"Don't Linger Love, Come Take My Hand", Hamlet, Horatio-Ophelia centric

[paperclipbitch]

Title: Don’t Linger Love, Come Take My Hand
Fandom: Hamlet
Characters: Horatio, Ophelia; Hamlet, Laertes
Challenge/Prompt: paliphrase, “Never”
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 7300
Genre: Gen [het]
Copyright: Title is from Ophelia by Jon Boden.
Summary: Horatio looks down at the trembling woman encircled in his arms and feels something break, something that he did

Comments

[samueljames]

This was brilliant. I never thought I'd see Shakespeare fanfic. It was good to focus on Horatio's perspective since there is so much drama in everyone else's life. It showed how she slipped through the cracks so to speak. After watching Desperate Romantics I kept picturing Ophelia looking like Lizzie

[myklavelle]

I cried.

[flo_nelja]

It's very beautiful! And sad, and even horrible, when it's about Polonius-and-Ophelia, but wow... I really love how you write her madness, it is still poetic as in the play, but more horrifyingly realistic.

[iambickilometer]

That was absolutely stunning.

I'm a big Shakespeare reader, and I've read -- and written -- some Bardfic in my time. But this has blown everything I've seen and written out of the water. Your Horatio is so completely believable, and you make sense out of some of the more bewildering aspects of the play, and you manage to build off of the play with such completeness. I knew Ophelia had to die, but I didn't want to believe it.

And I loved Horatio's great and unassuming love for her. It read as more platonic than anything, which from your author's note I assume you intended.

Anyway. That was brilliant.

[hanelissar]

That was...amazing. Completely and utterly fantastic, and tragic. And beautiful. And I loved it, more than I've loved anything I have read for a long time.