Now it was essential to Shakespeare’s purpose that too great an interest should not be aroused in the love-story; essential, therefore, that Ophelia should be merely one of the subordinate characters; and necessary, accordingly, that she should not be the equal, in spirit, power or intelligence, of his famous heroines.  If she had been an Imogen, a Cordelia, even a Portia or a Juliet, the story must have taken another shape.  Hamlet would either have been stimulated to do his duty, or (which is more likely) he would have gone mad, or (which is likeliest) he would have killed himself in despair.  Ophelia, therefore, was made a character who could not help Hamlet, and for whom on the other hand he would not naturally feel a passion so vehement or profound as to interfere with the main motive of the play.[76] And in the love and the fate of Ophelia herself there was introduced an element, not of deep tragedy but of pathetic beauty, which makes the analysis of her character seem almost a desecration.

Ophelia is plainly quite young and inexperienced.  She has lost her mother, and has only a father and a brother, affectionate but worldly, to take care of her.  Everyone in the drama who has any heart is drawn to her.  To the persons in the play, as to the readers of it, she brings the thought of flowers.  ‘Rose of May’ Laertes names her.

             Lay her in the earth,
     And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
     May violets spring!

—­so he prays at her burial.  ‘Sweets to the sweet’ the Queen murmurs, as she scatters flowers on the grave; and the flowers which Ophelia herself gathered—­those which she gave to others, and those which floated about her in the brook—­glimmer in the picture of the mind.  Her affection for her brother is shown in two or three delicate strokes.  Her love for her father is deep, though mingled with fear.  For Hamlet she has, some say, no deep love—­and perhaps she is so near childhood that old affections have still the strongest hold; but certainly she has given to Hamlet all the love of which her nature is as yet capable.  Beyond these three beloved ones she seems to have eyes and ears for no one.  The Queen is fond of her, but there is no sign of her returning the Queen’s affection.  Her existence is wrapped up in these three.

On this childlike nature and on Ophelia’s inexperience everything depends.  The knowledge that ‘there’s tricks in the world’ has reached her only as a vague report.  Her father and brother are jealously anxious for her because of her ignorance and innocence; and we resent their anxiety chiefly because we know Hamlet better than they.  Her whole character is that of simple unselfish affection.  Naturally she is incapable of understanding Hamlet’s mind, though she can feel its beauty.  Naturally, too, she obeys her father when she is forbidden to receive Hamlet’s visits and letters.  If we remember not what we know but what she knows of her lover and her father; if we remember that she had not, like Juliet, confessed her love; and if we remember that she was much below her suitor in station, her compliance surely must seem perfectly natural, apart from the fact that the standard of obedience to a father was in Shakespeare’s day higher than in ours.