Part 11: "Mad" Ophelia grasps "tricks i' th' world" and Denmark's corruption

Too many critics, readers and viewers of Shakespeare’s Hamlet assume that Ophelia’s madness is merely an inability to deal with emotions, mostly about her father and Hamlet.

Showlater cites Theodore Lidz (a typical example of this) who claims “Ophelia goes mad because she fails in the female developmental task of shifting her sexual attachment from her father ‘to a man who can bring her fulfillment as a woman.’” (294) [1]

Too few consider that her madness may have been as much, or more, caused by a startling epiphany about Denmark’s corruption, understanding it perhaps even better than her father.

Why would (mostly male) critics have neglected this possibility for so long? A tendency among critics to keep Ophelia out of politics, like keeping women out of voting booths?

A “GENTLEMAN” and Horatio speak about Ophelia the first we hear of her having gone mad:

GENTLEMAN:
She speaks much of her father, says she hears
There’s tricks i’ th’ world, and hems, and beats her heart,
Spurns enviously at straws, speaks things in doubt
That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshapèd use of it doth move
The hearers to collection. They aim at it
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts;
Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them,
Indeed would make one think there might be thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.

HORATIO
’Twere good she were spoken with, for she may strew
Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds. (4.5.5-20)

Commenters such as Lidz ignore that she is the daughter of Polonius, and that, for example, she anticipated the possibility of her brother’s hypocrisy regarding his advice to her about chastity on the occasion of his return to France (1.3.49-54).

Ophelia may have glimpsed more about corruption in Denmark than she reveals. The “Gentleman” says she speaks of her father and “tricks i’ th’ world”: Her father was often suspicious of political and sexual intrigue. The “tricks i’ th’ world” of which she speaks may have been grasped by fearful comprehension.

This deeper comprehension of Denmark’s corruption may help prepare her to give the King, Queen, and her brother flowers with much-discussed symbolic meanings. She may realize: If Gertrude conceives a child by Clauduis, Hamlet may no longer be the preferred heir, and the kind of violence that suddenly took her father’s life may threaten Hamlet’s and her own.

For these and other reasons, to characterize Ophelia as merely innocent, child-like, docile, emotional, and too dependent on her father, may fall far short of grasping her richness and complexity. Daughter of the king’s key advisor, she may already be quite wise to some of Denmark’s political machinations in which she, Hamlet, and others have been caught up.

Many others have already considered this.[2] I am arriving late to the party.

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https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2023/08/part-11-mad-ophelia-grasps-tricks-i-th.html
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NOTES:

[1] Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” in the Norton Hamlet, ed. Robert S. Miola, 2011, W.W. Norton and Company. 281-297. This is also in a number of other anthologies of collected essays. The British Library has an article by Showalter that was adapted from this essay, and for which there is free access: https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/ophelia-gender-and-madness

[2] See “Who is Ophelia? An examination of the Objectification and Subjectivity of Shakespeare's Ophelia,” a 2015 master’s thesis by Tynelle Ann Olivas, and Olivas’s bibliography and notes: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations/2403/
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IMAGE:
Ophelia, 1890, Henrietta Rae  (1859–1928), public domain via
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henrietta_Rae_-_Ophelia_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg


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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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