“Green girls … unsifted in perilous circumstance.”
Hamlet, I.iii.101–02
Not all of Shakespeare’s daughters are rebels. Some are docile, eager-to-please young women—classic Good Girls. Their fathers view them as ideal children whose beauty and accomplishments reflect well on their families and whose conduct presents no threat to authority. Each young woman accepts the suitor of her father’s choice and takes pains to make herself presentable and agreeable. The plays begin as that tranquil stasis is about to be disrupted. In the crisis that comes with the daughter’s maturity, these fathers are convinced that they know what is best, and they feel no qualms about imposing their wills. These daughters, unlike their rebellious counterparts, do not question their fathers’ views nor complain about the effects of their commands. Lest we credit this submissive stance as Shakespeare’s ideal, or as the feminine norm for that period, we have only to look at the blight that it creates.
In the comic version of this plot, Much Ado About Nothing, Hero is rescued by external forces, and her reputation and happiness, so far as we can judge, are restored. In the tragic versions, the story of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus and Ophelia in Hamlet, the young women suffer isolation, abuse, and death. The gauge of each play’s tone is the extent to which the damage caused by unquestioning obedience is made permanent and irreparable. Another indication of the skeptical eye that Shakespeare casts on the conventional model of daughterly subservience is the feigned version that he creates in other plays. Bianca, the supposed Good Girl in The Taming of the Shrew, is revealed to be a sly manipulator of both father and suitor. Goneril and Regan, the wily flatterers in King Lear, emerge as ruthless power-mongers and patricides. (They will be discussed in Chapter 4.) In no case does Shakespeare present the domineering father as the standard of justice and wisdom.
Hero’s story is in many ways the comic version of Desdemona’s. She, too, is falsely accused of sexual license by an unscrupulous villain and publicly humiliated by the suitor he has duped. She, too, is rejected by a father who doubts her intrinsic worth and pronounces her better unborn than disobedient. Her groom is also a brave and accomplished soldier, just returned from a successful military campaign and eager for celebration and love. The setting is also analogous: Italy—Messina in this case rather than Venice—land of hot days and strong passions. The main characters are again aristocrats, well spoken, privileged, and idle. Hero, like Desdemona, has a woman friend who believes in her innocence and defies her male accusers in a passionate defense of her honor. The differences between the women’s situations, however, are crucial in assuring that both the development and the outcome of Hero’s story remain comic.
Rather than being exiled from her native city, relegated as Desdemona is to a fortified island, Hero remains ensconced in her native social element. The forces of religion, family, and friendship act in concert to rescue the wronged maiden. This time her female ally is not the recently met and socially inferior Emilia, but a cousin of her own class. Beatrice’s defense of Hero, based as it is on both empathy and lifelong friendship, is infectious. It inspires first the Friar who conducts the disrupted wedding, then the groom’s bosom friend, and finally the rejecting father to recognize her innocence. Unlike Othello, the lover is not a battle-hardened general but an impulsive junior officer, readily influenced by the mentors he reveres. The villain, the malcontent Don John, is much less cunning than the master hypocrite, Iago. It takes no great leap of imagination for the play’s protagonists, Beatrice and Benedick, to see him for the “bastard” that he is by birth and nature. Don John is incompetent, his schemes transparent, his henchmen bumbling. It takes only coincidence and eavesdropping—the devices of comedy—to expose his thin stratagems.
Even the setting in time and place reinforces the comic tone. The military battle has just been won, not averted by chance. Instead of the barely contained frustration of the garrisoned island in Othello, the mood of triumphant Messina is celebratory. The scene is ripe not for scheming and bloodshed but for dancing and romance. Exoneration and expiation are possible, and the play ends not in murder but in marriage.
Just under the laughter and the pipers’ melodies, though, resound more ominous notes. Hero is betrayed by both father and suitor. Her “happy” marriage is achieved at the cost of silent acquiescence, first in the men’s rejection, then in their refusal to see their mistreatment for what it is. All the protest, like all the defense, of Hero is left to her rescuer, Beatrice. One of her functions in the play is to make us see her cousin’s happiness for the tenuous and compromised thing that it is.
Claudio, like the rest of Messina, knows Don John to be a cynic and a malcontent. His moroseness is so at odds with the festive temperament of the other nobles that Beatrice comments after their first encounter on “how tartly” he looks, adding wryly that his every appearance leaves her “heartburned an hour after” (II.i.4). Even the mild-mannered Hero notes that he has “a very melancholy disposition.” That Don John is not only sad but malicious is also clear to all: his own henchman, Conrade, reminds him that he has been at odds with his brother and should be conciliatory since he is only “newly” restored to “his grace” (I.iii.20). Don John growls back that he prefers to be “disdained by all” for the “plain-dealing villain” that he is. His flimsy plan for sullying Hero’s reputation depends on his questionable claim that “the lady is disloyal” (III.ii.89–90). The evidence is circumstantial: his supposed witnessing of the young woman’s assignation with another lover at “her chamber window … even the night before her wedding day” (98–99). Yet it is enough to cause Claudio and his patron, Don Pedro, to denounce the modest young woman. Benedick, after a moment’s reflection, divines the true source of the evil: “John the bastard, / Whose spirits toil in frame of villainies” (IV.i.186–87). Why then does Claudio so readily credit the vicious lies about the woman he professes to love? The short answer is that the groom scarcely knows his bride.
The reasons are partly situational. Claudio is a newcomer to Messina, a “Florentine,” in the company of the Prince of Aragon, Don Pedro, who has just “bestowed much honor” on him for brave military feats. Claudio is very young—resembling more a “lamb” than the soldierly “lion” one might expect and eagerly following after his “new sworn brother,” the cosmopolitan Benedick. He has “noted” (I.i.145) Hero at an earlier time, he admits, using the word that echoes through the play from title to climactic scene. In Shakespeare’s day “nothing” and “noting” were pronounced alike; the pun becomes an extended metaphor on the superficiality of appearances. Before, Claudio says, he “looked upon [Hero] with a soldier’s eye”—attracted but intent on his “rougher task.” Now that he has returned victorious, “war thoughts” have been replaced by “soft and delicate desires” (ll. 269–71). We should note—pun intended—that Claudio is describing a fantasy, not an individual woman. He confesses to Benedick, “In mine eye, she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on” (ll. 166–67, italics mine). The jaded Benedick parries his sentimental outlook: “I can see without spectacles, and I see no such matter.” For him, Hero is merely “Leonato’s short daughter (ll. 189–90). He demands wryly, “Would you buy her, that you inquire after her?” The enamored young courtier responds, “Can the world buy such a jewel?” The pretty sentiment sugarcoats the ugly implication: the woman is an object whose value lies in her looks. Again the worldly Benedick undercuts the romanticism: “Yea, and a case to put it into.”
