So Many Ophelia—Hamlet Parallels!
I have been reading Julia Reinhard Lupton's good book, Thinking with Shakespeare, with special attention, of course, to the chapter on Hamlet, which is very rich in that it's challenging me to think in ways outside of my previous habits.
This blog post is not to share any of Lupton's ideas in particular, though I hope to do so in a future post, especially regarding her mention of Moses as related to Hamlet seeing his father's ghost.
Sometimes when I research, I mark or copy down quotes and ideas I think I can use. Other times, while the text I'm reading is about A, B, and C, my mind leaps, and I'm thinking of J,K,L. It's a mysterious process. I am not a fan of saying the Catholic Rosary, but I have heard some say that the prayers of the rosary are meant to occupy and distract your ego or consious mind (or "monkey mind"), which allows other insights to surface or breakthroughs to occur. This is what I mean by stumbling upon J-K-L while doing research.
What follows are not Lupton's ideas for now, but rather, my own distracted insights while ruminating on her ideas about Hamlet and Ophelia. (Yet I do owe Lupton a great debt, because reading her book really occasioned the insights for me.)
The Globe and Mail, 2009: Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Ophelia, Jude Law as Hamlet
It occurred to me that
- in the "nunnery scene" (3.1), Hamlet chastises Ophelia and tells her to get to a nunnery, saying that men are all "arrant knaves."
- Later, mad Ophelia chastises men in her songs for not being faithful (for being arrant knaves to women).
It seems she has internalized something of Hamlet’s madness and message: She has become like him, echoes him.
- So Hamlet goes mad, chastizes women, gets on a wooden ship to England.
He takes to water and is perhaps changed.
- And Ophelia goes mad, chastizes men (in song!), gets on a willow (also wood);
she takes to water and is changed (drowns).
These are details in the play that were not in the source tales from Saxo Grammaticus or its translation/retelling in Belleforest.
We know that Hamlet thinks Polonius is like a Jephthah figure in the way that he uses his daughter and makes his devotion to the state a higher priority than his responsibilities as a father.
We also might observe that, like Ophelia, Hamlet is also the offspring of a father who is (like Jephthah) willing to sacrifice him to achieve his ends, and asks him to do things he might prefer not to do:
- Ophelia has been forced by her father to rebuke Hamlet's advances.
- Hamlet has been asked by his father to swear to obtain revenge for his murder.
Both Ophelia and Hamlet have lost a parent of the same sex, so they are in a sense, orphans.
I have noted before in this blog that my interpretation of the play follows those many who think that, after a descent into evil, Hamlet has a turn that is focused on his Jonah-like sea-voyage and his Emmaus-like encounter in the graveyard with a stranger/gravedigger and with the skull of Yorick. Hamlet seems to become more focused on Providence than on his father, like the transformation in Francis of Assisi after he renounces his father.
I've also noted here in past blog posts that some of Ophelia's remarks in her "madness" ("they say the owl was a baker's daughter" / "it was the false steward that stole his master's daughter") indicate that she may have a similar character arc, tending toward Providence as well as toward death.
The play so nicely offers these parallels, and we might note that Hamlet has (according to Ophelia) made to her "almost all the holy vows of heaven," which could be a betrothal (attempt). In the view of the church, the most important elements of marriage were not ring or even the presence of a priest, but rather, the vows of the couple. Hamlet is a play about vows: Hamlet to Ophelia; Ophelia to her father; Hamlet to the ghost; Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo to silence. It's also a play about marriages and two becoming "one flesh": King Hamlet and Gertrude; Gertrude and Claudius; and perhaps Hamlet and Ophelia.
Does Ophelia echo Hamlet in some of these ways because she would not, to the marriage of their minds, admit impediments (as the Shakespeare sonnet says)? Have they become something like two in one flesh, members of a shared social/spiritual body?
Which brings us around to the topic of Eucharistic "body," disputed so hotly in Elizabethan times and during the reformation. The Emmaus gospel tale has its moment of recognition in the breaking of bread, harkening back to the last supper table-action. The stranger/gravedigger/clown/sexton is recognized as a companion (and fellow clown) of Yorick, when the gravedigger tells the tale of how Yorick once poured a flagon of Rhenish wine on his head, a figurative baptism. And of course, the pouring of wine was the other table-action at the last supper.
Ophelia: "My lord, we know what we are now, but not what we may become. May God be at your table."
(Perhaps a reformation-era, Catholic way of saying, may you have real Eucharist and transubstantiation, instead of Protestantism's mere remembrance of the real thing? Or more simply, may the real presence of the divine be at your table, food for your living, your thoughts, your soul? Or that one should welcome the stranger to one's table, like the disciples at Emmaus, and not like the Rich Man rejected the beggar Lazarus, or the "baker's daughter" neglected the beggar at hers? Although Ophelia's blessing is apparently spoken in madness, does it come to pass, that God is at their table by the end of the play? That the dying-and-rising Jesus, or an echo of him, is present?)
