The Hamlet Project

Does she fear it or hope it?
There is some frisson to the notion of driving someone mad with love for you. It supposes that you are so extraordinary, so necessary, so adorable, so like the sun in a galaxy, an atom in a molecule, carbon in a fossil, oxygen in the air – that the absence of you so disturbs the universe that someone MUST go mad without you.
And in this case, what has she done to disrupt the calm of Hamlet’s sea? She just stopped taking his calls, so to speak. She refused to accept his letters and wouldn’t let him come over. It doesn’t even sound like a break-up yet. It just seems like someone without much skill at communication or relationships expressing her displeasure. She could just be punishing him for a dumb thing he said. It’s not really the sort of thing that makes a person crazy. And, still, despite her refusal to let him come over – he manages to get into her closet in this disordered state. Seems to me if a person were going to go crazy with neglected love, he’d likely have to be crazy with love in the first place. And I’m sorry but it’s AWFULLY hard to see that passion in these two. Granted, we only see them together in the midst of a breakup. Despite the nice, good, obedient girl thing that Ophelia’s got going, I think she’s a bit egotistically blind. She doesn’t ASK a crazy looking Hamlet what’s wrong, she just assumes he’s crazy with love for her.