Claudio is undeterred. When Don Pedro enters, he confesses to his other mentor in turn: “That I love her, I feel.” The Prince responds: “That she is worthy, I know” (I.i.203–04). The stichomythia suggests their complacency. But what is the test of this worth? Claudio’s only question to Don Pedro is an indirect inquiry about Hero’s dowry: “Hath Leonato any son, my lord?” Don Pedro, instantly understanding the implication, assures him: “No child but Hero; she’s his only heir” (l. 263). In their minds, the issue is settled: it remains only for Claudio to get her father’s permission for the match and then, Don Pedro avers, “Thou shalt have her” (l. 278). Although the young woman will be informed, she will have no choice: she will be matched for life to this man who has been pleased enough by her “modest” looks to claim her.
Leonato is in perfect accord with this patriarchal system. In fact, for him the eligible suitors are interchangeable. When he is mistakenly informed that Don Pedro is the one seeking Hero’s hand, he sends his brother to order her to accept. The uncle, old Antonio, expresses the conventional view: “Well, niece, I trust you will be ruled by your father” (II.i.43–44). But Hero, like Claudio, has a more worldly ally; her witty cousin Beatrice answers for her:
Yes, faith. It is my cousin’s duty to make curtsy and say, “Father, as it please you.” But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy and say, “Father, as it please me” [ll. 45–48].
Since this is a comedy, Hero suffers none of Juliet’s angst at being betrothed to the wrong man. The misunderstanding about Don Pedro is easily resolved, and the attraction between her and Claudio is acknowledged to be mutual. At Beatrice’s amused prompting, Hero shyly “tells him in his ear that he is in her heart” (II.i.282–83). So the match is made without the couple’s having exchanged a single word. All the ado has been over “noting” (observing surface appearances): no wonder that the undoing will occur over “nothing.”
The superficiality of Claudio’s attachment is evident from his courtship: not he but Don Pedro is the spokesman. The prince sums up that process to his protégé: “I have wooed in thy name, and fair Hero is won. I have broke with her father, and his good will obtained” (II.i.267–68). Till this point, Claudio had been ready to believe Don John’s lie, conveyed under cover of masks and disingenuousness, that his patron was trying to steal his lady. Disabused, he is nonetheless easily persuaded of his more vicious lie about Hero’s promiscuity. “If you will follow me, I will show you enough” (III.ii.105, my italics), the villain promises. He adds, “think you of a worse title [than “disloyal”] and I will fit her to it” (ll. 96–97). On the surface, this sounds like tact: Don John does not wish to utter the full extent of Hero’s lewdness. But the double entendre is a sly boast: anything that Claudio and Don Pedro can accuse Hero of, the schemer can make them believe.
Claudio’s most damning fault, however, is not gullibility but malice. He vows not only to reject Hero but to “shame her” before the entire “congregation” assembled for their wedding. Her humiliation, in other words, must be made greater than his: the total ruin of her reputation. Don Pedro instantly allies with his protégé “to disgrace her” (III.ii.112). Neither considers taking the more direct and kindly approach: simply asking Hero herself to answer these incredible charges.
The ruined wedding, too, reflects the shallow nature of Claudio’s love. Shakespeare builds suspense as the groom pretends at first to go through with the ceremony. He calls Hero a “rich and precious gift” whose worth he cannot “counterpoise”—innuendoes that suggest again the quantitative way that he measures her value. “Nothing,” his mentor and co-conspirator adds, can equal such a prize “unless you render her again” (IV.i.27). This paradox is precisely the resolution that the comedy will offer: once Claudio has been taught to regret his haste and to pity Hero, his supposedly dead bride will be replaced by her newly exonerated self.
Several of Shakespeare’s plays present a situation in which a woman is falsely accused of sexual license: besides Othello, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline, for example. In all, the mood turns ugly at the advent of this most difficult to refute charge. The enormous value accorded to chastity becomes clear if we look at the case of Lavinia in the early tragedy Titus Andronicus. Daughter of a Roman general, and newly married, Lavinia is set upon in a dark wood and raped by the two sons of her father’s enemy. They compound her suffering by murdering her beloved husband and mutilating her, cutting off her hands and tongue so that she cannot name her attackers. Lavinia does succeed in identifying them, however, writing their names in the dirt by the torturous means of holding a “staff in her mouth and guid[ing] it with her stumps” (stage direction, IV.i.76). Once her father Titus has learned the rapists’ identity, all his efforts are bent on exacting the cruelest possible revenge. He lures the miscreants to his quarters and slits their throats, with Lavinia aiding him by using her mutilated arms to “hold / The basin that receives their guilty blood” (V.ii.182–83). But Titus is not satisfied with mere murder. He must torment their mother, Tamora, Queen of the Goths, who had urged her sons to the rape as the greatest means of afflicting Titus.
The grisly revenge goes on. Titus next “grind[s] their bones to powder small,” “temper[s] … the paste” with the blood he has drawn, and “in that paste let[s] their vile heads be baked” (V.ii.198–200). A fairy tale ghoul, he relishes his morbid role: “I’ll play the cook” (l. 204), he exults. He serves Tamora the dish, tells her that she has been the unwitting cannibal of her own children, and then kills her in the horror of that new knowledge. But the striking point for our purposes is that Titus also kills Lavinia.
