Abstract
The study provides a look at one of the characters in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. It places her in the context of female characters associated in European cultural thinking since ancient times with melancholy and tragedy.
Once as a symbol of unhappy love, the second time as the physiology of death - the figure of the beautiful drowned woman has as many forms in literature, especially poetry, as there have been poets devoted to her. Poems by Arthur Rimbaud, the German expressionists and Vladimir Holan are united by one character, but they are divided by different aesthetic starting points, as well as their own meaning, which the authors themselves imprinted on the character of Ophelia or the beautiful drowned woman.