Appendix 3 on “Hamlet”, part 2: About Ophelia’s madness

 As I said, there might be hundreds of similar minor questions to ask and minor oddities to notice about this play, but there must have been a reason for me to ask THIS question before I singled it out as a strategic approach which I felt would work as an approach to the play AS A WHOLE. I think there are even a number of reasons, the most important one probably that I already had an opinion on this matter. Although I didn’t really know this, it was kind of already “there”. And I think it was created by a maze of irrational and illogical things going on around Ophelia, especially in her relationship with Hamlet, and then where her madness is concerned. The most obvious thing, that everybody would notice, is what she is talking about in her state of madness. There is some stuff about death and burial, but most of it is about men and women, and sex - which as such even appears quite logical because it is meant to make it perfectly clear that she is mentally disturbed. As these are things that she certainly wouldn’t talk about if she had still some control over what is “getting out”. But there is always this: external reasons, as, of course, Shakespeare wanting Ophelia to become mad for reasons of plot, and, of course, he needed the audience to believe in this. So he used these rather strong sexual allusions which are kind of strange for a young girl like Ophelia who, at least from what we know about her, doesn’t have any personal experience of this kind. But there are always “internal” reasons as well, and there is the content of her speech that is developing a life of its own. So there is of course MEANING created by these two contrasting “texts”: the one about the innocent, inexperienced young girl and the one about men and women, and sex, and losing their virginity. And the question will just automatically arise: What is this supposed to mean?

And, having noticed countless times how exactly and strategically Shakespeare uses this technique of establishing relevant content by what people say INADVERTENTLY, I always believe that when I “stumble” over something I was meant to do so. Of course I can be wrong in every single one of these instances, meaning that I may have stumbled by accident, and I never base my reading on just one of these moments. But, every time I stumble, I start looking for clues, and I think this is what happened. Apart from the fact that Ophelia irked me, and I didn’t like her, and I had learned this to be a good place to start. And I think, somehow, all of this together suddenly made me realize that I just didn’t BELIEVE that the reason for Ophelia’s madness that is suggested by most people in the play - and which we tend to accept because of this - is the REAL reason. Because I am totally convinced that nobody would become mentally disturbed because of a parent dying, not even if it is under horrible circumstances which you don’t understand. And not even if somebody you are very close to has killed them.

(And just asking one question in this case almost automatically raises another one. Because we actually don’t know if Ophelia knows HOW EXACTLY her father died. Especially not if she knew that Hamlet did it because, the way Claudius describes it, they tried to bury everything about it as fast and as deep as possible. And in that way - by “taking” the play “seriously” and asking “reasonable” questions about it - we soon come to realize that what we don’t know about things, and people!, is infinitely more than what we know. Quite like in “real life”.)

Of course I had to think about this long and hard because there are at least two arguments against what I am thinking which I could make up on the spot. But I did, and I haven’t changed my mind. One of the reasons for this, which I like a lot, is that I have come to TRUST Shakespeare in a way I shouldn’t trust anybody, and in fact DON’T trust anybody else about BEING RIGHT about this kind of issues. And what I just realized is so weird that I have to break off right here and think about it …

But I have, and I have found that I actually believe this! There are in fact exactly two people in the world – one of them absurdly already dead but still probably more “alive” through what he has written than many people actually living – whose opinions I would trust in these matters. And this is because they are the only two people I know about who appear to have a similar “approach” to them, so they would understand why they are important, and who are definitely more intelligent than I am. (Of course there must be millions of people who are more intelligent than I am, but I don’t know them.) And one of these two obviously “is” Shakespeare.

So, to put it crudely, I just don’t believe that Shakespeare is talking bollocks where his “special field” is concerned, which is human issues. And, in my belief, it is bollocks that people become mad because of things that happen to other people (with the possible exception of parents becoming mad about things that happen to their children, but NOT the other way round!) In fact, the situation Ophelia is in is exactly the kind of situation where people who are susceptible to it would become depressed – as Hamlet himself does, in the beginning of the play. But Ophelia is not depressed, she is “cracked”, and, although there might of course be any number of examples to prove me wrong, it is not what “usually” happens when a parent dies, even under dire circumstances. To become “cracked” the damage must somehow go “deeper” than that. That is, it would not be something to do with other people but something that happens to YOU. And, when I realized this, I became aware that the most convincing explanation for me is that she must have found out that she is pregnant.

Of course I liked it that I was so convinced of this because it is something that nobody I know about has come up with. And, as with so many things that are suggested in this play, we will never find definite proof for or against it because we AREN’T MEANT to find it. So, strictly speaking, the question If Ophelia and Hamlet had sex and Ophelia became pregnant isn’t even “academic”, it is pointless. And people who brought this play on the stage are completely right about NOT taking up this issue in an obvious way. And Kenneth Branagh was TOTALLY WRONG when he inserted a hot sex scene into his “Hamlet” film, even though it was an interesting thing to do, just as he was totally wrong about all the clarifications he tried to make in his film so that people would understand the play better. Not as such, because in other cases this kind of thing works great, but in “Hamlet” it is exactly THE POINT that we are NOT SUPPOSED to understand what is happening!

