Act 5, Scene 1
November 5, 2006
Even in death is Ophelia uséd! Now, after being swayed by her father’s dictates, her brother’s dictates, Hamlet’s ‘madness,’ her own insanity, is she to be used again as an excuse for Laertes to seek the revenge that the want of which he seems to have harboured since the begining? What madness is this? As corpse-Ophilia I am only left wondering how all of this would have been different if I had only beena little more rebelios, or picked a different side.
Of what could have been made a life more aligned with Hamlet? The Queen even states that she had wished Ophelia to be Hamlet’s wife. O, what could have been!
But regardless. Thus is thus and Ophelia is no more, while young Hamlet and Laertes squabble over who really has more woe than the other, while Yorick’s skull sits by and laughs.
The Gravediggers have a queer humour about them. More talk about mortality. Nice joke about who builds the strongest (gravediggers, because their houses last ’til doomsday) and so on and so forth. Breifly speaks about the rite aloted to this maiden because of the circumstances of her death. The water did not come to her.