The death is not accidental; in fact, it is one in which the young woman acquiesces. She enters the banquet like a sacrificial victim, “with a veil over her face” (stage direction, V.iii.25). Titus asks his guests-enemies whether the legendary Virginius was right “To slay his daughter with his own right hand, / Because she was enforc’d, stain’d, and deflow’r’d” (ll. 37–38). Saturninus, the corrupt emperor, commends Virginius, “because the girl should not survive her shame, / And by her presence still renew his sorrows” (ll. 41–42, my italics). This is the height of male arrogance and kill-the-messenger female subjugation. It is especially ironic when we recall that Lavinia was married, and so presumably not a virgin, and was also the innocent victim of her father’s wars. Yet she remains still and acquiescent: neither then nor earlier does she oppose her male kinsmen’s (uncle, brother, and nephew, as well as father) conviction that she is ruined beyond hope. Never does she make any attempt to save herself. Lavinia is simply the object of the men’s pity and the spur to their revenge. Titus kills her swiftly, echoing Virginius’s supposed motives: “Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee, / And with thy shame thy father’s sorrow die!” (ll. 46–47). The ruthless Tamora is shocked: “Why hast thou slain thine only daughter thus?” Even she would not murder her own offspring. But Titus is impervious to guilt:
Not I … ’twas Chiron and Demetrius.
They ravished her, and cut away her tongue,
And they, ’twas they, that did her all this wrong [ll. 56–58].
Granted that this, Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, is crude in plot and thin in characterization—closer to farce and melodrama than to high tragedy. Granted, too, that by this point Titus is nearly mad with grief and rage. After all, he has also murdered two of his own sons, whom he accused of dishonoring him by betraying his cause. Nevertheless, the issue of his daughter’s honor has different grounds. Lavinia is a passive, not an active, agent in her father’s dishonor. She “stains” his reputation not because of something that she does against him but because of something that is done to her. He does not kill her to spare her further suffering but to destroy the living embodiment of his “shame.” Chastity, in which is included marital fidelity, is an absolute, valued more highly than life. No wonder then that Claudio’s denouncement of Hero is so devastating.
The shift in tone in the wedding scene occurs when Claudio subjects his bride to an excruciating public castigation. Changing the terms of his marriage mart metaphor, he demands of his intended father-in-law: “Give not this rotten orange to your friend.” Hero’s blushes—she is shocked into speechlessness at first—show “guiltiness, not modesty” (IV.i.40), he claims. He overwhelms her with oxymorons: she is “most foul, most fair,” an exemplar of “pure impiety and impious purity” (ll. 101–02). Although Hero still looks to him like “Dian in her orb / As chaste as is the wind ere it be blown” (ll. 55–56), he will not trust the testimony of his own instincts. Instead, Claudio credits what the bastard Don John has told him he has seen. “Are not our eyes our own?” he demands with unwitting irony. Claudio also accepts the word of the “ruffian” Borachio, who “hath / Confessed the vile encounters” he has had with Hero “a thousand times in secret.” (ll. 91–92) This hyperbolic number recalls the “thousand ducats” (III.iii.101) that Borachio boasts of receiving from Don John for staging the tryst, with Margaret disguised as Hero.
Claudio is questioning the worth of Hero’s “name,” which he, ironically, is even then sullying. She is so shocked that she too questions her identity. “Is it not Hero?” she responds pathetically, “Who can blot that name / With any just reproach?” (IV.i.78–79) No one can: but reputation, not justice, is the issue here.
If this were the only plot, Hero’s young life would be blighted beyond rescue, and Much Ado About Nothing would be a tragedy. In the outraged words of Beatrice, Hero has suffered “public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancor,” and has been “wronged,” “slandered,” and “undone” (IV.i.298–301). The accuracy of this counter-charge is proven by the aftermath of Claudio’s denouncement. Hero faints dead away, the accusers make a hasty retreat, and the wronged maid revives only to face the recrimination of the man who should be her protector: her father. He demands a “dagger’s point” for himself and wishes for her “death” as “the fairest cover for her shame” (ll. 107, 114). Worse, he urges the reviving girl: “do not live, Hero; do not ope thine eyes” and goes so far as to threaten to “strike at [her] life” (ll. 121, 125). Leonato curses his only child with the bitterest wish a parent can express: that she had never been born.
In exact parallel to Claudio, his accusation is based entirely on appearances: “Why wast thou ever lovely in my eyes?” he demands of the forlorn young woman, and claims: “she is fall’n / Into a pot of ink, that the wide sun / Hath drops too few to wash her clean again” (IV.i.137–39). This sounds like a schoolroom version of Macbeth’s bloody metaphor. Leonato’s evidence is based on hearsay and the testimony of witnesses he never thinks to question: “Would the two princes lie,” he demands, and “Claudio lie,” who wept, he recalls, as he made the charges. Instantly, he has taken the men’s word, including that of the malcontent Don John, dignified in his description as a “prince.” It never occurs to Leonato to ask his daughter for her version of events. Even after her fervent denials, he wants blood—theirs or hers. “If they speak but truth of her,” he growls, “These hands shall tear her” (ll. 188–89). Throughout this painful confrontation, he does not comfort his daughter or even talk to her. Fortunately, in the other witnesses to her slander, Hero has powerful champions.
The first of these is her best friend and nightly bedfellow, Beatrice. The cousins share deep sympathies, especially about one another’s love interests. In the opening scene, the quiet Hero’s only line is her gloss of Beatrice’s witty inquiry after “Signior Mountanto”: “My cousin means Signior Benedick of Padua” (I.i.32). Under Beatrice’s sarcastic show of indifference, Hero knows, is a sincere anxiety about the soldier’s safety. Later, Hero is the instigator of the scheme to make Beatrice admit her love for the only man who is her mental match. Hero knows her cousin’s faults, and she knows, too, how to exaggerate them so that Beatrice will take the “false sweet bait” wrought by “little Cupid’s crafty arrow” (III.i.33, 22). “Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes,” she tells her waiting gentlewoman and the eavesdropping Beatrice. “Her wit / Values itself [too] highly.” And she adds the final jab: “She cannot love … she is so self-endeared” (ll. 51–56). In the company of other women, Hero is bright and open, a shrewd judge of character and an eager partaker in the mischievous plot.
