What is Prince Hamlet's relationship to Ophelia?

Answer 1

That there is a romantic relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia there can be no doubt, but the text is irritatingly vague on just how far along it has progressed. Ophelia tells her father that Hamlet is wooing or courting her: "My lord, he hath importuned me with love in honourable fashion." Laertes calls it "the trifling of his favour", and argues that Hamlet's interest in her cannot be honourable as, being royalty, he has no control over who he marries. Therefore, Laertes concludes, Hamlet is just trying to get into her pants, and warns her not to allow her "chaste treasure open to his unmastered importunity". Her father echoes this: Hamlet's vows are "springes to catch woodcocks".

Curiously both of them may have been wrong about Ophelia's chances of marrying Hamlet. Gertrude says at her funeral "I hoped thou should have been my Hamlet's wife."

On the other hand neither Polonius nor Laertes think that this Hamlet/Ophelia romance has gone very far. He has sent her letters (perhaps a little indecent: "in her excellent white bosom these &c . . ." makes us wonder just exactly what words the "et cetera" is replacing and why Polonius does not want to finish the sentence) and made protests of love accompanied with all the vows of heaven. Have they gone farther? Some of the songs Ophelia sings in her madness suggest that they have: Quoth she "before thou tumbled me, you promised me to wed." He answers, "So would I have done by yonder sun, an thou had not come to my bed." These line may well be expressing the anguish and betrayal Ophelia feels because she has indeed opened her chaste treasure to Hamlet, who has abandoned her.

Hamlet's feelings are difficult to discern. In the nunnery scene, he says one thing and then another: "I did love you once" then in the next line "I loved you not." Sometimes the nunnery he is talking about seems to be a convent, at others a brothel. Why is he so brutal to her during the Mousetrap play? His language is filthy. Could it be that Ophelia's complicity in Claudius and Polonius's spying have made him particularly bitter because they are closer than others imagine, and that she seems like a prostitute to him because she shares his bed one minute and betrays him the next? Or perhaps he knows that he is in terrible danger and is pushing her away to save her from being implicated in it.

Be that as it may, his last word is: "I loved Ophelia--forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum." Perhaps this is just a reaction to Laertes's posturing and "the bravery of his grief put [Hamlet] into a towering passion". Or maybe this is Hamlet's anger with himself for allowing this opportunity for love to slip by him, and for destroying one he loved by his indifference.