Other Shakespeare heroines have fought back under like circumstances. Jessica defies Shylock and runs off with Lorenzo. Rosalind, Imogen and Julia risk punishment and banishment in search of true love, but a lifetime of indoctrination, together with a particularly impressionable nature, ensures that Ophelia cannot resist.
From that moment on she puts herself entirely in her father’s hands. Having been terrified by an encounter with the seemingly deranged Hamlet, rather than try to talk to him, she rushes to her father and blurts out the whole story. Polonius in his turn reports everything back to the King, and all this culminates in the plot to test Hamlet’s madness in which Ophelia is quite wittingly used as bait. Guilt, love, duty and, above all, terror confound her. Given this state of affairs, imagine the following exchanges from Ophelia’s point of view.
(Ophelia offers to return Hamlet’s gifts.)
HAMLET: I never gave you aught.
OPHELIA: My honour’d lord, you know right well you did…
(Which of them is going crazy?)
HAMLET: Are you honest?
OPHELIA: My lord?
HAMLET: Are you fair?
OPHELIA: What means your lordship?
HAMLET: That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.
OPHELIA: Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?
(Holding her own pretty well; but then…)
HAMLET: Ay, truly. For the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.
OPHELIA: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
HAMLET: You should not have believed me… I loved you not.
OPHELIA: I was the more deceived.
This would be pretty devastating to most of us, but Ophelia is disintegrating fast. I am trying to convey something of the sensation of playing Ophelia, given the story so far.
When Hamlet suddenly springs on Ophelia, ‘Where’s your father?’, the girl who cannot keep a secret feels transparent and replies, ‘At home, my lord’, a little too quickly. She has blown the cover, and now that Hamlet has seen through the plot, she is powerless to dissociate herself from its cynical perpetrators. She puts up little resistance as Hamlet brutally rejects her, in a scene played out mostly for the ears of her eavesdropping puppet-masters.
When everyone has left the stage, Ophelia gives us her one soliloquy that ends with, ‘O woe is me, to have seen what I have seen, see what I see!’ The line has a similar ring to Isabella’s in Measure for Measure:
To whom should I complain? Did I tell this,
Who would believe me?
The audience has witnessed the abuse of both women and is on their side, but the women themselves cannot be reached or helped. They are sealed in the world of the play, with a knowledge that is too dangerous to share. The big difference is that Isabella has a gigantic sense of her self and her integrity while Ophelia has virtually none. She has depended on Hamlet and her brother and father for what flimsy self-definition she has. The one has just denounced her as a whore, the second is abroad and the third is about to be murdered by the first.
I am not going to start decoding Ophelia’s ramblings in the mad scene, because that is a task for each actress who plays her. How much does she know? Did she sleep with Hamlet? These and many other questions are up for grabs. The important thing is to work out your own private coherence and to have a strong intention behind each thing you say. However broken up your story, let each fragment come from a clear image. If there are ‘unconscious’ tics, let them come from a centred impulse. Inhabit your world, don’t demonstrate it.
With a director who is sympathetic to your intentions, any demonstrating can be done for you by the production itself. Out of sheer embarrassment I never disclosed the details of my homework to Richard Eyre, but the tentative sketch that I brought to rehearsals gave him at least enough to go on. He picked up Ophelia’s message, however faint, and helped to focus it physically. His greatest gift to me came in the shape of props.
The first was a bundle of Hamlet’s letters upon which my grasp weakened as the play progressed. In the first scene I clung to them as if they embodied my faith in Hamlet, only to surrender them to Polonius as soon as he beckoned me to. In Act III, Scene 1, Polonius placed the letters in my lap like a photographer arranging a picture. He and Claudius have staged the scene, and the letters are Ophelia’s props. She hands them to Hamlet, saying:
My lord, I have remembrances of yours
That I have longéd long to redeliver.
I pray you now receive them.
As Hamlet departs at the end of the scene, he throws the letters in Ophelia’s face, and they scatter on the floor. Claudius and Polonius re-emerge from their listening-post and discuss the scene they have just witnessed as if Ophelia were not in the room. She, meanwhile, crawls around the floor gathering up the letters as though they were the shards of her life.
The second prop that helped to tell my story was a bundle of blackened twigs. These were a memorable substitute for Ophelia’s usual picturesque garlands. This not only added to her delusion but somehow helped to suggest a subversiveness, a sense that she knew something. ‘Follow her close. Give her good watch, I pray you,’ says Claudius. She is dangerous not just to herself but to the court. When I presented Claudius with a gnarled stick saying, ‘Here’s fennel for you and columbines,’ it was no pretty gift but an accusation.
My performance fell far short of my aims, mainly because I was inexperienced and too inhibited to carry out all that I had planned at home, but I was totally supported by the production. Bill Dudley’s set, with its secret panels and trompe l’œil life-sized ‘spies’ lurking in the corners, together with a soundtrack of indecipherable whisperings, all added to the atmosphere of paranoia, and the chamber scale of the Royal Court suited my implosive rather than explosive version of madness.
