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Hamlet Act 4: “The Painting of a Sorrow” The Doubling of Madness and Revenge

Hamlet Act 4: “The Painting of a Sorrow” The Doubling of Madness and Revenge. Focus on the sub-plots of the play Focus on foils Characters who are contrasts/ doubles/ mirror-images Laertes and Fortinbras : vengeful sons – both doubles & foils to Hamlet.

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Hamlet Act 4: “The Painting of a Sorrow” The Doubling of Madness and Revenge

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  1. Hamlet Act 4: “The Painting of a Sorrow”The Doubling of Madness and Revenge • Focus on the sub-plots of the play • Focus on foils • Characters who are contrasts/ doubles/ mirror-images • Laertes and Fortinbras: vengeful sons – both doubles & foils to Hamlet. • Ophelia faces madness & suicide. John Everett Millais, 1852

  2. Act 4: Three Figures of Avenging Sons Laertes returns from Paris to avenge Polonius: That drop of blood that’s calm Proclaims me bastard, cries Cuckold to my father, brands The harlot even here between The chaste unsmirched brow Of my true mother. ……. To hell, allegiance! Vows to the Blackest devil! Conscience and Grace to the profoundest pit! …. Let come what comes, only I’ll be revenged most thoroughly for my father. (4.5.115-136) Fortinbras, Nephew to the king of Norway, sends 2 thousand men into battle against Poland (in the extended version of 4.4 included in both the Doran and Branagh versions) Captain to Hamlet: We go to gain a little patch of ground/That hath no profit in it but the name … I would not farm it. (Fortinbras will become the king in Act 5, nominated by Hamlet as he dies) Hamlet soliloquy: How all occasions do Inform against me. I do not know Why I yet live to say This things to do. … O, from this time forth/ My thoughts be bloody or nothing worth.

  3. Ophelia’s Madness and Suicide • Gentleman: Her speech is nothing, the unshaped use of it does move the hearer’s to collection. (4.5.7-9) (an image of her fragmentation, but her speech provokes interpretation, like art?) • Claudius: O, this is the poison of deep grief: it springs all from her father’s death …. poor Ophelia Divided from her self and her fair judgment (like Hamlet?) Without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts. (4.5.73-82) http://youtu.be/Uet1OaTal5Q http://youtu.be/4hwJ8_mBeiQ http://youtu.be/TfcsP-eKJF8

  4. “Her speech is nothing”: Is it n thing? • “I do not know, my lord, what I should think.” (1.3.104) • “I think nothing, my lord” (3.2.109) • In Elizabethan slang, “nothing” was a term for the female genitalia • She draws on the English folklore of flowers: “there’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance, I pray you love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts …. There’s a daisy.” (4.5.176-85) • She dies singing “snatches of old tunes” drawing on the folk wisdom of the ballad • Ballads of betrayed love and of loss and death • Songs of the “nothings” – women, the marginal, the vulnerable, the poor, the voice of the voiceless in her speech and songs • Moments of perfect lucidity and astute perception: “But I cannot chose but weep to think that they would lay him i’th’cold ground. My brother shall know of it. And so I thank you for your good counsel.” (4.5.66-69) Quoth she, Before you tumbled me You promised me to wed He answers, So would I a don, by yonder sun And thou hadst not come to my bed (4.5.61-4)

  5. Ophelia: “A document in madness” (4.5.179) Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism” ecmd.nju.edu.cn/UploadFile/17/8062/ophelia.doc • We could tell her story as feminists –speak for her, but how? • We could see her as a symbol: “Deprived of thought, sexuality, language, Ophelia’s story becomes the Story of O – the zero, the empty circle or mystery of feminine difference, the cipher of female sexuality to be deciphered by feminist interpretation”. 3) We could Read Ophelia’s story as “the female subtext of the tragedy, the repressed story of Hamlet. In this reading, Ophelia represents the strong emotions that the Elizabethans as well as the Freudians thought womanish and unmanly.” 4) Showalter’s approach – read Ophelia’s history in representation: in painting, photography, psychiatry, and literature, as well as in theatrical production and examine the links in such representations between female insanity and female sexuality. Google: Ophelia painting images Ophelia in representation connects insanity and femininity, the romance of flowers, songs, drowning in feelings, a watery death

  6. Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” Now Ophelia, she’s ’neath the windowFor her I feel so afraidOn her twenty-second birthdayShe already is an old maidTo her, death is quite romanticShe wears an iron vestHer profession’s her religionHer sin is her lifelessnessAnd though her eyes are fixed uponNoah’s great rainbowShe spends her time peekingInto Desolation Row John Everett Millais, 1852 Pre-Raphelite painting, Tate Gallery London 1965, Columbia Records George Steeves, Ophelia(1988)

  7. More Reading Resources: • http://www.academia.edu/206578/Ophelia_in_the_Films_of_Richardson_Zeffirelli_and_Branagh • http://rock.rapgenius.com/Bob-dylan-desolation-row-lyrics#note-1356070 • http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Arthur-rimbaud-ophelia-annotated • http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3668050/Ten-things-you-never-knew-about-Ophelia.html • http://www.hamlethaven.com/ophelia.html#dunn • Klett, Elizabeth. “The Heart of the Mystery: Surveillance in Michael Almereyda and Gregory Doran's Films of Hamlet.” Literature/Film Quarterly.Vol. 41, No. 2

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