Robert Crossley at the Hudson Review:
People are constantly telling Ophelia what to do. No sooner has Laertes left the room, with an injunction to remember his words to her, than Polonius, never one to mind his own business, asks Ophelia what her exchange with her brother was all about. The conversation between father and daughter that follows is squirm-worthy. The more Ophelia tries to explain how things stand between her and Hamlet—how he has behaved in courting her and how she has responded to the “many tenders / Of his affection to me”—the more her father belittles her. “You speak like a green girl”; “think yourself a baby”; “Tender yourself more dearly”; “Go to, go to.” Each time Ophelia tries to speak up for herself—and, for that matter, speak up for Hamlet—Polonius overrides her. Finally, in his last twenty lines, he stifles her effort at reasoning with him, adding a father’s authority to the brother’s condescension: “I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth / Have you so slander any moment leisure / As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet. / Look to’t, I charge you. Come your ways.” By the scene’s end any resistance left in Ophelia has wilted. Not for the last time she is silenced. “I shall obey, my lord.”
more here.