Flowers In Hamlet

Did you know that flowers actually do represent people and/or events in Hamlet and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Through the use of flowers, The authors William Shakespeare for Hamlet and Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, reveal underlying messages about the characters and plot. In Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Ophelia used flowers to describe each character. This all started when Hamlet kills Ophelia’s father and she becomes mad. In her madness Ophelia gives flowers to each of the characters in the Hamlet. The Picture of Dorian Gray uses flowers in more of a hidden fashion, if the reader of where to read the book closely they would find that a flower is always in the same paragraph as character that is being introduced. Therefor, both of the books Hamlet and The Picture of Dorian Gray have meaning embedded into each flower represented towards each character.

In Hamlet, Ophelia talks about flowers and gives them to people in her mind. Ophelia says

“There's rosemary, that's for remembrance.

Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts. […]

Give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. (Shakespeare 4.5.199-201, 204-209)”

From the quote above the reader clearly starts to realize that Ophelia is giving someone flowers. As Ophelia states a flower's name she would then

Although Flowers get introduced differently, they still have a deep resemblance to many characters. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, each flower that represented a character would be in the same paragraph as the character is introduced For instance, “in the first chapter Wilde introduces two of the main characters in his novel: Basil Hallward, a young artist, and Lord Henry Wotton, an influential and devious aristocrat. First, Wilde drapes Hallward’s studio, an extension of the artist himself, in roses.(Pearson