Ophelia Speaks

Ophelia Speaks

Role: You are a playwright commissioned by a theatrical troupe to create a soliloquy (or monologue or letter written by Ophelia) that will be inserted into Hamlet.

Audience: Readers and viewers of Hamlet who want to understand Ophelia more deeply.

Format:       1. a soliloquy (or monologue)

                   2. 14+ lines*

3. The lines conclude with a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter. (*The other 12 or more lines may be in prose or in iambic pentameter# [blank verse).)

4. Try to use Elizabethan language (diction and syntax), or use language that does not stand out as obviously modern.

5. State where in the play you would insert the soliloquy (or monologue). (Would you create a 4.8? Would you place it somewhere in 4.5? Where? Be precise: act, scene, line. You could even, I suppose, create a 4.8 in which she returns as a ghost; or perhaps someone finds a letter she has written or a diary.)

6. Refer to song lyrics and flower imagery (from 4.5).

7. Show Ophelia’s mind puzzling out and wrestling with her dramatic situation and inner consciousness (just as Hamlet does in his soliloquies).

Topic: What Ophelia is thinking and feeling at the moment in the play into which you decide to insert her soliloquy?

# Much of Hamlet is written in blank verse meaning most lines do not rhyme but they do follow a particular meter (a pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables). The meter is called iambic pentameter. “Iambic” means unstressed syllables are followed by stressed syllables: “And makes us rather bear those ills we have”. Pentameter means there are five iambs.

“…And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

than fly to others that we know not of…”