Part 5: Ophelia Drowning in Conflicting Authorities
When Ophelia says, “ “I do not know, my lord, what I should think” (1.3.113), people in Early Modern England would have assumed that, at least in part, she may have felt torn between apparently contradictory biblical injunctions. In Act 1, scene 3, Ophelia has her first brief lines, spoken to her long-winded brother Laertes and her even more long-winded father, Polonius. She says that Hamlet has made her “almost all the holy vows of heaven” [1]: She could be the next queen of Denmark. Laertes suspects Hamlet may be tempted to use and abandon her, needing to marry someone else to secure a treaty [2]. But the play gives no evidence of treaty-marriages, or that Hamlet would take love lightly: He wants to return to university in Wittenberg, while Laertes wants to return to France where his father suspects he will be “drabbing” (whoring), and where Ophelia suspects he will be a hypocrite for not heeding his own strict advice. Ophelia’s father similarly suspects bad intentions on Hamlet’s pa...