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.
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Notes
Gugu Mbatha-Raw on preparing to play Ophelia, Daily Telegraph, 28 May 2009.
For a description and analysis of this concept, in which Barthes explores the potentially disruptive or transgressive potential of elements of a photo in excess of its seeming intended subject, see Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), pp. 25–60.
The Quarto One stage direction for Ophelia’s ‘mad’ entrance is ‘Enter Ophelia playing on a lute, and her hair down singing’. Alan Dessen has suggested the direction draws ‘upon an actor’s memory of how the scene was staged in some production’; Quarto One is, disputably, a memorial reconstruction by actors. Alan Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 38.
For an account of Laing’s early work and thought, his ‘Rumpus Room’ experi ments with psychiatric hospital inmates and his comments on the Nan case, see Daniel Burston, The Wings of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D. Laing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 37–40.
Elaine Showalter, ‘Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. by Patricia A. Parker (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 77–94, p. 80.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 117.
In fact, in English law, ‘natural fools’ or ‘idiots’ (those with congenital intel lectual disabilities) and persons ‘non compos mentis’ are distinguished from the second half of the thirteenth century. See Richard Neugebauer, ‘Medieval and Early Modern Theories of Mental Illness’, Archives of General Psychiatry, 36, 4, 1979, pp. 477–83, pp. 478–9.
See Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press: 2004), p. 175.
Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, New Mermaid edi tion (London: Methuen, 2006), 1.2.142–3. Subsequent quotations will be referenced in-text.
This scene in The Changeling lends support to a history of childhood of the kind proposed by Linda Pollock, who has suggested that early modern parents and carers showed a great deal more of what we might recognise as love and compassion for their children than had previously been sug gested in the theories of Aries and de Mause. See Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Vintage Books, 1962).
Lloyd de Mause, ‘The Evolution of Childhood’, in The History of Childhood, ed. by Lloyd de Mause (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), pp. 1–74.
Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
For a summary of these arguments see William A. Corsaro, The Sociology of Childhood (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 65–7.
See, for example, Paul Delaney, ‘King Lear and the Decline of Feudalism’, PMLA, 92, 3, May 1977, pp. 429–40.
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984).
Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Julian Markels, ‘King Lear, Revolution, and the New Historicism’, Modern Language Studies, 21, 2, Spring 1991, pp. 11–26.
John Turner, ‘The Tragic Romances of Feudalism’, in Shakespeare: The Play of History, ed. by Graham Holderness, Nick Potter and John Turner (London: Macmillan Press, 1988), pp. 83–154.
With thanks to Jerald Spotswood’s article ‘Maintaining Hierarchy in The Tragedie of King Leaf, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 38, 2, 1998, pp. 265–80, for sending me back to many of these works.
Jane Kromm, The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe, 1500–1850 (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 90–1.
Alan R. Young, Hamlet and the Visual Arts 1709–1800 (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), p. 280.23.
Charles Lamb, ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’, The Works of Charles Lamb vol.2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1838), p. 353.
Fiona Gregory, ‘Performing the Rest Cure: Mrs Patrick Campbell’s Ophelia, 1897’, New Theatre Quarterly, 28, 2, May 2012, pp. 107–21, pp. 108–9.
Anna Brownell Murphy Jameson, Shakespeare’s Heroines: Characteristics of Women (1889; New York: AMS Press, 1967).
Helena Faucit, On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1899), p. 14.
Ellen Terry, The Story of My Life (New York: Doubleday, 1908), p. 154.
Bridget Escolme, Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2013).
Petra Kuppers, ‘Toward the Unknown Body: Stillness, Silence, and Space in Mental Health Settings’, Theatre Topics, 10, 2, September 2000, pp. 129–43, p. 129.
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Escolme, B. (2014). Ophelia Confined: Madness and Infantilisation in Some Versions of Hamlet . In: Harpin, A., Foster, J. (eds) Performance, Madness and Psychiatry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137337252_8
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