ABSTRACT
When Ophelia told King Claudius, “Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be,” her state when she said it implied more than that one could never know what would happen next. “Look what happened to me” her words meant to anyone hearing them, “to me, the one whose lover had recently invited her to enter a nunnery, who had lost her father, and so forth. Look at what it did to me. I have gone quite mad!” Bad fortune had not simply happened to her; it had transformed her. The owl was a baker’s daughter, as she had just told Claudius. Even a baker’s daughter never knew what she might be.
