Here is an on-line WWW answer in essay form:
By The Way, Ophelia Is Pregnant
By Alex Epstein
Has anyone noticed that Ophelia is pregnant? In all the productions of Hamlet that I've seen,
she is interpreted as an innocent girl in love with the doomed Prince. He breaks her heart, and
her sanity goes with it. She drowns herself out of madness.
But I think her madness has a point to it. In Ophelia's first scene, her brother Laertes warns
her to beware of Hamlet's affection for her:
" For Hamlet and the trifling of his favor,
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood...
no more."
In other words: the Prince is toying with you. Ophelia demurs ("No more but so?") but appears
to submit to her brother's wishes.
Next, Ophelia's father Polonius complains,
"'Tis told me, he hath very oft of late
Given private time to you, and you yourself
Have of your audience been most free and bounteous."
That is, "You've been spending a lot of time alone with this guy." Ophelia, in the time-honored
fashion of daughters, claims the relationship is completely innocent: "he hath importun'd me
with love / In honorable fashion."
All well and good, but in III:i, Ophelia is set to spy on Hamlet. (Some editors would have Hamlet
overhear her father and Polonius asking her to do it. If we suppose a lost stage direction that
has Hamlet entering seven lines before he speaks, we can explain why Hamlet suddenly turns
on her with such otherwise inexplicable viciousness.) Ophelia listens to his suicidal soliloquy,
which he ends by pretending to notice her for the first time:
Nymph, in thy orisons
be all my sins remembered.
Orisons are prayers. If Hamlet has importuned Ophelia in honorable fashion, why should his
sins be remembered in her prayers? The implication is that they have sinned together.
Hamlet really lays into her in III:i, ending by telling her, "To a nunnery, go!" In high school they
tell you that "nunnery" was slang for a whorehouse, and the rest of his barbed repartee
suggests that he thinks she is as dishonored as she is dishonest. He knows she is deceitful
from having just heard her agree to spy on him. The best way for him to know she is
dishonored is if he has dishonored her.
But it is the mad songs that Ophelia sings in IV:7 that really give away her secret. More than
half of her songs are songs of mourning; after all, Hamlet has just killed Ophelia's father. That
might be why Ophelia warns, "They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what
we are, but know not what we may be." After all, she is no longer the daughter of the King's
chamberlain; she is now only the daughter of a dead old man. But perhaps she knows all too
well what she soon may be, for shortly she sings:
Tomorrow is St. Valentine's day
All in the morning betime
And I a maid at your window
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose and donn'd his clothes
and dupp'd the chamber door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.
Why is Ophelia singing about a maid seduced by her lover? Aside from the songs of mourning,
all her songs are songs of betrayed love. A few lines later, she is singing an even more pointed
song:
Quoth she, "Before you tumbled me,
You promis'd me to wed."
He answers:
"So would I ha'done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed."
It is hard to avoid the thought that Hamlet has seduced and abandoned her.
When she returns, she has gathered herbs. "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray
you love, remember..." The various herbs have symbolic meanings well-documented in the
scholarship, but the only herb she intends for herself is rue: "...there's rue for you, and here's
some for me; we may call it herb of grace o'Sundays; O, you must wear your rue with a
difference." The symbolic meaning of rue is, of course, regret. Ophelia has much to rue, but the
symbolic meaning is not the only one. The herb rue (ruta graveolens, aka Herb-of-Grace) is a
powerful abortifacient. My herbiary notes that rue is "Lethally toxic, do not use during
pregnancy."
Herbal abortifacients tend to be mild poisons. The idea is that you poison yourself to the point
where your body decides it's too sick to support the growing embryo or fetus, and rejects it. If
you miscalculate in one direction, continued pregnancy; in the other direction, personal death.
Rue, while toxic, would not be used as a poison, since it is not a pleasant way to go.
Presumably Shakespeare would have given Ophelia hemlock if she had intended to poison
herself.
A girl who has been seduced and abandoned need fear nothing but a broken heart, provided
there is no evidence of her shame. But if she is pregnant, then there is no way to hide what she
has done, unless she can abort the child, or kill herself. And, indeed, shortly thereafter,
Ophelia drowns herself.
The conventional interpretation is that Hamlet has broken her heart and then killed her father.
But the play seems to suggest strongly that Hamlet has seduced her, and to hint that she is
pregnant as well.
It is not hard to imagine Ophelia falling in love with the romantic Prince, and giving in to his
passions. He has promised to marry her, and it is not an impossible promise. The Queen later
says (V: 2) "I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife." Ophelia might well have hoped
to become Queen when Hamlet ascended the throne, as his uncle Claudius has promised.
Hamlet has been away at Wittenberg long enough for Claudius to murder Hamlet's father and
then to marry his mother Gertrude, and then for the news to reach Hamlet. Presumably this
would be a few months at least, long enough for Ophelia to know she's pregnant. When he
returns, she is hoping he'll do right by her.
But Hamlet rejects her, kills her father, and to destroy all hope, is sent by King Claudius to
England to be executed. What will become of the mother of the doomed prince's bastard? There
is only one way to preserve her honor, and she takes it.
The point is, the next time someone puts on Hamlet, Ophelia really ought to be showing. Okay?