Did Hamlet Love Ophelia?: and Other Thoughts on the Play

by Lenny Everson

  Castle and Character

  G. Chaska’s meta-analysis5 of Shakespeare's characters has been the subject of considerable debate and may well have contributed to a translational academic view of these in Hamlet as stage-beings within the mythical late-medieval interior landscapes of English (rather than Danish) castles. The psychological battles that incur in front of Troy are said to be mimicked in and repeated in the jail-like inspaciality of a stone fortress on the Danish coast in this mid-career Shakespeare tragedy.

  Difficulties arise, however, in the failure to acknowledge the authentic renaissance nature of these actions in terms of Shakespeare's own circumstances and the limitations of the Globe's stage, as has been pointed out. An author’s first writings inevitably use metafictals and seldom adequately maintain the fiction of true distance from his or her own life-muse and reflexive wellsprings. Early plays are laden with an author’s surface ideas, while later ones often try to gild what the author thinks are others’ idols, but this, like a true career-changing work, walks bravely into the labyrinthine convolutions and theatre of the author’s own soul.

  The thematic elements of the medieval virtue of Patience, with its associated peaceful conflict resolution, disguised under an antic attitude, are understood in the character of the prince and fronted into battle by the dark opposite, Revenge, who, however insubstanial, is all wrath and intemperance when confined, as it must be, within cold stone walls. These diametrically opposite drives impel more than one of the principle characters, constitutive of the operative schematica of Hamlet; into the turmoil must results when claustrophobic granite medieval motive meets the renaissance logic of the new cannons. Text that appears to be principally discursive is, in truth, more generative, while that which appears hyperbolic is, when the ideographology is parsed, a finer mimesis of the transformation of a maturing civilization, slighting a castle and a monarchy with a wave of a dying prince's hand.

  Death and Life in Hamlet

  Several critics have challenged Thomas Batton's pairing6 of death/dissolution with woman/seduction in Hamlet. Indeed, a cogent argument could be made that Batton relies too heavily on a quantitative, rather than qualitative analysis, and difficulties arise when he attempts to refute the contrary without introducing its co-relationship and the many parallels between the ghost's order for revenge and Ophelia's acceptance of male relationship dominance. A casual reading shows that Ophelia had a choice only between death and revenge.

  Batton, as D. H. Lawrence did before him, makes too strong an attempt to differentiate between the various values of constancy, as it were, in regards to Gertrude and Ophelia, leading to inconsistency. This approach has been devastatingly critiqued by Miller (2006)7 and Smyth (2005)8.

  A meta-analytical approach is called for when tackling this most important aspect of Shakespeare's most celebrated work. We can only speculate what might have been the playwright's intention with Ophelia's songs, but the results direct her end without compromise.

  Smyth cites Shakespeare as a master of the dichotomy between life (woman/Ophelia) and death (man/Hamlet), and Shakespeare, as we have seen, routinely accepts the dualistic classification (with the condition that his work also articulates "some truth that transcends gender and transcends carnal life"9, propelling it to the level of the universal, and there is Smyth’s definition of the “trueness of life” as lost innocence. She implies life is not found in adults, rather, it is embodied in a timeless image: the Eden of childhood, where the world was in order and fathers were in charge of that order. Identifying the archetype, understanding the play is understanding that the action of Hamlet is the reduction of a child's vision of Eden to the cosmic the child must leave behind. She is, however, reluctant to project a vision of lost innocence onto the archetype nostalgia that Ophelia drowned with tears, but prefers to dramatize the girl-child's ineffable sublimation of innocence/need as wisdom lost and forever afterward sought.

  Paul Grissom10 offers a more systematic (although, some say, over cryptographic) analysis seemingly based on entirely different criteria. Grissom contends that further and contradictory elements point, inexorably, towards a conflict between childhood/innocence/female (bosom) and age/despair/mail (balls). We must, he contents convincingly (within, of course the synergistic parameters of Shakespeare's own life), acknowledge that the author includes an ontological and deeper structuralist conception of his universe with the seemingly picayune details of the actions of his heroes in this Danish world, much the same way he would do in later plays such as Lear, where death, at least, has meaning without revenge.

  God, Grissom contends, is, in Shakespeare's world, both an antagonist and a terrifying nonentity, and the effortless contradiction between these two states (or personae, if you will) generates the syntax of the play, and the propulsion of its primary characters towards that inevitable doom in front of the thrones.

  Chapter 16:Use of These Thoughts

  However, students at the following institutions may use the ideas and writings in any way they want, without any acknowledgment or attribution: Queens University, Trent University, UWO, Wilfred Laurier at Brantford, University of Waterloo, University of Toronto, Brock University, York University, York University, University of Guelph, University of Ottawa, Lakehead University, Nipissing University, University of Alberta, Mount Royal University., University of Lethbridge, University of California Berkeley, Bates College, Bowdoin College, Colby College, College of the Atlantic, Thomas College, University of Maine at Farmington, University of Maine at Fort Kent, University of Maine at Machias, University of Southern Maine, Rice University, The University of Texas at Austin, Southwestern University, Harvard University, Williams College, Amherst College, Wellesley College, Tufts University, Boston University, Smith College, Brandeis University, University of Massachusetts - Amherst, Suffolk University in Boston, University of Edinburgh, University of Victoria, University of Manitoba, McGill University, University of New Brunswick, Columbia University, Colgate University, Cornell University, Barnard College, Hamilton College , New York University, University of Rochester, Vassar College, Skidmore College, Yeshiva University, King’s College London, Boston University Press, University of Birmingham, and Loyola Chicago.

  Send any questions to the following address: everson@golden.net.

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