I hadn’t realized that Hamlet inhabits the world of social media—pretending and viewing others as performers is what’s wrong with the Danish court. No one lives in the present, or experiences things directly except Ophelia.
When she goes mad at the end it isn’t acting. What do you expect,? Her terrifying encounter with acting-up-for-Instagram Hamlet in Act 3 is deliberately set up by her father—Polonius literally gives her her mark and her prop as if he were staging a YouTube zinger.
She isn’t jaded enough to take it ironically, and it stuns her. Though she has caught enough of the self-monitoring bug to suffer, at first, in the third person: “And I, of ladies most deject and wretched ….” But she recovers herself: “… O woe is me, / T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see!”
Her line rhymes—phonetically and philosophically—with one of her last utterances in the next Act, “Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.”
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