But I realize that I have jumped too far ahead already and have left out my argument about Ophelia’s pregnancy. Because, even though Shakespeare DELIBERATELY doesn’t give away the truth about what happened between Hamlet and Ophelia, he nourishes the suspicion that something might have happened very carefully. And there was this moment that convinced me: where I stumbled and probably bruised my knee or something, so that I couldn’t just walk on and pretend not to notice. It was in the scene where Gertrude is reporting Ophelia’s death. A scene that had irked me every time I saw or read it, probably just because of the illogical point of view. When it appears as if she or other people had witnessed Ophelia’s drowning without doing anything about it. (Which in my opinion strongly suggests, by the way, that her report is deliberately incorrect, and that Ophelia has killed herself – that is, didn’t die in an unfortunate accident. And that Getrude didn’t want Laertes to know this …) And when I am irked I probably “slow down” and notice a lot of things I wouldn’t have noticed or wouldn’t have put down as “odd”. In this case it was the flowers. Who the f… cares, in this kind of tale, what flowers Ophelia had been playing with??? And, in this case, the list is so long that I think that Shakespeare deliberately wanted us to “slow down” and make us notice the ADDITIONAL CONTENT he had so artfully inserted in this scene.

For me it worked in a similar way as one of my two favourite bits “in Shakespeare”. Which is from  “Richard II” (Act 3, scene 2) when Bolingbroke is trying his hand on an elaborate, and audacious!, metaphor – and then realizes that he has “overstepped”, and tries to mend it:

“Methinks King Richard and myself should meet with no less terror than the elements of fire and water, when their thund’ring shock at meeting tears the cloudy cheeks of heaven. Be he the fire, I’ll be the yielding water; the rage be his, whilst on the earth I’II rain my waters – ON THE EARTH, AND NOT ON HIM.”

Of course not! For he himself is in no doubt about who will win this “pissing contest”. There is no mistaking his real intentions NOW, although he might have hidden them successfully until then, even from himself! - In Gertrude’s elaborate enumeration of the flowers there is one moment where I think everybody must feel what Polonius says some time before this about the actor’s monologue: THIS IS TOO LONG! And it is the moment when she comes to the “long purples that liberal shepherds give a grosser name, but our cold maids do dead man’s fingers call them”. Of course it is not literally too long, especially for a time when people obviously enjoyed HEARING actors (not SEEING them in the first place!) (See “Macbeth”: where “life’s but a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is HEARD no more”). But it is kind of too long and totally IRRELEVANT where the hearers want to know what happened to Ophelia! Of course Shakespeare wouldn’t have left out such a stellar opportunity of inserting double meaning into his text through ONE flower with TWO names. But the way this “weighs down” Gertrude’s report is really hitting us on the head with the metaphor to make us notice that SOMETHING is wrong. And it implies the two possible reasons for Ophelia’s madness: having had forbidden sex and presumably ending up pregnant, and her father being killed. And this seemingly dispensable double metaphor contains such a “key structure” of this play where nothing ever is what you think it is!

Digging for more was great fun in this case, and just starting to dig brought up so much more that I still think this was just scratching the surface. Strictly speaking I didn’t even dig, I just shook the tree a bit, and see what fell out! The first thing was a shrewed observation by my friend about one of the plants Ophelia is distributing earlier on in the play. She noticed that Ophelia gives RUE to Claudius and to herself. As this is the only plant she gives to herself as well as others I had noticed this but hadn’t got the meaning. Which is obvious in Claudius’ case, but what the hell has SHE done to deserve it???

What is even more interesting about this is that “rue” might be one of the very few “residues” of a whole world of meaning that we still are able to detect just using our own experience, semantic, in this case. Of course there must be a lot more, as there are probably any number of academic theses and articles about plants and flowers in Shakespeare. And I think I “pulled out” one of these “strands” of meaning accidentally by recalling another text. Which is another basic methodical approach I am very fond of – as anybody who has read this blog would have noticed. In this case it was a German poem from the Middle Ages about somebody describing how winter is kind of taking over his house (or hers, as it turns out) so that it suddenly doesn’t appear like a homely place anymore. It was a very popular text which was made into a song, probably by more troubadours than one, something that everybody knew. And there is no mentioning of a love relationship or a pregnancy, but everybody KNEW what this song meant: that it was about a girl who got pregnant and was deserted by her lover. I don’t even remember a single line or phrase of this poem, just this structure of concealing sexual content completely “within” a metaphor – but of course in a way that everybody who is used to this technique would be able to read it. And, as this is a technique which is not generally used anymore, a lot of the finer points in Shakespeare are probably lost on us.

