Ophelia

With King Hamlet's death, the state of Denmark was in a like manner shaken to its foundations and chaos took the place of order.

His hands and lips were warm and full of life, but at my back I felt a chill. I withdrew from his embrace and looked about. A stone effigy of some long-dead king stared at us with stern rebuke. In a painting dark with smoky grime, a naked Adam and Eve turned from the avenging angel. I felt their woeful eyes on me and shivered with unease.

nge. My heart felt like a sack laden with stones and dropped into the deepest sea.

Then I listened in amazement as Hamlet related how he had gone with Horatio to the parapet last night, to the very place of our embracing. There the guards had lately seen a ghostly apparition. My skin prickled as Hamlet told how he, too, beheld the ghost of his dead father, armed from head to toe. How he followed the beckoning vision into the darkness despite Horatio's warning that it might tempt him to madness. How his very bones froze as the perturbed spirit revealed that he, King Hamlet, had been murdered.
"Murdered?" I echoed. "But how? And why?"
"Yes, murdered. Claudius was the serpent who stung my father," Hamlet said, agony in his voice and eyes. "The spirit told me how my uncle poured juice of henbane into his ears, curdling his blood and cutting off his life."

"Why, my lord, you look as though you have been visited by a ghost!"
He started like a guilty man.
"Have you seen it, too?" he whispered.

So Hamlet and I were married in our rustic attire, with woodland flowers to deck us. I said my vows believing that I would love Hamlet until my death. He also spoke his vows with evident faith, and Horatio was our witness.

"The flowers appear on the earth;

"I swear to you, my ambitions aim no higher than your heart," he said with feeling.

Yet I would let him think that he still ruled me.

"Do not believe his vows! They are traps to catch a woodcock