Ophelia whomever he wants. Ophelia's father, Polonius, who enters while Laertes is leaving, also forbids Ophelia from pursuing Hamlet, as Polonius fears that Hamlet is not earnest about her. In Ophelia's next appearance, she tells Polonius that Hamlet rushed into her room with his clothing askew and a "hellish" expression on his face; he only stared at her, nodding three times without speaking to her. Based on what Ophelia told him, Polonius concludes that he was wrong to forbid Ophelia from seeing Hamlet, and that Hamlet must be mad with love for her. Polonius immediately decides to go to Claudius, the
Ophelia (painting) allowed them to go out. As a result, Siddal caught a severe cold, and her father later sent Millais a letter demanding £50 for medical expenses. According to Millais' son, he eventually accepted a lower sum. When "Ophelia" was first publicly exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1852, it was not universally acclaimed. A critic in "The Times" wrote that "there must be something strangely perverse in an imagination which souses Ophelia in a weedy ditch, and robs the drowning struggle of that lovelorn maiden of all pathos and beauty", while a further review in the same newspaper