Ophelia brothel. Polonius instructs Ophelia to stand in the lobby of the castle while he and Claudius hide. Hamlet approaches Ophelia and talks to her, saying "Get thee to a nunnery." Hamlet asks Ophelia where her father is and she lies to him, saying her father must be at home. Hamlet realises he is being spied upon. He exits after declaring, "I say we will have no more marriages." Ophelia is left bewildered and heartbroken, sure that Hamlet is insane. She knows that ultimately it is she that broke him because she lied. She was the woman he had loved and
Ophelia arms one last time and proclaims how much he loved her. Hamlet, nearby, then challenges Laertes and claims that he loved Ophelia more than "forty thousand" brothers could. After her funeral scene, Ophelia is no longer mentioned. While it is known that Richard Burbage played Hamlet in Shakespeare's time, there is no evidence of who played Ophelia; since there were no professional actresses on the public stage in Elizabethan England, we may assume that she was played by a boy. The actor appears to have had some musical ability, as Ophelia is given lines from ballads such as "Walsingham" to