Thanks for reading! This is short, rambling, and informal this week due to multiple deadlines. Please feel free to comment and share.
This blog post is not to share any of Lupton's ideas in particular, though I hope to do so in a future post, especially regarding her mention of Moses as related to Hamlet seeing his father's ghost.
Sometimes when I research, I mark or copy down quotes and ideas I think I can use. Other times, while the text I'm reading is about A, B, and C, my mind leaps, and I'm thinking of J,K,L. It's a mysterious process. I am not a fan of saying the Catholic Rosary, but I have heard some say that the prayers of the rosary are meant to occupy and distract your ego or consious mind (or "monkey mind"), which allows other insights to surface or breakthroughs to occur. This is what I mean by stumbling upon J-K-L while doing research.
What follows are not Lupton's ideas for now, but rather, my own distracted insights while ruminating on her ideas about Hamlet and Ophelia. (Yet I do owe Lupton a great debt, because reading her book really occasioned the insights for me.)
The Globe and Mail, 2009: Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Ophelia, Jude Law as Hamlet
It occurred to me that
- in the "nunnery scene" (3.1), Hamlet chastises Ophelia and tells her to get to a nunnery, saying that men are all "arrant knaves."
- Later, mad Ophelia chastises men in her songs for not being faithful (for being arrant knaves to women).
It seems she has internalized something of Hamlet’s madness and message: She has become like him, echoes him.
- So Hamlet goes mad, chastizes women, gets on a wooden ship to England.
He takes to water and is perhaps changed.
- And Ophelia goes mad, chastizes men (in song!), gets on a willow (also wood);
she takes to water and is changed (drowns).
These are details in the play that were not in the source tales from Saxo Grammaticus or its translation/retelling in Belleforest.
We know that Hamlet thinks Polonius is like a Jephthah figure in the way that he uses his daughter and makes his devotion to the state a higher priority than his responsibilities as a father.
We also might observe that, like Ophelia, Hamlet is also the offspring of a father who is (like Jephthah) willing to sacrifice him to achieve his ends, and asks him to do things he might prefer not to do:
- Ophelia has been forced by her father to rebuke Hamlet's advances.
- Hamlet has been asked by his father to swear to obtain revenge for his murder.
Both Ophelia and Hamlet have lost a parent of the same sex, so they are in a sense, orphans.
I have noted before in this blog that my interpretation of the play follows those many who think that, after a descent into evil, Hamlet has a turn that is focused on his Jonah-like sea-voyage and his Emmaus-like encounter in the graveyard with a stranger/gravedigger and with the skull of Yorick. Hamlet seems to become more focused on Providence than on his father, like the transformation in Francis of Assisi after he renounces his father.
I've also noted here in past blog posts that some of Ophelia's remarks in her "madness" ("they say the owl was a baker's daughter" / "it was the false steward that stole his master's daughter") indicate that she may have a similar character arc, tending toward Providence as well as toward death.
The play so nicely offers these parallels, and we might note that Hamlet has (according to Ophelia) made to her "almost all the holy vows of heaven," which could be a betrothal (attempt). In the view of the church, the most important elements of marriage were not ring or even the presence of a priest, but rather, the vows of the couple. Hamlet is a play about vows: Hamlet to Ophelia; Ophelia to her father; Hamlet to the ghost; Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo to silence. It's also a play about marriages and two becoming "one flesh": King Hamlet and Gertrude; Gertrude and Claudius; and perhaps Hamlet and Ophelia.
Does Ophelia echo Hamlet in some of these ways because she would not, to the marriage of their minds, admit impediments (as the Shakespeare sonnet says)? Have they become something like two in one flesh, members of a shared social/spiritual body?
Which brings us around to the topic of Eucharistic "body," disputed so hotly in Elizabethan times and during the reformation. The Emmaus gospel tale has its moment of recognition in the breaking of bread, harkening back to the last supper table-action. The stranger/gravedigger/clown/sexton is recognized as a companion (and fellow clown) of Yorick, when the gravedigger tells the tale of how Yorick once poured a flagon of Rhenish wine on his head, a figurative baptism. And of course, the pouring of wine was the other table-action at the last supper.
Ophelia: "My lord, we know what we are now, but not what we may become. May God be at your table."
(Perhaps a reformation-era, Catholic way of saying, may you have real Eucharist and transubstantiation, instead of Protestantism's mere remembrance of the real thing? Or more simply, may the real presence of the divine be at your table, food for your living, your thoughts, your soul? Or that one should welcome the stranger to one's table, like the disciples at Emmaus, and not like the Rich Man rejected the beggar Lazarus, or the "baker's daughter" neglected the beggar at hers? Although Ophelia's blessing is apparently spoken in madness, does it come to pass, that God is at their table by the end of the play? That the dying-and-rising Jesus, or an echo of him, is present?)
Thanks for reading! This is short, rambling, and informal this week due to multiple deadlines. Please feel free to comment and share.
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