Hero is also the soul of honor. She agrees to aid Claudio and Don Pedro in this matchmaking scheme with a statement that might be her byword: “I will do any modest office … to help my cousin to a good husband” (II.i.333–34, my italics). In a play replete with cuckold jokes—the first is Benedick’s response to the love-struck Claudio’s announcement that he intends to marry (I.i.175–76), the last Claudio’s own remark just before the wedding that as a husband Benedick is sure to become a “double dealer”—Hero keeps a staunchly clean tongue in her mouth. As she is dressing for her wedding, the loose-tongued Margaret offends her with some bawdy jests, and Hero snaps, “Fie upon thee! Art not ashamed?” (III.iv.25). Even in the duping scene, pretending to castigate Beatrice, she credits her with the values that both cousins, in fact, embrace: “truth and virtue,” “simpleness and merit” (III.i.69, 70). So by the time of Claudio’s accusation, the audience has had ample evidence that Hero is a paragon of modesty and sincerity.
We have seen, too, that Beatrice would be a formidable defender. As the overwhelmed messenger says after her invective about the absent Benedick: “I will hold friends with you, lady” (I.i.80), and Leonato concedes to his niece, “Cousin, you apprehend passing shrewdly” (II.i.70). What Beatrice “apprehends,” she must express. While the men, including the usually poised Benedick, remain nonplussed by Claudio’s denouncement, not “know[ing] what to say,” Beatrice knows exactly how to answer the charges: “on my soul, my cousin is belied!” (IV.i.144). She dismisses Claudio as “Count Comfect”—no gallant but a sugar-coated flatterer and slanderer. “It is a man’s office,” she tells Benedick to “right” Hero. And the means? “Kill Claudio” (ll. 262, 284). The short, grim command fills Benedick—and us—with horror. It disrupts the comic tone and would, if carried out, turn the play blackly tragic. Shakespeare must pull out all his comic tools to patch together a happy resolution.
The simplest of these devices is dramatic irony: the Watch—and the audience—know the truth. The guards have overheard Borachio’s account to Conrade of the conspiracy, and they take the “arrant knaves” (III.v.30) into custody. However incompetent they prove as witnesses—Dogberry fails to stop the doomed wedding because he is “too cunning to be understood” (V.i.217–18)—they have assured that the truth is there to be discovered. As the sardonic Borachio observes to the nobles: “What your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light.” To corroborate the bumblers’ testimony, the henchman is moved to a remorseful confession, and the chief conspirator, Don John, confirms his own guilt by “secretly [stealing] away” (IV.ii.56). He, too, is caught and, safely off-stage, “brought with armed men back to Messina” (V.iv.123). So Shakespeare puts the plot structure in place for proving Hero’s innocence.
On the deeper level of character development, Beatrice is not made Hero’s only champion. The Friar who performed the wedding ceremony proves a thoroughly sympathetic witness. Simply on the evidence of his instincts and experience, “by noting of the lady,” he stakes his “age,” “reverence,” “calling,” and “divinity” on her being “guiltless” (IV.i.156; 165–66). This stranger’s perception of Hero’s blushes and protests is considerably more sensitive than that of the two men who claim to love her, her father and her fiancé.
The Friar’s scheme for “righting” Hero depends not on violent action but on pathetic forbearance. He urges Leonato to publish the claim that her swoon was fatal, so that thereby the “dead” lady “Shall be lamented, pitied, and excused / Of every hearer” (IV.i.214–15). Claudio, the Friar predicts, will soon miss and value her anew: “Th’ idea of her will sweetly creep / Into his study of imagination” and “every lovely organ of her life” be enhanced by “the eye and prospect of his soul” (ll. 222–27). This is an ironically fitting method to restore so superficial a love: to replace the suitor’s tainted image of Hero with a newly shining version. Should this plan fail, the Friar offers an alternate possibility: concealment “in some reclusive and religious life”—the nunnery of Hamlet’s bitter command to Ophelia—“as best befits her wounded reputation.” In other words, Claudio’s false accusation has ruined any chance for Hero to marry another. The best hope that the Friar can offer is “This wedding day / Perhaps is but prolonged” (ll. 251–52). He urges on her the passive course: “Have patience and endure.” The dazed Hero remains silent.
Better Beatrice’s violent response, most modern young women might think. But do suitor and father ever acknowledge how much they have abused the innocent Hero? No: they are agreed both on the limited extent of Claudio’s guilt and on the superficial means of expiating it. After the Friar and Beatrice have persuaded Leonato to pretend that Hero is dead, he at last challenges Claudio: “I say thou hast belied mine innocent child” (V.i.67). But his chief concern is with defending his own “honor” and that of his “ancestors” and with lauding himself as a paragon of fatherly devotion. There can be, he claims, no other “father that so loved his child / Whose joy of her is overwhelmed like mine” (ll. 8–9). Admittedly, he is feigning grief in order to spread the rumor that Hero is dead. In a comic twist, his credulous old brother is so moved that he challenges the young gallant to a duel, and Leonato must restrain him. Still, Leonato prides himself on the depth of his own “bereavement”—in the form not only of mourning but of bitter disappointment. Like Brabantio in his appeal to the Duke of Venice, he will not agree to “patch grief with proverbs,” and claims proudly:
I will be flesh and blood
For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently [ll. 34–36].
Hero, of course, is expected to practice just such stoicism under much greater suffering. Nor does Leonato accuse Claudio of willful malice. Later he will call both him and Don Pedro “innocent,” agreeing that they accused Hero only “in error.”
Claudio’s view of his actions exactly reflects Leonato’s values. Having lost Hero, he misses his “image” of her, which appears to his fancy, he says, “in the rare semblance that I loved it” (V.i.238–39). Her posthumous reward for all the “shame” he has brought upon her, he claims, is “glorious fame”—the exculpation of the blot on her ancestral “honor” that preoccupies Leonato. The suitor, too, sees his only fault as gullibility: “Yet sinned I not / But in mistaking” (ll. 261–62). Nevertheless, his guilt at the offense to her reputation shows in his eagerness to return to his would-be father-in-law’s graces. Between them, the men devise the perfect superficial expiation.