But could I have been explosive if I’d wanted to be? That was the next question, put to me (in slightly different terms) by Trevor Nunn, who had seen my Ophelia and was sizing me up for the part of Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well. He had appreciated the detail of my performance but, as he put it, could I preserve that detail and reach the back of the auditorium? (Bear in mind that he was talking main house at Stratford, not the cosy Royal Court.) Luckily for me, Trevor took the risk, and over the next decade I joined in the effort to combine intimacy with projection, heightened language with naturalistic speech, and verbal dexterity with physical strength that has preoccupied the RSC since it first began.
HELENA
Heroine or Harpy?
As Helena with Peggy Ashcroft (Countess)
All’s Well That Ends Well, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1981
In 1991 I was invited to give a paper on Women in Theatre at the Divina Conference at Turin University. I titled it ‘The Heroine, the Harpy and the Human Being’. I wanted to look at the perceptions of virtue and vice in female characters and to uphold the right of women and female characters to be imperfect and flawed without being condemned as the baddy, the whore or the temptress.
The full piece dealt with modern as well as classical roles and was later published in New Theatre Quarterly (Vol. IX, number 34).
For this book I decided to focus on the character of Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, who exemplifies many of my observations. In order to be true to what I was writing at the time, I have kept to these observations in the current reworking for this book, but I am happy to say that a lot of the attitudes I was up against then have changed.
A more detailed study of Helena can be read in a piece I wrote for Clamorous Voices.
What is Virtue?
Any actress playing a classical heroine has to tackle the concepts of virtue and chastity: they are words which come up so centrally and so often that it is impossible to skirt round them. They are us
ed to define the whole woman, and often nothing else about her is known or deemed to be important. As a modern woman I could never connect personally with the significance the word ‘chastity’ had for a character I was playing, until Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well showed me a way through. I found if I mentally substituted the word ‘integrity’ for ‘chastity’, I could reach her need to preserve her sense of self, her internal moral core.
According to the morality of the day, a woman was virtuous simply by being a virgin. A virgin was a commodity on the marriage market, and if a woman lost her virginity out of wedlock, she was sullied goods and lost all claim to virtue. Virtue and virginity became one and the same.
But this makes virtue passive, or at most something to be maintained by resisting, a negative action. This kind of virtue is a male-centred definition, to do with the value of a prize to be won by men, and nothing to do with the intrinsic moral worth of a female human being. In other words, in classical drama and literature men earn their worth through their actions, whereas a heroine doesn’t have to do anything, she just has to be innocent, preferably quiet, and definitely a virgin. Female virtue is a state of being, rather than doing.
Historically, it was men who created the tie-up between a woman’s virginity and her virtue, but we women want our heroines and ourselves to be tested against the general human virtues and prove ourselves by our deeds and decisions against the same criteria as men.
A Mingled Yarn
In Act IV, Scene 3, of All’s Well That Ends Well Shakespeare says:
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.
It is one of my favourite speeches. It is not at all famous and comes from the mouth of a minor character who doesn’t even have a name (the First Lord).
It felt to me to be one of the central tenets of the play, and therefore it seemed that Shakespeare intended his chief female character, Helena, to reflect it. I believe Shakespeare deliberately created a heroine who is imperfect but whose worth he ultimately believes in. He challenges the audience to accept a flawed female as their guide through the story and to allow her to win in the end. That end remains ambiguous but, I think, hopeful. It would be unbelievable if it were all rosy, but it would be uncharacteristically cynical if the title were entirely ironic.
Helena came to me with a bad reputation. Critics over the years had judged her as immodest, ambitious, predatory and sanctimonious. It was 1981, and the play had not often been performed because so many people deemed it unplayable and the heroine unacceptable. What is Helena’s crime? She pursues the man of her choice rather than waiting for him to choose her. Helena’s namesake in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which I played in that same season) also chases after her man, but she is loveable because her quest is hopeless and it is treated comedically. In Act II, Scene 2, she voices the inappropriateness of her behaviour and despises her own desperation:
We cannot fight for love, as men may do.
We should be woo’d and were not made to woo,
and what is here comically expressed, is the predicament of the other, more serious Helena as well.
I was not interested in judging All’s Well’s Helena. I had my work cut out learning her very opaque speeches and summoning the courage and technique to play my first major Shakespeare role on the main stage at Stratford in the company of Dame Peggy Ashcroft among other luminaries.
What I instantly related to was a woman of ambition. To date, my favourite role had been Nina in The Seagull. Nina is no ordinary sweet young thing but an ambitious actress eager for experience, who gets battered by tragedy, is strengthened by it and moves on. I could always relate to ambition, having plenty of drive myself. What was harder to relate to was the fact that the full extent of Helena’s ambition was to get her man.
Precisely because she is hard to label, Helena is one of the most interesting and modern of Shakespeare’s women that I have ever played. However, the label-seeking analysts want to know where they stand. They fret over whether All’s Well is a comedy, a romance or a tragedy. The answer is that it hops between all three and all three overlap; a bit like life really. But a label it must have, so it becomes ‘a problem play’, and the major problem is what to make of the central couple, Helena and Bertram.
