Ophelia Confined: Madness and Infantilisation in Some Versions of Hamlet

Abstract

A friend once amused me with a tale about a drawing her daughter had made in kindergarten, in the weeks approaching one Christmas. The drawing depicted a tiny, prone human figure enclosed in some kind of cradle, surrounded by taller figures, towering above it. It was the kinder garten teacher’s habit to ask the children what their pictures represented, so that she could write explanatory titles on them. The little girl told the teacher that, in this drawing, ‘the baby Jesus is crying in the manger and they are all trying to calm him down’. The infant deity of Christianity and Renaissance art was reduced, or expanded, to a twentieth-century child’s experience of adult panic at a crying child and, perhaps, this little girl’s own experience of watching her peers being ‘calmed down’. The child’s drawing mapped itself comically back onto the Nativity, in its awareness of the extraordinary power of a seemingly helpless being. I recalled this anecdote when I first saw an image from the programme of Peter Brook’s 1955 production of Hamlet, in which Mary Ure, as Ophelia, flanked by Horatio (Michael David) and Gertrude (Diana Wynyard) and with Claudius (Alec Clunes) towering above, gazes up and away to her left as Gertrude holds her right wrist and looks at her, in her mad state, with an expression that could be read as pity or anxiety. The hold on the wrist seems to be a restraining one, as if Gertrude wants to calm Ophelia down and to prevent her hands from flailing too wildly.