ance; pray you, love remember. And there is pansies; that’s for thoughts” (4.5.174-175). It appears that Ophelia has shown her craziness by giving meaning even to something as simple as a flower. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “when Ophelia in her madness begins to distribute flowers and herbs to the court, she initially assigns symbolic meanings to her gifts” (Persoon). Polonius’ authoritarian ways has caused her to act in a childish manner. Another sign of her craziness is when she hands out flowers to everyone and compares the flowers to her father’s death: “There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died” (4.5. 179-180). Ophelia has gone mad because of her father’s recent death and later her madness leads to her own death by drowning. Polonius’ did not truly love his daughter and only used her for selfish reasons, which resulted in both of their deaths. Polonius was so self-centered that he made his only daughter do things she did not want to so Claudius would be proud of him. Polonius commanded her to stop seeing Hamlet because it might embarrass him in his high position. Then Polonius turned the situation around by making her visit with the prince so he and Claudius could observe the reason for Hamlet’s madness. In return, Ophelia is psychologically mistreated by Hamlet’s words. The only thing that Polonius wanted to do is determine the reasoning behind Hamlet’s lunacy, but he goes too far and gets murder by Hamlet while spying on him. Now that that she has been informed of her father’s murder, she has become “mad Ophelia with her flowers and song” (Guss) and dies inadvertently. Ophelia’s death occurred because of Polonius’ choices only concerning the interests of himself and Claudius. After the death of Polonius and Ophelia, Hamlet fulfills his assignment of m...