(My stellar example for this is the other one of my two favourite “bits” which is from “Henry V”: “If I conjure up love with her in his true likeness it must be naked and blind …” And this bit I loved mostly because of HOW LONG it took me until I “got it”. For I had actually NEVER BEFORE realized what the cute little innocent Cupid stands for!)

I liked it that the poem, which I recall having heard as a song, was there “before” Ophelia. That this was like some kind of tune that would automatically be played in your head if a story like the one about Ophelia comes up in a fictional context. It is even very likely that this wasn’t originally a German poem, but something translated from Provencal, or French, or English, or at least something similar would have been a well-known “tune” in popular culture everywhere in Europe. And Shakespeare just had to give a few hints so that this tune would automatically have been played and would have engendered the thought that Ophelia MIGHT be pregnant, and that this was a likely explanation for her to “crack” and to kill herself. (Obviously, at least one of the reasons for the gravedigger’s talk about suicide and Christian burial is certainly to RAISE DOUBTS about the version Gertrude is giving of Ophelia’s death!) Some of these “hints” would certainly be in the flowers Shakespeare is so explicit about. And I found one of them, accidentally, by reading “The Winter’s Tale”, on the occasion of the recent Kenneth Branagh production being shown in the “Cinema”. As there is a part about which plants are traditionally connected with certain seasons. And the plants Ophelia mentions in connection with rue are plants of winter.

I guess, if I really started digging, there would be even more of these hints that are meant to trigger a certain tune being played in our heads. And I liked it when I actually HEARD the tune being played really loud IN MY HEAD. Which was when Ophelia mentions the violets that withered when her father died. In this case I know from experience that violets are flowers of early spring because they suddenly appear in abundance round my house in the early days of April. And I always collect them for their scent, and am always disappointed when they disappear shortly afterwards. In times of global warming it is usually the fast-growing grass that finishes them off. But in “Hamlet” it is an untimely frost, the returning of winter. Obviously this is because of Polonius’ death, but when you have heard this tune playing for some time there will always be this double meaning. Not least because with a violet there always “comes” this scent - which evokes the awakening of spring IN US, and all the hopes and desires that go with it.

But it doesn’t matter if there is much more or not. And it is still only about one small, probably insignificant issue in “Hamlet”. I just wanted to make the little tune play really LOUD so as to demonstrate the method Shakespeare used. Because this is his way of dealing with the central question of what “is rotten in the state of Denmark”. And to tell us that there is NO SIMPLE ANSWER to this question. Because, if there was, there wouldn’t be a problem, and there wouldn’t be a TRAGEDY. And I can now say exactly why I liked the RSC film production with David Tennant and disliked the one by Kenneth Branagh (even though it has some great features, like Derek Jacobi playing Claudius or Kate Winslet “becoming mad”.) It is because the RSC production tries to “raise up” the MYSTERY in “Hamlet”, “dig up” the shady and discontinuous elements of the play, even uses additional features like mirrors and CCTV cameras in an attempt to make the irrational and complex structure of reality visible, whereas Kenneth Branagh labours to CLARIFY all the major issues, using stories and images we are well acquainted with.

And I have even answered another question, which was one of the initial questions that made me become involved with “this”. It is about why – and HOW EXACTLY – British actors are generally so infinitely better than others, at least at what I consider to be “proper” acting. And from the time I became involved with Shakespeare I had always felt that “he” must be one of the reasons for this. Now I think I know why. As I became aware that I kind of “quoted” Richard Armitage making my central point about the structure of “Hamlet”. The quote is from an interview on “The Desolation of Smaug” (given to some online magazine called “Hero Complex”) which is the most remarkable interview I have ever heard an actor give. And I still didn’t understand everything he said then, until now, when I used it to understand “Hamlet”.

“… I feel like in filmmaking we look for continuity and rationale in a character, and actually being able to flip that on its head and look for things that are discontinuous and irrational in a character was a way of portraying a breaking mind …”

And I think it is THIS – not even that he obviously “looked into” various Shakespearean characters for playing the dwarf Thorin: being able to somehow leave the safe ground of things we already know, and which are established by a CONTINUOS line of thinking and feeling, which great actors like to do, and where they know they can prove themselves. But there has to be SOMETHING somewhere to refer to when you leave this well-known ground. And even if not all of these actors have actually played significant parts of Shakespeare on stage they have some kind of relationship with Shakespeare. And they “have” some of these characters as a reference for creating this kind of “additional meaning” which makes characters on screen COME ALIVE in the same way it makes a play like “Hamlet” come alive. Because becoming aware of the MYSTERY of a character or a play makes us look ten times as long and as hard. And, of course, makes us leave the theatre or cinema with something we didn’t expect to find.