“I cannot bid you bid my daughter live,” Leonato begins, lying slyly, “That were impossible” (V.i.266). He posits the ultimate substitute, his brother’s daughter, “Almost the copy of my child that’s dead,” whom he decrees that Claudio must marry. It is The Winter’s Tale resolution, telescoped in time and minus the husband’s angst. At the ceremony, Claudio vows, “I’ll hold my mind, were she an Ethiope” (V.iv.38). His major criterion for love—beauty, and socially acceptable beauty at that—remains unchanged. When the bride enters masked, his first request is to see her face. The mask lifted, he exclaims, “Another Hero!” (l. 62). She concurs: the first “died defiled”; she has been reborn “a maid”—virginal in fact and report. Leonato underlines the point: “She died, my lord, but while her slander lived” (l. 66). As in Titus Andronicus, the daughter’s reputation is valued more highly than her life. Witnessing this resolution, old Antonio says complacently, “Well, I am glad that all things sort so well.” No blame is attached to Claudio, no accusation of insensitivity or irresponsibility. No one speculates on the future of the match between this egotistical young man and self-effacing young woman.
Lest we think that this is the whole picture of romantic love, Shakespeare places it against the backdrop of Beatrice and Benedick’s more open, more solidly based relationship. “I was not born under a rhyming planet,” Benedick thinks aloud when he realizes that he is in love with his long-time sparring partner, “nor I cannot woo in festival terms” (V.ii.38). Practical and frank, the two set to wrangling for the upper hand even on the brink of their wedding. He comments wryly to his beloved, “Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably” (l. 64). At the end of Much Ado, though, rhyme, festival terms, and harmony prevail. The villain and the threats to marital concord, suggested in Claudio’s final jokes about cuckoldry, are matter for “tomorrow.” The last word is Benedick’s command to ignore all such dark thoughts and begin the wedding dance: “Strike up, pipers!”
The figurative fate of Hero, the dutiful daughter in a comic world, is to be duplicated, her shallow bridegroom pronouncing her “copy” as desirable as the original. In contrast, the metaphorical lot of Ophelia, her tragic counterpart, is to be cleaved in half, “divided from herself and her fair judgment.” Even more readily than Hero, Ophelia hearkens to her father’s every word. Her bywords are established in her first appearance: “I do not know, my lord, what I should think” and “I will obey, my lord.” Lest we think that Shakespeare is portraying in Ophelia the ideal of Elizabethan daughterhood, he makes clear that the father whom she reveres is a hypocrite, a busybody, and a fool, and that Ophelia’s rewards for subservience are humiliation, madness, and death.
Hero has no need to explain her dismay and mortification. She swoons, and her best friend speaks for her. Ophelia has no woman friend to confide in. The men who do put words in her mouth have little understanding of her feelings and needs. They give her orders, dismiss her protests, insult or condescend. Each attempts to make her conform to some feminine stereotype that reflects well on his “honor.” Each betrays her.
Polonius and his son Laertes treat Ophelia like a child and picture her as a “chaste treasure” to be hoarded and guarded, even from the prince. It is their reputation that chiefly concerns them, as suggested by father and son’s other favorite metaphor: they picture her virginity as a delicate “flower” that might fall prey to the “canker” of pregnancy and consequent public shame. Ophelia is caught in the middle: loyalty to her father and brother means betrayal of her lover. When she carries out the rejection that Polonius has commanded, her obedience, ironically, subjects her to the public humiliation they would avoid at all costs: Hamlet, stung by her sudden coldness, treats her like the loose woman of their deepest fears. When her lover murders her father, Ophelia breaks down. Only in her mad songs does she find a voice for her grief, her sexual longings, and her bitterness. Even that small rebellion against the men’s expectations is short-lived. Treated like a flower, expected to look sweet and fragile, “pretty Ophelia” reverts in her desolation to that sanctioned image. In her horrified brother’s words, bawdry, insanity, “hell itself” she “turns to favor and prettiness.” Polonius is no longer alive to witness the pitiful wreck that his daughter’s life has become.
The vain old counselor of the opening acts could never have predicted such an end—or the destructive effect that he also has on his son. Shakespeare makes clear the bases for the father’s treatment. A profligate in his own youth, Polonius expects all young men to follow that course. He guards his daughter against such supposedly universal license and sanctions it in his son. Intent on control, he wants to know the most intimate details of his children’s private lives. Polonius’s attitude toward Laertes comes through clearly in his tête-à-tête with his servant Reynaldo. Laertes has just returned to the pleasures of life in France, and the lord chamberlain is dispatching his man to take him “money” and “notes.” The other purpose of this visit, though, is for Reynaldo “to make inquire / Of his behavior” (II.i.4–5). Polonius gives elaborate instructions for spying on his son. He even urges Reynaldo to spread lies that Laertes is “very wild, / Addicted so and so” (ll. 18–19), as a way of eliciting information, though “none so rank / As may dishonor him.”
“Honor”—that is, reputation—is Polonius’s chief preoccupation, as his earlier dicta to Laertes about dressing, quarreling, and borrowing suggested. Now he means, he explains to Reynaldo, the “usual slips … most common / To youth and liberty”—gambling, drinking, and even “drabbing”—whoring. Reynaldo objects to the last rumor as a source of “dishonor.” Polonius disagrees: he does not mean “incontinency,” but only such passion as shows “The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind” (II.i.25–33)—manliness, in short. Whether or not Laertes is guilty of such “slips,” Reynaldo is to discover through gossip. Thus, Polonius concludes complacently, “Your bait of falsehood takes your carp of truth” (l. 63). The sententiousness, the circumlocution, and the prying are all typical of him. He stresses that he has no wish to circumscribe his son’s sensual pleasures. His last directive to the servant is the ambiguous “Let him ply his music”—perhaps, “practice his instrument” but, more likely, “indulge his vices.” Towards his daughter, Polonius shows no such forbearance.
