Part 26: Ophelia gives crowns instead of grasping & hoarding one

According to Gertrude, Ophelia crowned willow branches with coronets (small crowns) of flowers, perhaps in the same spirit her giving away flowers and herbs to the court:

QUEEN:
There is a willow grows askant the brook
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
[....]
There on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang…
4.7.190-198

Coronets? Why does this detail matter?

There are men in Ophelia’s Denmark (Claudius) and from Norway (Fortinbras) who have killed, or are very willing to kill, to keep or grasp at a crown.

Claudius is a man willing to kill his own brother and king to gain his crown, willing to kill his nephew, and watch his own wife poison herself without stopping her, just to keep his crown.

Fortinbras is willing to enter battle where thousands will die so that he can achieve his victory, and later, he hopes, his crown:

HAMLET:
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender* prince, [1]
Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell. [...]
[…] to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand [2] men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain?
4.4.60-68

[*pampered & spoiled in the biblical sense]

These men are willing to stop at nothing to obtain and keep their crowns.

But Ophelia, who may rightfully be Hamlet’s handfast wife and queen, is not grasping at a crown, not conspiring to obtain one. She has no crown of gold but makes her coronets out of wild flowers and “weeds.”

The men hoard crowns, while Ophelia bestows simple crowns of her own making, generously, on the “pendant boughs” of a tree.

If our only frame of reference, our only status quo, is the top-down authority of rulers and their greed and hunger for power, then Ophelia’s gifts of coronets are either inconsequential or, worse, madness.

But if we have glimpsed people and cultures who are generous in respecting others and lifting them up, then we might quickly find that Claudius and Fortinbras are the mad ones.

Some scholars have questioned Gertrude’s account: Too much detail, and no hint of an attempted rescue of Ophelia from drowning. An interesting insight. [3]

And yet if Gertrude’s account is fiction, then it may be even more significant that Gertrude portrays Ophelia giving crowns away, in a kingdom where her son had told her that Claudius killed his brother to grasp the crown. If we accept Gertrude’s account as a merciful fiction, it still hints at a growing awareness about her new husband’s grasping and the depth of Denmark’s corruption.
~~~~~~~~
Postscript: Elizabethan England was Calvinist/Protestant, and Protestants loved the epistles of St. Paul, who used the images of running a race, inheriting an immortal crown (1 Cor 9:25) - drawing obviously on imagery of the Roman forum, races, etc.
~
See also Paul in 2 Timothy 4:7-8 / 1599 Geneva:
7 I have fought a good fight, and have finished my course: I have kept the faith.
8 For henceforth is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord the righteous Judge shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love that his appearing.
~
For Paul, everyone who keeps the faith (and holds charity/love as greatest of gifts?) gets a crown. Shakespeare may have had that in mind in creating Gertrude's tale of Ophelia's coronet-distribution, or it may have been one of the winds blowing through the playwright: As the D.H. Lawrence poem says, "Not I, not I, but the winds that blow through me."

On that note:
The villain in Disney's 2004 animated film, "The Incredibles," claims that if everyone (gets a figurative crown and) is "special," then no one is special (he'd rather be like Claudius and rule the world with his super-powers).

I tend to think charity/love is the better crown, more important than faith (understood as belief in a grocery list of doctrines about biblical miracle tales and Jesus' super-powers -- unless, if God is love, as the gospel of John claims, then faith in God is faith in love?).

But that's just me... 😉 

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

[1] “delicate and tender prince” as “pampered and spoiled” in a biblical sense:
See previous blog post for examples from the Bible:
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2018/11/to-hamlet-delicate-tender-isnt-about.html

[2] Hamlet says Fortinbras doesn't care if twenty thousand men go to their graves due to his military campaign in Poland, but we would do well to note that Hamlet doubles this figure in 5.1 when speaking to Laertes at Ophelia's grave about how his love, Hamlet's love for Ophelia, is greater than a brother's love: HAMLET:
I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum.
(5.1.285-287)

This seems significant, that Hamlet notes both the twenty thousand that Fortinbras would risk for victory, and also the forty thousand brothers whose love could not equal his. It seems the point is perhaps not only that Fortinbras is all about violent military victory, while Hamlet is all about love, but that Hamlet would take so personally the extravagant claims Laertes makes about his love for his sister, and that Hamlet would turn this exchange into a contest about whose love is greater.

[3] The idea of Gertrude weaving a fictional account of Ophelia's death might be traced at least back to 1913: See Trench, Wilbraham Fitzjohn. Shakespeare's Hamlet: A New Commentary. London: John Murray, 1913. Shakespeare Online. 2 Aug. 2011. < http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/hamlet/opheliasdeathgertrude.html >.


IMAGES:
LEFT:
Ophelia (1793),
Richard Westall, English, 1765 - 1836
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth: Public domain via
https://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/objects/2013.27#

CENTER:
Ophelia
circa 1863 - 64
Arthur Hughes  (1832–1915)  
London / Toledo Art Museum
Public domain via
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arthur_Hughes_-_Ophelia_(Second_Version).JPG

RIGHT:
'Hamlet', Act IV, Scene 5, Ophelia (date unknown),
Ferdinand von Piloty  (1828–1895)
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Public Domain via
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ophelia_IV_5.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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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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