Ophelia

Family: Denmark · Role: Polonius's daughter · First appears: Hamlet · Act I, Scene III

In Act I, Laertes asks his sister to keep him informed, while Polonius tells Ophelia that she does not understand herself as his daughter should. She reveals that Hamlet has recently shown her affection—“He hath, my lord, of late made many tenders Of his affection to me”—but Polonius orders her to stop speaking with him.

By Act II, Ophelia has followed Polonius’s command, rejecting Hamlet’s letters and denying him access. She reports his disturbing visit, and Polonius connects Hamlet’s rejection with his apparent descent into madness. He then proposes that Ophelia encounter Hamlet while he and Claudius secretly observe them, an arrangement carried into Act III.

After Polonius’s death, Ophelia becomes mentally unbalanced. In Act IV she falls from a willow into a brook and drowns; her death is treated as doubtful, and she receives restricted but permitted Christian burial rites. Gertrude says she had hoped Ophelia would become Hamlet’s wife, while Hamlet publicly declares, “I lov’d Ophelia; forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum.”