Laertes is his father’s son. The first time that we see him, he is warning his sister about the very propensities in young men that Polonius believes are universal. Laertes also echoes his father’s authoritarian tone and favorite metaphors. The subject he takes up is clearly one that he and Ophelia have discussed before. “For Hamlet and the trifling of his favor,” he begins, that is only “a violet” of youthful impulse, “sweet, not lasting” (I.iii.5–8). He paints Ophelia as a tender bud, a “button of the spring” that might be “galled” by the “canker” [worm] of sexual license. Shifting metaphors, from the horticultural to the military, he warns that she must keep her “chaste treasure” out of “the shot of danger and desire.” His thesis is “Be wary then: best safety lies in fear” (l. 43). Laertes is talking, of course, not about some wild affair but about the love between Ophelia and the prince of the realm. He concedes, “Perhaps he loves you now” (l. 14). But Hamlet’s very rank is the basis for Laertes’s distrust: “He may not, as unvalued persons do, carve for himself,” he warns. His “choice” must be sanctioned by “the main voice of Denmark” (ll. 19–20; 28).
Politic and ambitious courtier that he is, Laertes presumes to know the limitations of Hamlet’s choices. Later we see that, in fact, both the king and the queen would gladly have approved the match. In any case, “the safety and the health of the whole state” have already been hopelessly undermined by Claudius’s regicide in a way that no marriage can restore. Laertes cannot know that, of course. But in his arrogance, he is oblivious to the insult he is giving both lovers: he is denigrating both the sincerity of Hamlet’s love and the worth of the woman it is directed at. His final warning is:
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it….
…weigh what loss your honor may sustain
If with too credent ear you list his songs [I.iii.33, 29–30].
In retrospect, this speech contains irony upon irony: in listening with too credent ear to this song, Ophelia loses not only honor but sanity. In the end, overwhelmed by fear, the only songs that she can hear will be her own mad ones.
At this point, though, Ophelia has the presence of mind to resist this ill counsel. She is very fond of her brother: she promises to write him often and she listens patiently to his advice. But, perhaps because of their closeness in age, she recognizes the source of his suspicions about other young men in his own loose behavior. She even slyly turns Laertes’s flowery metaphor back on him, saying that she hopes that he is not preaching to her about taking “the steep and thorny way to heaven” while he himself treads “the primrose path of dalliance.” (I.iii.48–50)
But if Ophelia can see through her brother’s attempts to control her, she has no such perspicacity about her father’s. Although she has assured Laertes that his advice is “in [her] memory locked” (I.iii.85), when Polonius demands to know what his son has been saying, Ophelia reluctantly acquiesces: “So please you, something touching the Lord Hamlet” (l. 89). He recalls the court gossip about the couple—“’Tis told me…”—and demands specific details: “What is between you? Give me up the truth” (l. 98). This is a father who spies on both his children, but his daughter he denies any semblance of privacy and independence. Polonius has no intention of letting Ophelia “ply [her] music.”
Her innocent revelations spark a tirade on “my daughter” and “your honor”: for him, the two are inseparable. When Ophelia protests that Hamlet has courted her “in honorable fashion,” and pledged his love “with all the holy vows of heaven,” the old man dismisses those words as “springes to catch woodcocks”—proverbially stupid birds. His concept of his daughter is cuttingly dismissive: “Pooh! You speak like a green girl / Unsifted in such perilous circumstances” (I.iii.101–02). Reducing her status still further, he cautions, “Think yourself a baby.” Otherwise, he concludes, “you’ll tender me a fool” (ll. 105, 109)—make him look foolish, perhaps by tendering (producing) a child out of wedlock (“fool” was an Elizabethan endearment for “baby”).
Polonius echoes not only his son’s sentiments on this subject but also his metaphors. Ophelia must “set [her] entreatments” at a higher rate than “a command to parley” (I.iii.122–23). The woman is pictured here in military terms, as a castle under siege. Like Laertes, he dismisses the vows that she believes are silver “sterling” as not, in fact, “true pay.” His values are those of the market place, with the highest premium put on wiliness and material gain. Polonius can never resist multiplying his metaphors, and the one he adds in this case sullies the love still further: Hamlet’s “holy vows” are, he claims, “brokers” and “bawds” (ll. 114, 127, 130)—procurers. Upon what does he base these degrading charges? Conventional wisdom and, he implies, his own past:
I do know
When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul
Lends the tongue vows [ll. 115–17].
Again, these are Laertes’ precepts. But instead of merely concluding with a warning, this sermonizer issues an order: Ophelia is to cease all further “words or talk” (a typical Polonian redundancy) with “the Lord Hamlet.” Giving the prince his title underlines the reason that Polonius believes the prince is simply toying with her. Ophelia seems deaf to his pomposity and venality alike. She makes no further protest to his devastating command: “I shall obey, my lord,” she responds meekly—and does, to her ultimate destruction.
Nor does further experience teach Ophelia the foolishness of this counselor. The next time that we see her, she has sought him out to report a crisis: “O my lord, I have been so affrighted!” It is the voice of a child awaking from a nightmare. She has come to report on Hamlet’s disheveled appearance in her “closet.” Polonius immediately expresses what he sees as the only possible interpretation of such conduct: “This is the very ecstasy of love” (II.i.102). Then he turns on the frightened girl: Has she given the prince “any hard words of late?” Oh no, she assures him, “but as you did command, / I did repel his letters and denied / His access to me” (ll. 109–11). Clearly, he has forgotten all about the harsh order that she has been so scrupulous in carrying out. Now he admits his error—“I feared he did but trifle”—and regrets his officiousness. He claims that that fault is typical of the old, as “common” as “for the younger sort / To lack discretion” (ll. 116–17). Neither father nor daughter notes that he has learned nothing from his mistake: he continues to think in behavioral stereotypes. Nor does his egregious mistake make him cease to interfere in his daughter’s life. His conclusion to her sad tale is another order: “Come, go we to the king.” His intention is to report “the very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy” and so make political capital of Ophelia’s misery. She, too accustomed to subservience to make any protest, remains silent.
