Abstract
A historic photograph of the present Queen Elizabeth shows her seated in a blue suit at Westminster Central Hall flanked by her Household Cavalry, sharply dressed in red military tunics and white-plumed helmets.1 The occasion is her golden jubilee speech to the Lords and Commons. The Queen’s striking blue outfit (including matching hat) draws the spectator’s gaze to her centrality in the construction of nation through the symbolism of the colours of the British flag, the Union Jack. As a counterpoint to this austere public setting in which she sits, enthroned at the foot of a wide staircase, regal blue delphiniums rise from a tall stone urn in the corner behind her. Quentin Letts remarked in the Daily Mail: ‘Amid the scent of blue delphiniums and the honk of Household Cavalry State Trumpeters, the Queen took a cue from Gloria Gaynor and declared, in so many words, I Will Survive.’2 The photograph and the comment furnish me with echoes of performance and pastoral associated with another Queen Elizabeth who was determined to survive, and to the challenges to the body politic made by Ophelia as ‘pastoral speaker’ in Hamlet.
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Notes
Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘“Eliza, Queene of Shepheardes”, and the Pastoral of Power’, in The New Historicism Reader, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 88–115 (pp. 90 and 98).
Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: the Courtships of Elizabeth I (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 9.
See David Starkey, Elizabeth (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000); Hackett, Virgin Mother; Doran, Monarchy; and
Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1994).
Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: the Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), p. 67.
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 7.
Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), pp. 18–19.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), pp. 120–1,
quoted in Stephen Daniels, ‘Marxism, Culture and the Duplicity of Landscape’, in Human Geography: an Essential Anthology, ed. David N. Livingstone and Alisdair Rogers (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 329–40 (p. 330).
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). On primroses, see the editor’s note on p. 175.
Carroll Camden, ‘On Ophelia’s Madness’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 15 (1964), pp. 249–55.
See also Kaara L. Peterson, ‘Fluid Economies: Portraying Shakespeare’s Hysterics’, Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 34:1 (March 2001), pp. 35–59.
Sir Philip Sidney, ‘The Lady of May’, in Renaissance Drama: an Anthology of Plays and Entertainments, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), pp. 35–44 (p. 37).
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, The Arden Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), p. 475.
Phil Macnaghten and John Urry, Contested Natures (London: Sage Publications, 1998), p. 9.
Ibid, p. 9. The reference is to Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 176–253.
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 218.
See editor’s note in Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Hibbard, p. 305. Of course, for my argument I have chosen three films where Ophelia does give out ‘flowers’ or substitutes objects but some might argue against such ‘rescripting’ despite its history in popular culture. In Kenneth Branagh’s film, Hamlet (1996), Kate Winslet’s Ophelia does not give out flowers or any object. The screenplay direction reads: ‘She pretends to pass out flowers.’ See Kenneth Branagh, Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Screenplay, Introduction and Film Diary (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), p. 131.
Kenneth Branagh, Much Ado about Nothing by William Shakespeare: Screenplay, Introduction, and Notes on the Making of the Film (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. 5.
Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 43.
Edmund Spenser, Spenser: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Philip Edwards, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 201.
For a fine discussion of Ophelia’s body in performance, see Carol Chillington Rutter, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr., with C. Patrick O’Donnell, Jr. (London: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 983.
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: an Introduction, 5th edn (New York and St Louis: McGraw-Hill, 1997), p. 221.
Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: the Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook and Akira Kurosawa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 49.
Harry Keyishian, ‘Shakespeare and Movie Genre’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 72–81 (p. 75).
Kenneth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: a Century of Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 184.
Neil Taylor, ‘The Films of “Hamlet”’, Shakespeare and the Moving Image, ed. Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 180–95 (p. 184).
Eleanor Rowe, Hamlet: a Window on Russia (New York: New York University Press, 1976), p. 150.
See Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies (London and New York: Routledge), 1993), p. 15.
Patrick Phillips, ‘Genre, Star and/Auteur — Critical Approaches to Hollywood Cinema’, in An Introduction to Film Studies, ed. Jill Nelmes, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 161–208 (p. 176).
See Dennis Harvey, Variety (31 January–6 February 2000).
Bernice W. Kliman, ‘A Palimpsest for Olivier’s Hamlet’, Comparative Drama, 17 (1983), pp. 243–53 (p. 246).
See Elaine Showalter, ‘Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism’, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Routledge, 1985), pp. 77–94, and Rutter, Enter the Body, who feel that the artist’s skills (Showalter) and the director’s ingenuity (Rutter) rather than the subject dominate the scene.
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© 2003 Maria Jones
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Jones, M. (2003). Ophelia’s Flowers. In: Shakespeare’s Culture in Modern Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597167_4
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