nd also tells no one of it or that he is just pretending to be crazy.Hamlet lies, his uncle lies, Ophelia lies, Ophelia’s father Polonius lies to her, Laertes, Hamlet’s friend’s lie to him, the priest lies at Ophelia’s burial, and even his mother Gertrude lies of her love to the uncle/husband Claudius. Every one lies about something significant in the duration of the play. All of the characters lost their true love, sanity, families, and worst of all, they lost themselves. In the end, no one won accept Fortinbras. George Stubbes states that in all of his (Shakespeare’s) noble passions, the female characters are out of their timelines. They do not fit into their surroundings with the women of the period that they are supposed to be written in. In Shakespeare’s plays, “almost all his young women (who are designed as good characters) are made to behave with modesty and decency peculiar to those times, and which are of such pleasing simplicity as seem too ignorant and unmeaning in our well taught knowing age”. (George Stubbes, Shakespearean Criticism, Vol. 1, Pg. 76). Yes, Ophelia does carry those characteristics. She behaves like a well-educated, respected women, and as a crazy whore in others. Shakespeare places her in one extreme to the next; than he has her commit suicide due to her fathers death and or perhaps due to what she thinks is the loss of her true love Hamlet. No one really knows for sure. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch quotes Aristotle numerous times to make it clear how he feels about Shakespeare’s tragedies. “A hero of Tragic Drama must, whatever else he miss, engage our sympathy; that, however gross his error or grievous his frailty, it must not exclude our feeling that he is a man like ourselves” -Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Some also say Shakespeare used a lot of miscommunication in his tragedies to insure the downfall of the hero. I believe if Hamlet wo...