In the interim, Ophelia turns over to her father the love letters that Hamlet has written her and recounts the “time,” “place,” and “means” of all her lover’s “solicitings” (II.ii.126–27). Like all the failed fathers in Shakespeare’s plays, Polonius thinks of his daughter as his property; as he says to Claudius when he goes to relay the intimate details of her love affair: “I have a daughter (have while she is mine)…” (l. 106). He congratulates himself before the king and queen on her “duty and obedience,” which have led her to give him the letters. He proceeds to read one sample aloud and to defile it further by mocking its style. The man who preached to his son that the chief value in life should be truth to oneself robs his daughter of privacy, respect, and integrity.
Polonius’s next actions confirm his underlying motive: to make Ophelia a pawn in his ambition for political favor. Before he presents his plan for testing his theory that Hamlet’s madness is caused by unrequited love, he demands of the king: “What do you think of me?” Claudius gives the expected answer: “As of a man faithful and honorable” (II.ii.129–30). Polonius, pleased, praises his own efforts at intervening in the “hot love” he has been so keen as to perceive and at warning her that the “prince” is “out of [her] star” (l. 141). “I went round to work” (l. 139), he reports complacently, and launches into a lecture against social climbing whose purpose is to advance his own status. His next scheme is to use Ophelia to prove his theory: When Hamlet walks through the lobby, Polonius will “loose [his] daughter to him.” The verb, with its connotations of hunting, reflects his crass indifference to her feelings. He and Claudius will hide “behind the arras”—a hanging tapestry—and eavesdrop on the lovers. The plan recalls his scheme for having Reynaldo spy on Laertes. Here, Ophelia herself will serve as the “bait of falsehood” that will land what Polonius is convinced is the “carp of truth.” When Hamlet suddenly appears, he begs to test the “mad” young man’s mood: “I’ll board him presently…. O, give me leave” (l. 170). He is nearly bursting with eagerness to show off and to gain favor.
A major effect of Polonius’s tête-à-tête with Hamlet is to express outright what has been implied earlier: we get the hero’s own word that the king’s chief courtier is a hypocrite, a toady, and a fool. Under cover of madness, Hamlet scores one insulting point after another. In response to Polonius’s probing questions about whether he “knows” him, the prince responds that he is “a fishmonger”—Elizabethan slang for a pander, and thus a glance at Polonius’s treatment of Ophelia. He sharpens the needle with a warning that a man who has a daughter must guard her lest she “conceive,” a frank allusion to Polonius’s fears. Master of style that he is, Hamlet takes wry pleasure in mocking Polonius in his own idiom. He posits a stereotype of the Old Man, who is characterized by “a plentiful lack of wit” (II.ii.198). These barbs penetrate even Polonius’s thick hide: “How pregnant sometimes his replies are,” he muses, unwittingly alluding to his own greatest anxiety. When Hamlet finally gets rid of the would-be spy, he expresses his contempt outright: “These tedious old fools!” (l. 217) He reasserts that scorn each time they meet.
Before the “nunnery scene,” Gertrude tells Ophelia: “I hope your virtues / Will bring [Hamlet] to his wonted ways again, / To both your honors” (III.i.40–42). But both women should divine that they are sanctioning a betrayal that will alienate him irreparably. Of course, neither knows at this point that Hamlet’s beloved father was murdered, and by the despised stepfather who “now wears his crown.” Still, they could not miss the hostility he expresses to Gertrude’s precipitous second marriage. The first time that he vents his feelings in private, Hamlet hisses, “Frailty, thy name is woman” (I.ii.146). He shows that misogyny in every encounter with his mother and his lover. Ironically, Ophelia’s fault is the opposite of “frailty”: she is blindly, self-abnegatingly loyal—but to her father. At the same time she is frail: fragile and passive. The two men whom she expects will protect her are blind to her suffering. Her father is a fool and a social climber. Her lover is obsessed with his own father’s return from the grave and his charge to exact revenge on the “incestuous, adulterate beast” who has taken his throne and his wife. Hamlet has vowed to “wipe away all trivial fond records” and to concentrate on “setting right” the disjointed time: a messianic enterprise that excludes such “trivial” and “baser matter” (I.v.99, 104) as Ophelia’s well being.
The men in Ophelia’s life—her lover, her father, her king—subject her to an encounter of excruciating humiliation. She has prepared a neat little set speech for returning Hamlet’s letters and breaking off their affair. It concludes with a Polonian epigram: “to the noble mind / Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind” (III.i.100–01). Hamlet, as usual, seizes the advantage in a verbal duel and breaks both the sententious mood and the meter. “Ha, ha! Are you honest?” he demands. The word meant “chaste” in Elizabethan parlance—the very issue that is preying on his mind in regard to his mother and that drove Polonius to make Ophelia break with Hamlet. Sadly, he concedes, “I did love you once,” and blames his own faults and the corrupt state of the world for his fickleness: “I loved you not” (ll. 115, 119). Ophelia is confused by the contradiction and mortified by the knowledge that Polonius and Claudius, labeling themselves “lawful espials” (l. 32), are eavesdropping on this intimate talk.
Still, the exchange to this point has been fairly civil. Suddenly, with the question “Where’s your father?” (III.i.130), Hamlet’s mood shifts to sharply suspicious and bitter. The usual stage business at this point is to have his question provoked by an exposed shoe or sudden movement behind the arras. Stunned, Ophelia replies lamely, “At home, my lord.” The feeble lie drives Hamlet over the edge. “Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in’s own house” (ll. 132–33), he cries. What follows is a vitriolic tirade against women and marriage, ending with the “plague” he gives Ophelia as a “dowry”: Even were she “as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,” her fate would be “calumny.” The only alternative he offers is the “nunnery”—Hero’s other choice, proffered here as half a curse, half a prayer.
The poor girl is crushed. Her one inference is that he has gone mad: “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown” (III.i.150). Her manly ideal, the paragon of intellect, courtesy, and beauty, “th’observed of all observers,” is “blasted with ecstasy.” She can only pray weakly—“O heavenly powers, restore him!” a petition that provokes further vituperation. Hamlet stalks off after a final threat, directed at the eavesdroppers, against marriages in general and the life of one of those already married in particular. Ophelia collapses, describing herself as “most deject and wretched,” beset by “woe” to “have seen what I have seen, see what I see” (ll. 155, 160–61). She is dazed and helpless as a wounded animal.
