Part 3: Ophelia, Gertrude, and mutually exclusive agency

I love Grace Tiffany’s sonnet “Gertrude and Ophelia” [1] for now it reimagines Gertrude as having drowned Ophelia. The sonnet explores a possibility for Gertrude’s agency that the play chooses not to explore.

Grace recently introduced the poem, tongue-in-cheek, as depicting “what really happened.” Other plays, films and novels make similar claims, exploring alternative versions from different points of view, including
the 2018 film, Ophelia;
a 2022 novel by Carly Stevens called Laertes: A Hamlet Retelling;
a 2008 novel by Paul Griffiths made from Ophelia’s words, Let Me Tell You;
and many more. [2]

On female agency, there is a reading of Ophelia’s death that wrestles with Ophelia’s apparent lack of agency, proposing not despair, but that Ophelia uses suicide to fiercely reclaim her own agency. [3] 

IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES
This reading is hard to reconcile with Grace Tiffany’s poem: Ophelia probably cannot be both a victim of murder at Gertrude’s hands, and *also* a suicide. Yet both of these offer alternative twists to heighten Gertrude or Ophelia’s agency.

Some students may get confused on this point. Do such works or readings finally reveal some hidden truth about what really happened in Shakespeare’s play? (Perhaps, perhaps not.) Or do they propose new fictions, separate from Shakespeare’s, with their own internal logic, not necessarily  conforming to the evidence of Shakespeare’s text? (Often, probably.)

When we struggle to understand a text, aren’t we inclined to formulate new versions of the story in our own minds that make the best possible sense as we see fit? Isn’t this only natural, and what interpretation always does?

Shakespeare seems to have anticipated such situations when a “Gentleman” observes that when people hear Ophelia’s words in her madness, they “botch the words up fit to their own thoughts” [3]. Given the ambiguities in the play, we might not grasp the heart of Ophelia’s mystery, so absent that, we remold the meaning of her words more to fit our assumptions, desires, or hunches, than to comprehend her truth.

Some scholars research to restore a clearer understanding of what Shakespeare’s Hamlet meant to its original audiences. But Shakespeare himself was a creative adapter of older tales from Saxo Grammaticus and Belleforest, just as Grace Tiffany’s poem adapts Shakespeare’s Gertrude, and as countless others have adapted Shakespeare to concerns of their own times, audiences, and concerns.

It is good for students to wrestle with such things:
- Which adaptations help us come to better understandings of the original texts?
- Which interpretations may be interesting or cathartic in their own ways, but stray from the original texts, or “botch up” the words, fit to the interpreter’s thoughts, like finding shapes in clouds or Rorschach blots?  
- And what does it mean for us all to be involved in such processes?
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Postscript:
I used to think Gertrude tells the truth in her account of Ophelia's death; the play doesn't spend any words exploring the possibility of Gertrude's deceit even out of kindness. But more recently (as of May, 2024), I tend to think that Gertrude gives a careful fictional account of Ophelia's death, one that blames her death on crown-envy (the sliver of willow that breaks is called "envious" like Claudius, envious of his brother's crown and wife), but out of kindness, to save Ophelia the dishonor of a suicide's funeral, and to avoid further problems with Laertes, she has plenty of motivation to fictionalize. Unlike Claudius, who lies out of self-interest, Gertrude may lie out of kindness.

But various people have put forward compelling readings or alternative plots in order to address the problem of female agency, or the lack of it. Some of these readings or alternative fictions contradict one another: Hard for Ophelia to die by suicide, and *also* as a Gertrude's murder victim. //

But these ideas are important if only because Gertrude's account of Ophelia's death as accident (envious branch breaks) offers such a stark contrast with the assumptions of the "churlish priest" who assumes the death was "doubtful" enough (probably suicide?) that she should be denied certain church burial rites reserved for "peace-parted souls"... //

Think of how many people may not have died as "peace-parted souls," may have died in deep doubt and regret and fear of hell, without hope, without charity for neighbors and family, but their deaths may have been in secret, yet they were given church burial...

NOTES
[1] Grace Tiffany, poem, “Gertrude and Ophelia,” published in NEW ORLEANS REVIEW Issue 42 (2016). Published by Loyola University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Page 22. With permission via Grace Tiffany, via  https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2192204914302729&set=p.2192204914302729&type=3

[2] The 2018 film, Ophelia, is based on the 2006 novel, Ophelia, by Lisa M. Klein.

For other reimaginings of Hamlet and Ophelia, see also:

Hamlet Had an Uncle, James Branch Cabell (novel, 1940);
The Bad Sleep Well, (film, 1960)
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard (1966 play, film 1990);
Strange Brew (film, 1983);
The Lion King, (animated film, 1994)
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (novel, 1996)
Gertrude and Claudius, John Updike (novel, 2000);
Something Rotten, Jasper Fforde (novel, 2005)
The Banquet (film, 2006)
The Dead Fathers Club, Matt Haig (novel, 2006)
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski (novel, 2008)
To Be or Not to Be, Ryan North (novel, 2013, 2016)
Haider (film, 2014)
Sons of Anarchy (television series, 2008-2014)
Ophelia: Queen of Denmark, Jackie French (novel, 2015)
Ophelia Rising, Umberto Tosi (novel, 2015)
Nutshell, Ian McEwan (novel, 2016)
The Weight of an Infinite Sky, Carrie La Seur (novel, 2018)
Fire Queen, Joanna Courtney (novel, 2020)
The Northman (film, 2022, based in part on Saxo Grammaticus)

[3] Dr. Louise Geddes (@Thisbysmantle), one of the editors of Borrowers and Lenders, expressed this view in a twitter post. This is an Ophelia of fierce agency who intentionally chooses and rushes toward her own end. I would offer that this is not Shakespeare’s Ophelia, but a modern reimagining of her that may be as necessary as Grace Tiffany’s reimagining of Gertrude’s murderous agency. But it would be difficult or impossible to have both simultaneously in the same tale. Ophelia cannot have been murdered by Gertrude as imagined by Grace Tiffany, and also committed suicide to reclaim her own agency – unless, perhaps, Ophelia knew of Gertrude’s murderous designs and rushed toward that death on purpose? But again, that's not Shakespeare, but adaptation of Shakespeare.

[4] 4.5.12. All references to Hamlet are to the Folger Shakespeare Library online version: https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/entire-play/

IMAGES:
LEFT: Edwin Austin Abbey (1852–1911), The Play Scene in Hamlet, 1897. Oakley, Lucy. Unfaded Pageant: Edwin Austin Abbey's Shakespearean Subjects. Columbia University, 1994. Public domain via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Play_Scene_in_Hamlet.jpg

RIGHT: Grace Tiffany, poem, “Gertrude and Ophelia,” published in NEW ORLEANS REVIEW Issue 42 (2016). Published by Loyola University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Page 22. With permission via Grace Tiffany, via  https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2192204914302729&set=p.2192204914302729&type=3


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INDEX OF OPHELIA POSTS:
My 2023 series on Ophelia, and earlier Ophelia posts:

https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2023/10/index-of-ophelia-posts-2023-series-and.html
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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to explore how the Bible and religion influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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Thanks for reading!
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