Part 41: Love Madness: Ophelia, Gertrude, and Helen of Troy
That your good beauties be the happy cause
Of Hamlet’s wildness. So shall I hope your virtues
Will bring him to his wonted way again,
To both your honors.
OPHELIA Madam, I wish it may. (3.1.42-47)
Queen Gertrude expresses hope that Ophelia’s father Polonius may be correct in thinking that Hamlet is mad for the loss of Ophelia’s love. Shakespeare often described love as a madness in need of a cure.[1]
This may be more significant than one might assume at first glance, for at least three reasons.
First, Gertrude’s comments apply not only to her son but also to her new husband, even if she doesn’t know it. For Claudius to kill his brother and take the throne and his brother’s wife seems a kind of madness. Gertrude’s “virtues” were not enough to cure him.
Secondly, “The face that launched a thousand ships” is the famous Christopher Marlowe line describing the beauty of Helen of Troy. To steal her, Paris risked war, which seems madness [2]. In Greek mythology, even Zeus, king of the gods, seemed mad to have had so many affairs with women, including Leda, mother of Helen.
Shakespeare alludes to the popular Helen-Paris tale in Romeo and Juliet [3], The Taming of the Shrew [4], and Troilus and Cressida. In Hamlet, 2.2.457-587, Hamlet and the first player give an excerpt from a speech about Priam and Hecuba, parents of Paris suffering the revenge of Pyrrhus for their son’s choices after abducting Helen.
Shakespeare's Hamlet really situates itself, with the arrival of the players, in a larger historical and literary context that includes a married woman, Helen of Sparta, abducted by Paris, and the context of the Trojan War, a war perhaps claimed to have been fought over the love-madness of Paris for Helen, and counter-claims of - faithfulness in marriage? Or a wife and queen as a possession of a husband and king? In this sense, Claudius is like Paris, and Gertrude, like Helen (yet it is also true that Hamlet seeks revenge for the death of his father, as does Pyrrhus for the death of his father Achilles, who was killed by Paris - so the connections between the play, Hamlet, and the Paris-Helen tale are complex).
Thirdly, Helen’s tale may have been popular at least in part because Elizabeth I was the daughter of Henry VIII, whose pursuit of Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn led to destructive consequences, as did Paris’ pursuit of Helen [5].
Shakespeare’s England was still haunted by the ghosts of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and the continuing fallout from their choices. If too much talk about Anne Boleyn was still dangerous in England at the end of her daughter Elizabeth’s reign, some poets and playwrights may have addressed it indirectly through allusions to the popular tale of Paris and Helen of Troy as an analogy for England's Tudor legacy and its ills.
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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] See As You Like It, 3.2.407-435, where Rosalind speaks to Orlando about how to cure love, but actually convinces him to imagine wooing her. See also Sonnet 147. “My love is as a fever, longing still / For that which longer nurseth the disease….”
[2] After Paris died, Helen married her dead husband’s brother, Deiphobus, which parallels Catherine of Aragon, widow of Arthur Tudor, who married her dead husband’s brother, Henry VIII;
and also Gertrude, widow of King Hamlet, who married Claudius, her dead husband’s brother.
[3] In Romeo and Juliet, 2.4, Mercutio refers to Helen of Troy. On Jan 5, 2019 at 10:36, on Literature/stackexchange, Rand al'Thor commented: “I just noticed that a character in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has the same name as a character in Homer's Iliad: Paris. In both stories, Paris is one of two men who wish to be with the same woman; Paris of Troy elopes with an already married woman, while Paris of Verona is engaged to marry a woman already in love with someone else. In both stories, Paris ends up dead at the hands of an enemy. Is there any evidence that this is more than a coincidence?” https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/9058/is-there-any-connection-between-paris-of-troy-and-paris-of-verona
[4] In The Taming of the Shrew, 1.2, Tranio-as-Lucentio says, “Fair Leda's daughter had a thousand wooers,” pointing to Helen as Leda's daughter, and “a thousand wooers” a transformation of Marlowe’s “the face that launched a thousand ships.”
Shakespeare also has a Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, connected to Helen of Troy by an allusion made by Theseus; and also a Helena in All's Well that Ends Well.
[5] The love of Henry VIII for Anne led him to seek to annul his first marriage to the Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon, even if it meant breaking from Rome. Consequences later included many religious and political executions, and eventually, civil war. Ophelia’s brother, Laertes, warns her that Hamlet may need to marry to secure a treaty, instead of choosing his own wife for love:
“His greatness weighed, his will is not his own,
For he himself is subject to his birth.
He may not, as unvalued persons do,
Carve for himself, for on his choice depends
The safety and the health of this whole state.
And therefore must his choice be circumscribed
Unto the voice and yielding of that body
Whereof he is the head.” (1.3.20-26)
- This may be a reference to Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, a Spanish princess, a treaty bride, to maintain a treaty with Spain.
- Shakespeare seems to be holding a mirror up to Elizabethan England, at the end of the House of Tudor, to show the sins that have corrupted England.
IMAGES
Left: Anne Boleyn (Anna Bullen), by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/1498–1543)
Hever Castle, Kent. Public domain via
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Anneboleyn68.jpg
Center-left: Helen on the Walls of Troy, by Gustave Moreau, c.1885. Public domain via https://uploads3.wikiart.org/images/gustave-moreau/helen-on-the-walls-of-troy.jpg!Large.jpg
Center-right: Helen of Sparta boards a ship for Troy (fresco from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii). Before 79 CE. Public domain via https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Helen_of_Sparta_boards_a_ship_for_Troy_fresco_from_the_House_of_the_Tragic_Poet_in_Pompeii.jpg
Right:
Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536), Queen consort of England (1509-1533). Painting by Lucas Horenbout (1490–1544). 1525. Public domain, via
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Catherine_of_Aragon_%281485-1536%29.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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