Flowers from Ophelia

Whether in the distribution of flowers to the members of the court, Ophelia gave them out as they came to hand, or whether she chose a particular flower suitable to each person, is open to conjecture; neither in the text, nor by any stage direction has the Poet left us any certainty. By a long established custom, however, which has become a fixed stage tradition, Ophelia assigns rosemary to Hamlet, who is present to her imagination; she gives pansies to Laertes; fennel and columbines to Claudius; and rue to the Queen and herself.

When the mind is unsettled, it is usual for some idea to recur which has been introduced at a critical period of one's life. Now when Laertes was warning Ophelia against encouraging the attentions of Hamlet, he urged her to consider them as trifling, and his love but a violet in the youth of primy nature. These words, imprinted on her mind in association with the idea of Hamlet and her brother, are now recalled when she again converses with her brother on the same unhappy subject. Violets represent faithfulness, and they all withered, when her lover by the slaying of her father, had interposed a final obstacle to her union with him.

The language of flowers is very ancient, and was to Ophelia, like to most young maidens, a fond subject of study. Rosemary is emblematic of remembrance, and was distributed and worn at weddings, as well as at funerals. The pansy is a symbol of thought, of pensiveness, and of grief. The daisy represents faithlessness and dissembling. Fennel designates flattery, or cajolery and deceit; and columbine, ingratitude; and these two flowers Ophelia befittingly presents to the guileful and faithless Claudius. Rue is a bitter plant with medicinal qualities, and was in folk lore a symbol of repentance. She calls it "an herb of grace on Sundays;" because the wearer when entering a church on that day, dipped his rue in Holy Water, which always stood within the portals, and blessed himself with it, in the hope of obtaining God's "grace" or mercy. "There's rue for you," she says to the Queen, and "here's some for me." The Queen, however, is to wear hers with a difference, that is, in token of repentance, while she will wear it in regret and grief at the loss of her father and her lover. In the distribution, the demented maiden is seen naively but unwittingly to choose the flower most suited to each person.

Adapted From Blackmore, Simon Augustine. The Riddles of Hamlet. Boston: Stratford & Company, 1917.