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They finally got names! Camilla and Angelo.

Hamlet illustrated by John Austen, 1922

There is something so fun about the abundance of eye imagery in a completely non visual medium

@morethanfantasy i’m in the airport and i have a few ophelia thoughts left rattling around in my skull so let’s do this

i think the thing that makes ophelia so fascinating to me out of all the characters in hamlet is that we never really get to see what she’s thinking. every scene she’s in, every interaction she has, is colored in a certain level of uncertainty, because the complicated power dynamics involved mean it’s hard to tell what’s genuine and what’s a carefully curated persona to survive in elsinore. take her first scene with polonius. i’ve played it several different ways in the past: she’s genuinely confused about hamlet and wants his advice, she’s fully in love but he’s kinda talking her out of it, she’s rolling her eyes behind his back… we don’t actually ever get her take on this scene, so textually any of them could be a correct read.

The only time that Ophelia speaks directly to the audience and not to another character is directly after the nunnery scene. Hamlet runs out and Ophelia spends a few lines lamenting his change (lines that tell us a lot about the previous dynamics at elsinore and i think could be incorporated into design and directing choices a lot more), and then Polonius and Claudius leave their hiding place and discuss what to do next.

While this monologue could be read as Ophelia telling us her true feelings, I have two problems with that. First: she doesn’t? really? say anything?? don’t get me wrong, hamlet being the rose of elsinore’s court is fascinating, but it doesn’t tell us anything about how ophelia feels. it doesn’t tell us if she loves him, if she stopped loving him, if they’ve had sex and she’s freaking out cause now he’s said that he’ll never marry her (something that she may well be thinking based on the mad scenes). even when talking to the audience, she’s putting up a bit of a front. she’s telling us much less than we think she is.

Second (and this may explain the first): the entire conceit of this scene is that ophelia is being observed. claudius and polonius are watching from hiding the whole time, and while hamlet may or may not know that, ophelia is perfectly aware of it the whole time. she’s still performing because she’s still being watched. she can’t scream in anger or punch the wall or laugh hysterically or respond with any genuine emotional reaction because she’s still under her father and the king’s censorious eyes. It’s appropriate. The one time ophelia seems to speak her own thoughts, and she’s not really alone, just pretending to be, in front of the most powerful people in the world. hamlet may be fucking around with metatheatricality, but ophelia’s the one who’s really on a stage.

a lot of shakespeare plays have characters that never really talk to the audience directly. it’s normal. but it would be a very different experience if we never knew what juliet was feeling, or whether regan truly loved her father, or if malcolm wanted his country back. and it’s especially fascinating that we have this inscrutable character here, in the introspection play! i’d argue that we can tell what pretty much any of the other characters are feeling based on genuine conversations and monologues, which makes ophelia a fascinating foil to the obsessively introspective hamlet. how much different would the story be if the perspectives were flipped, if we got ophelia’s thoughts and not hamlet’s? would her inner monologue look like his or something completely different? i could spend YEARS trying to develop a coherent idea of ophelia’s psyche and i’d never know if it’s true.

and of COURSE that expresses itself in ophelia’s madness. hamlet makes jokes and puns and messes with his clothes and acts like he’s smarter than everyone else. ophelia starts fully speaking in code. you need 5 layers of context, some of which is known only by her, to follow what she’s saying. it does seem like it all has a meaning, though. my read on it is that for the first time in her life ophelia is able to say exactly what she thinks, without couching it in politics or politeness, by using songs and references and obliqueness so that none of the people around her have any idea what she’s saying to their faces. is that intentional on her part? up to interpretation. she might have truly been driven mad by grief and fear and powerlessness and this is the only way she can make sense of the world now. she may have simply decided to quit the power games of elsinore and is entirely lucid. (side note, it’s definitely relevant that scholars have been having the is-the-madness-real discussion about both hamlet and ophelia for ages. more parallels!) the point is, we’ll never know. we’ll never know if her death was a suicide, an accident, or a murder. in a play where we know everything about hamlet, we know next to nothing about ophelia.

personally, i think that tells us quite a lot. hamlet has some fascinating power dynamics, and the fact that even the structure of the play gives hamlet freedom to express himself at length while taking away ophelia’s voice is a clever way to show their positions in elsinore and the way that the social structure traps characters in the narrative. it also shows us our own blind spots as an audience, if we’re willing to see them. while the play is all too willing to show us the story of hamlet, there’s another story going on that it does its best to obscure from us. by the time we see that something invisible is going on with ophelia, it’s too late. it’s the mad scene and she’s already gone.

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