Ophelia

[sash2008]

In Hamlet,
Ophelia lost her virginity, didn't she?

[Anglika]

What in the play leads you to this conclusion?

[Offroad]

sounds like our dear friend wants us to do his/her homework.

[sash2008]

Originally Posted by marciobarbalho

sounds like our dear friend wants us to do his/her homework.

No
I am not convinced that Ophelia lost her virginity and there is no proof; however, in many websites I found that she lost it.
(By the way, this is not a homework, and I am just confused)

[sash2008]

Teachers,
Please, I have read the play and found some implications that Ophelia lost her virginity and became pregnant.
However it is said indirectly, so I am not sure.
Is that correct?

[BobK]

This reminds me of the book called How many children had Lady Macbeth? (based on the words 'I have given suck'); the speculation is pointless.

You could take a few stray words and read whatever you like into them: "Hamlet says 'Frailty, thy name is woman'; therefore, obviously, Ophelia was a whore." Please!

b

[sash2008]

Originally Posted by BobK

This reminds me of the book called How many children had Lady Macbeth? (based on the words 'I have given suck'); the speculation is pointless.

You could take a few stray words and read whatever you like into them: "Hamlet says 'Frailty, thy name is woman'; therefore, obviously, Ophelia was a whore." Please!

b

I was surprised that Ophelia might be pregnant.
However, there are some quotes in the play proves that she, at least, lost her virginity.
I am not convinced that she lost it, because all the time I know that she is innocent and pure.

The following speech is a song by Ophelia proves that she lost her virginity.

To-morrow is Saint 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.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـ


HAMLET:

Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a
breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I
could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother
had not borne me: 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.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

HAMLET:

Let her not walk i’ the sun: conception is a
blessing: but not as your daughter may conceive. Friend,
look to ‘t.

[Raymott]

Originally Posted by sash2008

The following speech is a song by Ophelia proves that she lost her virginity.

To-morrow is Saint 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.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـ
This is a song.
You need to review the definition of "prove, proof". This may be literary evidence, but her singing a song is not proof of anything about their affair.

HAMLET:

Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a
breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I
could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother
had not borne me: 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.

If Ophelia was already pregnant, sending her to a nunnery would not prevent her from a being a breeder of sinners, unless you are suggesting that the nuns were abortionists (They could have been, but it's not in the play). Hamlet is advising her not to marry.
This passage could be argued as evidence against Ophelia having lost her virginity.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

HAMLET:

Let her not walk i’ the sun: conception is a
blessing: but not as your daughter may conceive. Friend,
look to ‘t.
not as your daughter may conceive, NOT not as your daughter has conceived

I don't think there is sufficient evidence in the text to assert that Ophelia was not a virgin when she died. Admittedly, it would make it more likely that she'd become unbalanced after Hamlet rejected her, especially if she was pregnant (which there is also no good evidence for).
Shakespeare has Hamlet using a lot of sexual innuendos to and about Ophelia. There was always a prospect of them marrying, so the references to babies is not out of place.
But I agree that it is possible. I've also wondered about this, and I think it is quite possible that Shakespeare has left the matter of virginity (not pregnancy) open.

[sash2008]

Thank you Raymott for your reply.
I know that "prove" is a verb and "proof" is a noun
Have I used them incorrectly?

[Raymott]

Originally Posted by sash2008

Thank you Raymott for your reply.
I know that "prove" is a verb and "proof" is a noun
Have I used them incorrectly?

"The following speech is a song by Ophelia proves that she lost her virginity."

"Proof" means undeniable and totally compelling evidence.
If you prove something, you have shown it to be true.
What you have offered should be called evidence.
You could have written:
"The following speech is a song by Ophelia which indicates/suggests that she lost her virginity."