Bangladesh, July 16 -- Few literary works have generated as many competing interpretations as Shakespeares Hamlet. Psychoanalytic critics have found an Oedipal drama. Existentialists have found a meditation on freedom and death. Feminist critics have found a tragedy of patriarchal domination.

The feminist reading has become particularly influential in recent decades. On this view, Ophelia is less a character than a casualty. Controlled by her father, instructed by her brother, manipulated by the Danish court, and ultimately discarded by Hamlet, she represents the destructive effects of a social order in which women are denied agency and voice.

There is much truth in this interpretation. Ophelia is indeed constrained by patriarchal autho...