Ophelia's Prayer Book & the Annunciation of Mary

In Hamlet act 3, scene 1, Ophelia's father Polonius asks her to read a book so that she might project "devotion's image" and "pious action" as well as her own loneliness when Prince Hamlet first sees her.

In other words, he is using her for bait to trap Hamlet into conversation while Claudius and Polonius eavesdrop. I have written about this scene in a previous blog post regarding the echoes of the story of Suzannah and the Elders, from the book of Daniel. But today I want to note a visual echo of the Annunciation of Mary, when an angel visits to tell her that she is to bear a son, Jesus.

[See Bridget Gellert Lyons, "The Iconography of Ophelia," page 61: "The woman with a book was reminiscent of countless representations of the Virgin, who was most commonly shown reading when the Angel of the Annunciation came to visit her." ELH , Spring, 1977, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 60-74 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2872526 ]

In her remarkable book, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama, Katharine Goodland notes, “In the nunnery scene (3.1), she [Ophelia] resembles the contemplative Virgin of the Annunciation who reads a spiritual book as Gabriel appears to her and she conceives the Word incarnate." (191). [1] (Ruben Espinoza also references Goodland and adds his own insights on this scene in his book, Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare's England.) [2] In a footnote, Goodland observes: “Thomas Campin’s Altarpiece is among the most famous depictions of this moment.”

She may mean the Robert Campin Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece)
in the MET museum (ca. 1427–32):



[Does Reformation/protestant iconoclasm
and general suppression of things Catholic
explain why
what Katharine Goodland notices about the Annunciation echo (in her 2005 book)
may have been missed by previous Shakespeare scholars?
Did it take a feminist perspective on mourning
and a "turn to religion" in Shakespeare studies
to notice such things?]

Many other famous painters of the Renaissance and earlier ages depicted some version of the same scene, with Mary usually holding a prayer book (or reading from one on a stand), which commentators say could be a book of psalms, or the book of Isaiah with its prophecy supposedly (in the view of Christian apologists) foreshadowing the birth of Jesus. Of course, this makes little historical sense, as Mary was probably illiterate, and scriptures of the time were on scrolls, not in little personal prayer books, a much later invention.

For example, Leonardo da Vinci painted the scene (1475–1480, in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence), with the book on a stand, but still, the presence of the book:


El Greco painted The Annunciation around 1576 (below is a portion from a larger canvas):


Hans Memling's Annunciation (also in the MET) is dated to around 1480-89:


It was also a ubiquitous image in prayer books, and this earlier, medieval presence of the image in prayer books probably explains why it was repeated in famous paintings of the Renaissance and later:
Roger S. Wieck notes, “It has long been a truism that the Bible is the most-published book in the history of Western culture. But for almost 250 years, from about 1275 to 1525, Books of Hours (illuminated prayer books whose heart is a series of prayers devoted to the Virgin Mary) were the medieval best sellers.” (Bible Review 4:3, June 1988, "The Book of Hours).

Here is an example from Lambeth Palace Library, from a prayer book claimed by Eamon Duffy to have belonged to Richard III and to have been in his tent at the battle of Bosworth:


Also consider the Saxby book of hours, England, 15th century:



In each of these examples, we have the Virgin Mary with prayer book. No wonder Polonius gave her a book to hold as she waited for Hamlet. He knew exactly what he was doing. Sugaring o'er the devil.

So regarding all of these images, we might note a few things:
1. In the Annunciation story from Luke 1:26-38, Mary is betrothed to Joseph but not yet married and still a virgin; Ophelia at this point in the play would like her father to believe that she is still a virgin, that Hamlet's attentions to her were "honorable" and that the prince made to her "almost all the holy vows of heaven," which could be understood as betrothal.

2. In the first chapter of Luke's gospel, Mary is the young betrothed girl, while her much older cousin Elizabeth, who had been presumed barren, has also conceived (the child who will become John the Baptist, at least according to the gospel story). Inasmuch as we're offered the visual allusion of the Annunciation, this brings with it perhaps the hint that the other woman in the Hamlet play, Gertrude, might conceive a child with Claudius in their old age, even as Elizabeth conceived late in life. While Claudius says Hamlet is next in succession, the murderous usurper Claudius would view Hamlet as even more expendable if he and Gertrude had a son of their own (who was, he might claim, not mad, like Hamlet).

