Claudius: The Wrongful Death Of Ophelia

Cloture for Claudius: The Wrongful Death of Ophelia
To blame, or not to blame? In Act I, scene v, Hamlet, the titular hero of William Shakespeare’s classic tragedy, bemoaned the vile corruption that manifested “in this distracted globe” (Shakespeare, trans. 1986, 1.5.101-102) after discovering the heinous murder of his father. This is only the first of numerous catastrophes to transpire in Denmark. The most spiteful of these misfortunes is the death of pure and innocent Ophelia, lover of Hamlet and daughter of Polonius. Although one may initially regard her drowning as an accident, upon closer examination, it becomes evident that after enduring several tribulations, most notably the sudden murder of her father, Ophelia lost the desire to live.

Hamlet was the first domino to tumble. In the woods, the ghost of Old Hamlet asserted that “. . . The serpent that did sting thy father’s life / Now wears his crown” (Shakespeare, trans. 1986, 1.5.44-45). In conjunction with Claudius’s prompt marriage to Hamlet’s mother, the prince became enraged and enacts a plot to avenge his father’s regicide. As a part of his plan, he decided to feign madness, putting himself in a better position to take revenge and protecting him according to the contemporaneous pagan belief that the mad were divinely touched. Observing Hamlet’s irregular mentality, Claudius feared that his murder of Old Hamlet was the root of Hamlet’s lunacy and a forthcoming attack, in revenge, would endanger his crown. The defendant thus proceeded to take drastic measures to determine what, in actuality, troubled

Upon first learning of this tragedy, the defendant egotistically remarked, “It had been so with us had we been there,” fearing his people will blame him (Shakespeare, trans. 1986, 4.1.14). In an attempt to avoid tumult and inquiries from the people, Claudius arranged a hastened and undignified funeral for Polonius; this imaginably exacerbated the already troublesome situation for Ophelia. Claudius advanced to send Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. By doing this, the defendant protected himself and avoided punishing Hamlet, which would have upset Gertrude and the commoners. However, Claudius may have feared that in prosecuting the prince for the murder, he risked Hamlet disclosing he was trying to kill Claudius. As Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley (2010) explained, this course would foreseeably raise the question of the defendant’s own behavior at the play. Though this may have been advantageous for the king, it was the opposite for Ophelia. With her brother Laertes at college, her father dead, and her companion across the sea, Ophelia had nobody to support her amid such immense suffering. Moreover, Ophelia could not ask Hamlet about his alleged involvement in the murder. This grueling uncertainty served the final blow that drove her to take her own life. At the end of the play, even Laertes, who initially blamed Hamlet, recognized Claudius’s culpability for the