he confides in Laertes, Ophelia is drowning [4].

There is no scene in Hamlet in which a character tells Ophelia that Hamlet killed her father. None.

No character refers to Ophelia having been told, or knowing it, or finding out via gossip from Elsinore guards or servants.

This may *not* be a small point: It is one thing to assume that Ophelia should be defined mostly by her familial and romantic relationships, and to have gone mad merely because of them.

Yet it is very different for her to be defined by political awakenings, to have
- loved a prince and heir apparent;
- witnessed the play-within-the-play, "The Mousetrap," or "The Murder of Gonzago";
- pondered how the prince she loved seems to be saying, through that play, that someone poisoned the previous king and then wooed his widow to gain the throne;
- and not long after watching that play with Hamlet, to have learned that her father, too, has suddenly and inexplicably died.

These alone could be cause enough for madness. Being told that Hamlet stabbed her father would not be necessary.

We have no evidence that Ophelia knows: The texts do not support it.

Many have assumed what the text does not say: that Ophelia knows that Hamlet killed her father [5].

But this takes an awareness that certainly the audience knows, and projects it most carelessly onto Ophelia via flawed assumption.

It plucks the heart of a mystery that should not be plucked so recklessly, and impregnates Ophelia with a knowledge of her father's murder that the play's texts absolutely do not indicate that she possesses.

~~

If one lived in a city where a mother was found to have secretly encouraged the suicide of her son’s girlfriend, and a later Hamlet production clearly implied that Gertrude cruelly told Ophelia that Hamlet murdered her father to encourage suicide, and later lied in her account of Ophelia’s drowning (just as one example), some might support such an adaptation. Adaptations can be wonderful and are often necessary in modern productions, as is often the case with The Taming of the Shrew.

But it would be an adaptation. It would not be Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but a departure from it, a choice made by a director and actors, not in the text.


NOTES: All references to Hamlet (and other Shakespeare plays) are to the Folger Shakespeare Library online versions: https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/entire-play/

[1] Laertes mentions the abbreviated rites for his father’s funeral:

His means of death, his obscure funeral
(No trophy, sword, nor hatchment o’er his bones,
No noble rite nor formal ostentation)
Cry to be heard, as ’twere from heaven to earth,
That I must call ’t in question. (4.5.238-242)

Some have noticed that Ophelia sings of her father’s burial as if some things were amiss, such as grass at his head instead of at his feet, and a (grave-) stone at his heels instead of at his head (4.5.36-37); and instead of her father’s grave being showered with tears as he went to the ground, her song says

…bewept to the ground did not go
With true-love showers. (4.5.44-45).

- All evidence of the "maimed rites" of the funeral (as Hamlet would later say in 5.1 of Ophelia's funeral).

[2] Hamlet 4.5.89-91

[3] Claudius first confides in Laertes about his father’s death in (4.7.4-5), while Ophelia is off-stage. Claudius is therefore conspiring with Laertes to kill Hamlet, while Ophelia is somewhere near a brook, drowning.  

[4] Gertrude reports Ophelia’s drowning to Claudius and Laertes later in the same scene (4.7.187-210).

[5] For example, via CORE.ac.uk, see Calzada, Paul. "Hamlet's Foils: Ophelia and Laertes." (1994)
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/228566433.pdf
Page 180: "She goes mad, then, because she loves Hamlet and can't bear what's happened to him, can't bear losing him and being unjustly accused of being wanton, and, most importantly, can't bear the fact that he killed the father she loved."

Image (below) of Calzada’s text: From page 180,
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/228566433.pdf

TOP IMAGE:
Constantin Meunier (1831–1905).
Ophelia, 1851-1905.
At Sotheby's London sale of 24 November 2009 lot 54.
Public Domain via https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Constantin_Meunier_-_Ophelia.jpeg

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