A literary mind is an inevitable thing to waste. - DmS

from Teaching Hamlet: What it Feels Like for a Girl:

Meanwhile, often overlooked as the real tragedy, there is Ophelia. Before his haunting visions of vulnerability and betrayal make a bludgeoning tool of Hamlet, she knew him and admired him and she sometimes held his hand. She is brought as bait to tempt him to reveal himself, but she knows (she thinks she knows) that that would be impossible, that the dark and dangerous mind that they all want to flush into the open does not actually exist in Hamlet. So standing there, she expects to see only the man she knows. Wouldn’t any of us? She’s never seen any other in him: “He hath importun’d me with love/ in honourable fashion.” He does not resist going to her, but he is armed to the hilt now with gloom. He knows that already, and despises her for not knowing it and for thus standing there like a slab to his blade. She pleads (but but . . ), and in doing so she bares her throat to his slicing of her, down to size:

Get thee to a nunnery: . . . I am very
proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at
my beck than I have thoughts to put them in,
imagination to give them shape, or time to act them
in. What should such fellows as I do crawling
between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves,
all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery
. . . . or if thou wilt needs marry,
marry a fool; for wise men know well enough
what monsters you make of them.

“Get thee to a nunnery,” he hisses close to her face as she meets his eyes.

He is righteous, only being “cruel to be kind”, then he retreats. She stares into the space where the man she used to know used to be, racked with mourning. She caves in around the mortal wound she’s taken, (“Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me/ To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!”) and she drifts from the stage as others continue chatting. She is a Dead (want) Woman Walking, and she knows it, the first fatality of his unrelenting despair. She dies slowly, knowing and knowing. She talks to the air, her half of their conversations, wincing from anyone else taking up the response. Finally, she crumples into her own trembling reflection, unable either to comfort herself or to save her lover from disappearing into the man who flays. She did it. She bared her throat and sealed both their fates. She becomes the woman distorted in the current. But like Noah’s dove, she does not stop and drown soon enough to prevent the world from having begun.

Gortoz A Ran-J'Attends - Danez Prigent & Lisa Gerrard