Ophelia me; we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays; O, you must wear your rue with a difference". Rue is well known for its symbolic meaning of regret, but the herb is also used to treat pain, bruises and has abortive qualities. In Act 4 Scene 7, Queen Gertrude reports that Ophelia had climbed into a willow tree ("There is a willow grows aslant the brook"), and that the branch had broken and dropped Ophelia into the brook, where she drowned. Gertrude says that Ophelia appeared "incapable of her own distress". Gertrude's announcement of Ophelia's death has been praised
Literary influence of Hamlet introducing Maggie Tulliver "who is explicitly compared with Hamlet". Scholar Marianne Novy suggests that Eliot "demythologises Hamlet by imagining him with a reputation for sanity", notwithstanding his frequent monologues and moodiness towards Ophelia. Novy also suggests Mary Wollstonecraft as an influence on Eliot, critiquing "the trivialisation of women in contemporary society". "Hamlet" has played "a relatively small role" in the appropriation of Shakespeare's plays by women writers, ranging from "Ophelia, The Fair Rose of Elsinore" in Mary Cowden Clarke's 1852 "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines", to Margaret Atwood's 1994 "Gertrude Talks Back"—in her 1994 collection of short stories "Good Bones