ABSTRACT
Claudius very likely would have commiserated less for Ophelia than for himself. That he, like anyone else, must put up with fortune he would have dismissed as obvious. But he could not so easily dismiss that he himself had not always been a fratricide. Neither Claudius nor Ophelia herself derived any paradox from her dictum. They merely suffered from it, he cynical and hopeless, she mad; he accepting the impossibility of conducting one's own life at the turning points that required it, she illustrating it. For those of us neither mad nor cynical, however, a paradox of sorts arises. Acknowledging that we ourselves change and are changed, most of us nevertheless presume to find some choices in the conduct of our lives better than others, and mean more by that presumption than that we have learned how to find our way around.
