Abstract
I take my title from a 1924 song, in which a young boy confesses to his mother:
I’ve got a feeling for Ophelia
A funny feeling for Ophelia.
She’s as sweet as I don’t know what.
Does she love me? Maybe and maybe not.1
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Notes
For the rise of “girlhood” from the eighteenth to the twentieth century — as a social phenomenon, as a subject of literary and artistic representation, and as a spur to changes in family relationships — see Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915, ed. Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994)
Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Inferiority (London: Virago, 1995)
Lynne Vallone, Disciplines of Virtue: Girl’s Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). For Mary Cowden Clarke, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines in a Series of Tales (London, 1851–52), I use the two-volume Everyman Library edition (London: J. M. Dent, 1907) All subsequent references to Clarke from this edition.
L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, ed., Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston (New York: Norton, 2007) 179. All subsequent quotations will be from this edition.
See, for example, Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Grove Press, 1989)
Margreta De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
Stephen Orgel, Representing Shakespeare (London: Palgrave, 2002).
Richard Schoch, Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Adrian Poole, Shakespeare and the Victorians (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2003)
Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole, eds., Victorian Shakespeare, 2 vols (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
Gail Marshall, Shakespeare and Victorian Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
See Stanley Friedman, “Echoes of Hamlet in Great Expectations” Hamlet Studies 9 (1987): 86–89
William A. Wilson, “The Magic Circle of Genius: Dickens’ Translations of Shakespearean Drama in Great Expectations,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40 (1985): 154–74
Sarah Gates, “Intertextual Estella: Great Expectations, Gender, and Literary Tradition,” PMLA 124 (2009): 390–405.
Helena Faucit, Lady Martin, On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters (Edinburgh and London, 1885) 5. Scholarship on Ophelia’s place in Shakespeare reception in general, and in visual and literary art in particular, is reviewed effectively in Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. 25–63
Carol Solomon Kiefer, ed., The Myth and Madness of Ophelia (Amherst, MA: Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, 2001). For the role of Ophelia in the shaping of feminist literary criticism
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: Methuen, 1985) 77–94.
William Hazlitt, “Hamlet,” Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, ed. F. J. S. (London: Dent, 1906) 85, qtd. in Gates, “Intertextual Estella” 394.
John Lyly, Euphues, The Complete Works of John Lyly, vol.1, ed. R. Warwick Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902) 188.
All quotations from Shakespeare are from Stephen Orgel and A. R. Brownmuller, eds., The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 2002).
See Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
See Elizabeth Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
Ruskin, letter to Millais, May 4, 1852, qtd. in Allen Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) 33.
Anna Murphy Jameson, Shakespeare’s Heroines, ed. Cheri L. Larsen Hoeckley (London: Broadview, 2005) 177.
For a review of children’s Shakespeare, together with discussions of adaptations and attitudes throughout the Victorian period, see Kathryn Prince, Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals (New York: Routledge, 2008) esp. 37–61.
See Debra N. Mancoff, “Is There Substance Behind the Shadows? New Works on Elizabeth Siddal,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 1 (1992): 20–28. See too, the reminiscences in Hall Caine, My Story (New York: Appleton, 1909) 79–81 and in William Michael Rossetti, “Dante Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal,” Burlington Magazine 1 (1903): 273–95. See, too, the evocative account in
Francine Prose, The lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired (New York: Harper Collins, 2002) 99–136.
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© 2012 Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams
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Lerer, S. (2012). “I’ve got a feeling for Ophelia”: Childhood and Performance. 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_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016461_2
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