It is one thing to come to terms with a heroine who pursues and traps a man into marriage, but another to accept that the man she pursues doesn’t seem worth the effort. Neither hero nor heroine is likeable.
The issue of likeability is one I have come up against often since, but never so clearly as with Helena. Seldom does anybody ask whether they like Hamlet, Henry V, or King Lear, but somehow the heroine has to be sympathetic, palatable, liked. It is definitely easier for a woman to be liked if she is pretty, gentle, and unassuming than if she is intense, ambitious, and complicated like Helena.
On the other hand, it is interesting that George Bernard Shaw preferred Helena to any other Shakespeare heroine, and having studied the part in depth and played it in repertoire over a period of two years, I feel certain that Shakespeare was basically on her side. Every decent, wise character in the play approves of her, and her only detractors are Parolles, a known cheat, and Bertram, an immature snobbish boy.
From the start, I felt for Helena’s unrequited love and her social isolation. I liked her for her ambition and the way she shoved self-pity aside and followed her dream. I admired her guts chancing her arm at curing the King. I was fascinated by her oblique, broken-up, cryptic soliloquies at the beginning of the play. They gave me a clue as to her tangled thoughts, and the fact that she almost could not speak her ambition out loud, it seemed so transgressive. This means that she could barely admit her feelings to herself, since a confessional soliloquy to the audience is the equivalent of talking to oneself.
About her faults I was maybe less than honest. I was feeling defensive against what seemed to be a historical sea of prejudice, so I was perhaps in denial about any of her shortcomings, her possible underhandedness, her blinkeredness about Bertram’s feelings, her scheming—and I sought every justification for these that I could dig out of the text.
Trevor Nunn, the director, also saw the need to redeem the misunderstood Helena if he was going to make the play work. By setting the play in the early twentieth century, he helped my interpretation of Helena by suggesting a connection with the emancipated heroines of Ibsen and Shaw. He also encouraged me to emphasise Helena’s trepidation and thereby her bravery, to dig out and deliver whatever self-deprecatory wit she might have, and to find her moments of remorse and compassion for Bertram. The opportunities were all there in Shakespeare’s text.
Yes, she can seem secretive and indirect, especially in her dealings with Bertram, but I put that down to diffidence and self-doubt. Yes, she can seem manipulative but, as I see it, she only manipulates what Fate seems to set in her pathway, and Fate seems consistently to reward her faith. First her pursuit of Bertram gets a blessing from his own mother, the Countess of Rousillon, then her faith (plus a little medical know-how) manages to cure the King of France of a fatal disease, and then the King promises her Bertram as her reward.
When things go terribly wrong and Helena realises that her monomania has driven Bertram away from France and on to the battlefield and possible death, she is willing to give up her pursuit, become a wandering pilgrim and leave France, since it is her presence there that has forced Bertram to run to the wars.
No, come thou home, Rousillon,
Whence honour but of danger wins a scar,
As oft it loses all: I will be gone;
My being here it is that holds thee hence:
Shall I stay here to do’t? no, no, although
The air of paradise did fan the house
And angels officed all: I will be gone.
All this seems quite clearly to indicate her willing self-sacrifice to Bertram’s happin
ess, but then, for the sake of a good plot, Shakespeare has her winding up in Italy and, by ‘coincidence’, exactly in that part of Italy where Bertram’s regiment is stationed. The prejudiced in the audience see only the schemer deliberately stalking her prey. They forget the soliloquy they have recently heard. Actions have spoken louder than words.
The fact that everyone Helena meets seems to like her, including the Widow and Diana, who take to her immediately, can be seen by the prejudiced as evidence of her manipulative charm. I tried to be as straight as possible, but the plot is twisty and doesn’t help me.
Why did I try? Partly I was being true to what I found in the text, but partly I was guilty of wanting to make Helena as palatable as I possibly could. This tends to happen with actresses of my generation who do not want to play into any possible misogynist interpretations of a female role. We feel burdened by the need to overcompensate and make our character better than anyone else, wiser, more moral, more sympathetic; and that leads to a different, though understandable, kind of inaccuracy.
Helena was complicated enough for me not to have to come down one side or another of the ‘heroine or harpy’ argument. I loved her variety, her contradictions, her elusiveness, her switches from diffidence to dynamism, from conjuror to rejected victim, from pilgrim to adventurer. I love her ‘feminine’ empathy and her ‘masculine’ wooing and pursuing; and she does all this without having to wear trousers!
After a long and painful journey she wins through. Bertram has been through a painful journey too, and Helena’s steadfastness, that once sickened him, becomes the very thing he needs to redeem him from his own self-loathing and humiliation.
I did have trouble with both Shakespeare’s and Trevor’s idea of the woman as redeemer. This kind of idealism doesn’t seem true to a real woman’s experience any more than the negative portrayal of a scheming succubus, but I also can’t believe that Shakespeare meant to leave the audience with a sense of ‘Well, that marriage sure ain’t gonna last’ or ‘Poor geezer saddled with that domineering woman’. I think he meant to leave us with a feeling that these two people have gone on an incredible journey, and who knows? They might work it out, and their life could be very interesting.
Brutus and Other Heroines Page 2