Oh now tortured my soul

Soliloquy of Ophelia

She contemplates Hamlet’s failing mental health as well as the merits of committing suicide and why she can’t bring herself to do it.

Ophelia:

Oh now tortured my soul

Embraced by such a fate as this!

Judas’ path lay before my resistant feet.

Dear Hamlet! My dear blesséd Hamlet!

Madness is thy bedmate

Against thou I shant compete.

Forevermore thou said thy lovéd me

Beneath sheets compos’d of most

Intimate breaths. I did breathe with caution

Alert to the uneasiness with which

My father would receive it,

But such risks I did take.

How could such an affliction rob

A most obedient son and prince?

A man of such potential

With eagle’s wings would mount the back

Of a mountain and ride it to the sea.

A lion of enormous measure would a

Tender kitty appear before such a man.

Greatness is not in strength, but in

The character of the heart.

To watch thy descent, is affliction

My soul can bear not.

A blaze with a fuel of inextinguishable

Consistency is more easily disposed of

Than the passionate sighs of lovers

So connected by the throws of death.

For in the death of thy mind

I find mine own.

The glassy night extends above and below,

Unawares of the presence of

Pearly gates, and the fiery lake

Wherein my soul should rest.

Should I be redeem’d ‘fore the night be through

Wait for thee I will behind the doors of eternity.

Oh curséd feet of mine,

Will them though I do, movement

They make not.

Should such an act be easy for the mind

Yet the body resists as if held in

Shackles by existence and the attachment of

Living to life?

The writers say that dying be swift and

Careful, but if these truths hold themselves

Than what be the pause before the end?

Surely the cold grip of passing be no more

Pained than the deterioration of my own sanity

Much like that of the Dane.

But to risk such an endless time in the darkest

Of places with the most tormented of souls only

To escape the temporary trappings of the world

Should not take my hand.

Hamlet, oh my Hamlet, needs my

Warm bosom to comfort his harrowing mind

And for me to play as the Lord and decide

My time of twilight would just drive his mind to breaking

Beyond that endured by even the strongest of men.

To plummet him into such a pit

Would show the devil in me himself.

These ghosts in his head will antagonize him no longer.

For if I revisit,

And will myself to health,

Then he will return to sanity.

Together we will live,

And his uncle he will forgive.

A sound from behind

Speak you now! Who be there?

Ophelia grunts as she is shoved into the water below; her screams echo into the night unheard