Abstract
There is a YouTube Ophelia that I like to click on — Sassy Gay Friend’s alternate scenario of her drowning.1 A sweet-looking blonde stands on the edge of a stream, one foot lifted. “What, what, what are you doing?” cries an offstage voice, and Sassy Gay Friend, a tall, cute guy with an earring and a scarf, pops onscreen. “Hamlet doesn’t love me anymore,” says Ophelia in anguished tones. “So we kill ourselves — kill ourselves? ” demands Sassy Gay Friend. “There’s something rotten in Denmark, and it’s Hamlet’s piss-poor attitude,” he declares. “Ophelia, he stabbed your father through a curtain!” With relentless good sense, he badgers her, “Write a sad poem in your journal, and move on.” When he compliments her on her hair (“It’s never looked better! I can’t believe you were going to get it wet”), she smiles, and they head away from the stream.
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Notes
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: Methuen, 1985) 77–92; 85.
Kaara Peterson, “Framing Ophelia: Representation and the Pictorial Tradition,” Mosaic 31.3 (September 1998): 1–24. This essay interweaves sophisticated textual analysis of Gertrude’s narrative with analysis of visually represented Ophelias, the most influential of which derive from that narrative. Peterson argues that the queen’s account constitutes a kind of aporia or mise-en-abysme in that “the narrative body’s description by Gertrude, we must remember, has no ‘authority,’ no referent, no originator, pointing instead back to the epistemo-logical gap in the text” (16).
This and all subsequent quotations will be taken from Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, Arden 2 Shakespeare (London and New York: Methuen, 1982).
Lynda E. Boose, “The Father’s House and the Daughter in It: The Structures of Western Culture’s Daughter-Father Relationship,” Daughters and Fathers, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989): 19–74; 21.
See Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet Without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), for an interpretation of the tragedy as emanating not from Hamlet’s melancholy or indecision but from his disenfranchisement of land and crown. The drama of the Polonius family, she argues, parallels that main action. In a richly suggestive discussion, she shows how “Ophelia’s corpse festooned with flowers stands for the estate and progeny denied them both” (126). Here, I see Ophelia as the center of her own story, but within the determining context of the patriarchal rivalries carried out by her father and brother and by Hamlet and Claudius.
Mary Cowden Clarke, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, 3 vols, vol. 2 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1851) 187–263; 252.
Marvin Carlson, “What Is Performance?,” The Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Bial (New York: Routledge, 2007) 70–75; 73.
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© 2012 Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams
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Kahn, C. (2012). Afterword: Ophelia Then, Now, Hereafter. In: Peterson, K.L., Williams, D. (eds) The Afterlife of Ophelia. Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016461_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016461_14
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