Hamlet
Prompt #9 · Hamlet
Prompt Type: Scene Analysis
In Ophelia's mad scene, she enters fantastically dressed with flowers and straws, singing fragmented songs and distributing symbolic flowers with cryptic meanings. Analyze how Shakespeare uses this moment to explore the theme of corruption and decay, showing how the court's moral rot destroys innocence. Explain how it contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.
Quote 1
“There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray love, remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts.”
Act IV, Scene 5
Argument
This quote from the mad scene itself demonstrates Ophelia's symbolic flower distribution, where rosemary and pansies cryptically encode remembrance and thought—her fragmented language exposing how the court's corruption has shattered her coherent self into symbolic gestures that indict those who destroyed her innocence.
Quote 2
Act IV, Scene 5
Argument
This quote from the mad scene captures the disturbing transformation where Ophelia's madness converts 'thought and affliction, passion, hell itself' into 'favour and to prettiness,' revealing through juxtaposition how the court aestheticizes and trivializes the very suffering it has caused, turning genuine anguish into decorative spectacle.
Quote 3
“The canker galls the infants of the spring / Too oft before their buttons be disclos’d, / And in the morn and liquid dew of youth / Contagious blastments are most imminent.”
Act I, Scene 3
Argument
This quote from earlier in the play establishes the metaphor of corruption destroying youth ('canker galls the infants of the spring'), providing essential context for understanding how Ophelia's mad scene fulfills this prophecy—she becomes the literal embodiment of innocence destroyed by the court's 'contagious blastments' before her potential could bloom.
Quote 4
“There is a willow grows aslant a brook, / That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream. / There with fantastic garlands did she make / Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, / But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.”
Act IV, Scene 7
Argument
This quote from Gertrude's description of Ophelia's death extends the mad scene's flower imagery, where the 'fantastic garlands' of 'crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples' become instruments of her drowning—the court's corruption transforms even nature's beauty into agents of destruction, completing the annihilation of innocence begun in the mad scene itself.
Quote 5
“O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; / It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,— / A brother’s murder!”
Act III, Scene 3
Argument
This quote establishes the source of the court's moral rot ('my offence is rank, it smells to heaven'), providing essential context for understanding how Claudius's fratricide creates the 'contagious blastments' that ultimately destroy Ophelia—her mad scene becomes the visible manifestation of corruption spreading from the throne to consume the innocent.