Ophelia, the Only One Who Truly Goes Mad

If there is an image that sums up Hamlet for those who have never read the play, it is this: a girl lying in dark water, surrounded by flowers, her face serene in the face of her own death. It is the painting Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, painted between 1851 and 1852, now at Tate Britain, London. Pre-Raphaelite, and probably the most reproduced painting in the entire English language.

And the strangest thing about this painting is what it reveals about the play itself: this scene does not exist in Hamlet. Shakespeare never stages it.

The painting that describes a missing scene

In the painting, Ophelia is lying in a slow-flowing stream. The embroidered dress is still inflated by the air that is slowly escaping, the hands open upwards as if they were no longer holding anything, the mouth half-open, the eyes open, staring at something that is no longer in this world. Around her, every plant is botanically accurate, because Millais spent five months painting that margin leaf by leaf before even beginning the figure.

It is an image of almost scientific precision about an instant that the piece itself refuses to show. In the play, Ophelia's death is told, not staged: it is Gertrude who reports what happened, afterwards, to characters who also did not witness anything. The most famous image in all of Shakespeare's work is the painting of something that no one, within history itself, ever sees happen.

This is exactly what happens to her from start to finish

This absence is not a compositional accident. It's the epitome of what Ophelia is in the entire play: someone no one really looks closely at while she suffers.

Her father uses her as bait, positioning her to spy on Hamlet and discover the cause of his supposed madness. The man she loves sends her away to a convent, in a scene of calculated cruelty, and shortly afterwards kills her own father, blindly, behind a curtain. No one, at any point, stops to ask what is left for Ophelia after each of these blows.

The only madness that isn't an act

And that's precisely why her madness weighs differently than everything else in the play. Hamlet pretends to be mad, and even warns in advance that he is going to pretend. Claudius pretends to mourn the brother he killed. Polonius feigns paternal care while manipulating his own children like pieces in a game. Hamlet's childhood friends pretend to be friends, in the service of the king.

Ophelia is the only person in that castle whose mind truly breaks. She comes out distributing flowers and saying the most lucid thing in the entire text, at a time when everyone around her thinks she is lost:

"We know what we are, but know not what we may be." (Ophelia, Hamlet, Act IV, scene 5)

While the entire castle plays a role, the only person without a mask is the one who truly goes crazy.

The price that was not charged to him

There is a possible reading of this entire story in which the price of Hamlet's hesitation, of calculation, of the sword that doesn't come down when it could, is not paid by him. It's paid for by her.

And the outcome confirms this even in the ritual. When they finally bury her, the priest refuses to grant a full funeral, because the circumstances of Ophelia's death are suspicious, and no one can say for sure whether she fell while picking flowers or whether she entered the water of her own free will. The same doubt about what exists after death, which stopped Hamlet's hand in front of his own uncle, now denies Ophelia the full rites over her own coffin.

She never had the play in her favor. She only had the painting.

Continue: Hamlet, by Shakespeare: summary and analysis · When no exit is clear · How to read a play · Capitoline and Caravaggio Museums
Source class (NousCast Community): Hamlet, de William Shakespeare