Ophelia

It's probably a little weird, but I really love the character Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet. I understand her. She's always trying so very hard to please everyone around her- but everyone seems to want something different! She's a crazy singing lunatic who has made some questionable decisions and been walked all over by idiots in her life. And her name is so pretty... This is a painting by J.W. Waterhouse, my favorite artist. She was picking flowers in a field. I like how this photograph is in a bathtub. It modernizes the story and seems darker somehow.

This one I found on Etsy and attached a link to the page so you can look at it and buy it and whatnot.
Ophelia was Hamlet's love interest in the play, but Hamlet was so distracted by his father's death that he didn't notice how she was affected by his ignoring her and his "pretended madness". I, personally, think hamlet really was crazy but that's a matter of opinion. Ophelia may have been completely nuts but the songs she sang during her madness were so appropriate to the situation. "He is dead and gone, lady, he is dead and gone/ at his head a grass green turf/at his heels a stone" Her father had just died and Hamlet had forsaken her. Poor pretty Ophelia. I would love to be her in a play, I'd be really good at her crazy scenes. She starts singing to the king about inappropriate things (that tend to make me think that she and Hamlet had been a little more 'serious' than people thought) "tomorrow is St. Valentines Day and and all the morning betime/and I a maid at your window to be your Valentine/ and up he rose and donned his clothes and dupped the chamber door/ let in the maid that out a maid never departed more" I love that.
On the topic of madness, here are some of my favorite quotes:
"Gallus Vibius strained his mind so hard to understand the essence and impulses of insanity that he dragged his judgement off its seat and never could get it back again; and he could boast of having become mad through wisdom."- Montaigne
"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher"- Ambrose Bierce
"We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe"- Johann von Goethe
"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity"- Edgar Allen Poe
"A mite whimsical in the brainpan"- Firefly (I got this on a pin:)
So, this is probably the craziest post I've ever done. I hope it was enjoyable!
Love,
Belle