3. This subtle echo of the Annunciation may also explain more about the hunch in many readers' and viewers' minds that Ophelia is pregnant: Not only does she sing songs in her madness about men taking advantage of women sexually and then abandoning them, and mention flowers and herbs considered abortifacients by Elizabethans ("herb of grace” o' Sundays"), but we've been prepared by the comparison to Mary, pregnant with Jesus, Prince of Peace. The Annunciation visual echo at the start of the eavesdropping scene prepares us to think of a pregnant Ophelia, who may have one day given birth to an heir for the throne of Denmark, if her life and Hamlet's had not been cut short by Claudius having poisoned his brother the king, and all the tragic aftermath of his plotting to usurp the throne.

4. Although the text of the play doesn't seem to have any major, obvious allusions to this part of the Luke gospel (which helps to avoid trouble with the censors), the image of the Virgin Mary with Prayer Book was so ubiquitous that it could be considered an Elizabethan equivalent of what Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Narrative) discusses in relation to biblical type scenes: Alter notes that when we watch a movie and see a man get down on one knee and open a jewelry box with a ring in it, offering it to a woman, we know what to expect: He will propose to her. If a woman were to get down on one knee and offer a ring to a man, we'd know this is a variation on the same theme. Although modern audiences (who have not been exposed repeatedly to the image) might not see in Ophelia and her prayer book a visual allusion to the Annunciation, it's much more likely that audiences in Shakespeare's time may have caught the allusion (or at least been subconsciously influenced by it), as well as Polonius's effort to use appearances to deceive Hamlet into being spied upon:

Polonius: We are oft to blame in this,--
'Tis too much proved--that with devotion's visage
And pious action we do sugar o'er
The devil himself.

Goodland observes that Hamlet, after his "To be or not to be" soliloquy, notes to himself Ophelia's presence and seems to hope for prayers:
Hamlet: Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.

But then she returns his "remembrances," his love letters. Hamlet has recently vowed to the ghost that he will not forget, but now Ophelia wants to return "remembrances," a confusing gesture that seems to imply she wishes to forget him. Yet she demonstrates very soon that she remembers them, and him, fondly. She seems quite conflicted. Hamlet tells her he never loved her, which is either a lie, or it's a hair-splitting truth, a claim that he never loved this deceptive person she has now become, as some scholars have said.

As I noted in an earlier blog post about Ophelia, Elizabeth and Suzannah, the scene shifts from the deceptive appearance of the Annunciation, to a twisted variation on the story of Suzannah and the Elders: [3] In place of the virtuous Suzannah, standing up to the corrupt elders and risking her life for the truth, instead we have Ophelia cooperating quite willingly with the corrupt elders, Claudius and Polonius, even as some in Shakespeare's day viewed Elizabeth as being corrupted by the men who were her key advisers, such as William Cecil and Francis Walsingham.

Do we read the scene any differently if we notice the visual allusion to the Annunciation and plot variation on the Suzannah tale? I think we may, as it allows us to imagine some of the historical and religious contexts regarding how the first audiences of the play may have reacted to the scene, and how it appealed to their emotions and cultural memory. It makes the manipulations of Polonius seem even more Machiavellian, perhaps sacrilegious. He knows he sugars o'er the Devil, but he does it anyway.

It was considered the duty of children in general, and of daughters especially, to be obedient to their fathers, although Shakespeare shows us in other plays (The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo & Juliet, etc.) he was fully aware that things don't always work out that way (and should not). In a sense, from a patriarchal view, Ophelia would seem the perfect daughter, compliant and obedient in spite of her own personal feelings. And in a sense, this is the image we are given by the Annunciation story when Mary obeys the will of God as communicated to her by the angel. In the Elizabethan understanding of the Great Chain of Being, with its hierarchies of authority, Ophelia's duty is to obey her father. But because her father is corrupt (and even as Shakespeare's comedies frequently show, patriarchy is usually corrupt), and because her beloved Hamlet seems to have gone mad, Ophelia, too, is headed for madness.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NOTES:
[1] Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama, Routledge, 2006:
https://www.routledge.com/Female-Mourning-and-Tragedy-in-Medieval-and-Renaissance-English-Drama-From/Goodland/p/book/9781138275638

[2] Ruben Espinoza, Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare's England. Routledge, 2011.
https://www.routledge.com/Masculinity-and-Marian-Efficacy-in-Shakespeares-England/Espinosa/p/book/9781138268111


[3] I owe this insight regarding the eavesdropping scene to Frank Ardolino and his observations about the popularity of the tale of Susanna and the Corrupt Elders as an analogy used to defend Elizabeth (11); but in Hamlet, Ophelia, the Susanna figure, is complicit with the spies, and in the eavesdropping scene in The Spanish Tragedy, the Susanna figure is not married, not quite so virtuous (more like Elizabeth?), and her lover does show up and gets murdered. See Apocalypse & Armada.
Frank Ardolino. Apocalypse & Armada in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 29. Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1995, 11.