The king and his counselor emerge from hiding to comment on the prince’s behavior. Claudius, the wily politician, recognizes that Hamlet has been showing neither “love” nor “madness.” Polonius, reluctant to relinquish his pet theory, still insists that the “origin and commencement of his grief / Sprang from neglected love” (III.i.177–78). Ophelia, meanwhile, is forgotten. The one word spoken to the desolate young woman is her father’s directive: “You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said. We heard it all.” On stage, this line is often supplemented by comforting gestures, but in the text it is brief and cold.
The focus of the men’s exchange is on the political repercussions of the prince’s threat. Claudius announces his plan to send his dangerous stepson abroad; Polonius, still convinced that Hamlet is mad, proposes spying on him once again, this time when he is summoned to his mother’s chamber. Gertrude, supposedly “all alone,” must “entreat” him to reveal the cause of “his grief” (III.i.182–83). If she cannot discover what troubles him, then Polonius concurs with the plan of sending him away. The wily king agrees in an abrupt about-face: “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go,” he pronounces solemnly. Claudius has realized that Hamlet’s “antic disposition,” which he has just called feigned, might still be credited by the gullible and, thus, useful for his purposes. The tone-deaf lord chamberlain, busy with his own scheme, takes no note of the changed attitude. Neither man expresses a word of concern for the young woman they have just exploited. Ophelia makes no objection to her father’s abuse. In fact, neither she nor Laertes ever questions his motives or his worth.
Ophelia is made to face further humiliation, this time in a more public arena. With the entire court assembled for the performance of “The Murder of Gonzago,” Hamlet pointedly chooses to sit by her and then to address her as though she were a prostitute. “Lady, shall I lie in your lap?” (III.ii.107) he begins. When she objects to his crass language, he asks with assumed innocence, “Did you think I meant count-ry matters?” (l. 111, italics mine). His crude pun on the female sex organ is intentional. Quickly, Hamlet’s lewdness becomes so explicit that Ophelia is driven to scold: “You are naught, you are naught. I’ll mark the play” (l. 139). But she tries once more to divert him by appealing to his theatrical expertise: “What means this, my lord?” She succeeds only in evoking more obscenity: he pictures himself as the commentator on a scene of Ophelia and a lover “dallying” like “puppets.” To her lame compliment that he is “keen,” he responds lasciviously, “It would cost you a groaning to take off mine edge” (l. 240). Ophelia is hopelessly outmatched in this duel. Hamlet has on his side not only superior wit but a relish for public show. The young woman, shy, modest, keenly aware of what should be her proper role, has for defenses only simulated poise and feigned ignorance: “I think nothing, my lord.” She does not stand a chance, either of controlling him or of preserving her dignity.
Directly after the disrupted play, Polonius appoints himself once more the eavesdropper on Hamlet’s private conversation and assures the distraught king: “I’ll call upon you ere you go to bed / And tell you what I know” (III.iii.34–35). Claudius, overwhelmed by the knowledge that Hamlet knows and has shown the entire court the precise manner of the regicide, absentmindedly agrees. He is all too aware of the real reasons for Hamlet’s rage and he wants to be alone to pray and think. Polonius, oblivious as usual to anyone’s feelings but his own, undertakes the new scheme with relish. He confronts the queen with a script that he has invented for the coming confrontation: “Tell him…,” “Look you lay home to him…” (III.iv.1–2). This is the approach we have seen him use before, with his servant and his children. He loves playing the moral arbiter. Instead, he ends up not only ignominiously exposed but de trop. Polonius’s death, accidental and unnecessary, turns the play irreversibly in the direction of tragedy. Its immediate consequence is the destruction of the daughter who has obeyed his every wish.
Hamlet’s ruthlessness about his murder of Polonius is foreshadowed before the performance of “The Murder of Gonzago,” when he mocks the chamberlain’s youthful acting efforts. Polonius reminisces about the time that he played Julius Caesar and was duly killed by Brutus in the capital. The prince puns, “’Twas a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf”—Elizabethan slang for a fool. When Hamlet does in fact kill the old counselor, after mistaking the concealed Polonius for the king, his attitude is no less crass. His words to the corpse are ruthlessly contemptuous: “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! / Thou findst to be too busy is some danger” (III.iv.32–33). Later in the scene, somewhat calmer, he claims, to “repent,” but still he sees the murder as “heaven’s” means of punishing him, who “must be their scourge and minister” (l. 176). Noble, divinely ordained agent of God’s will: it is a self-concept that does not permit remorse for the destruction of “baser natures” that come between “mighty opposites” (V.ii.60–62).
That lofty stand announced, Hamlet’s tone switches back to sarcastic. He tells his mother, who has watched the murder in horror, “I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room.” Then he turns his scorn once more on the dead man: “This counselor / Is now most still, most secret, and most grave, / Who was in life a foolish, prating knave” (III.iv.214–16). Neither then nor later when he evades Claudius’s questions about where he has hidden the body with morbid puns does Hamlet express remorse.
More tellingly, it never occurs to Hamlet that his victim was the father of the woman he professes to love. At her funeral, he will insist: “I loved Ophelia” (V.i.256). There and in the letter that Polonius quotes to the king and queen, we have Hamlet’s word for his devotion. But nothing in the play shows that regard. In fact, what we see is the aftermath of a seemingly shallow attachment. Never does Hamlet confide in Ophelia, appeal to her for aid, or profess his respect for her gifts: those roles in his life are fulfilled by his bosom friend, Horatio. The implication is that the young woman who can give an old busybody unquestioning devotion is too weak to be valued by “the son of a king.” Ophelia’s acquiescence in Polonius and Claudius’s scheme to spy on Hamlet is the final proof in her lover’s eyes of her unworthiness.
When Ophelia next appears, she has gone mad. Disheveled, speaking in double-edged non-sequiturs, breaking into snatches of song, she has been struck by the insanity that she believed afflicted Hamlet. Claudius pronounces the cause “the poison of deep grief,” which “springs all from her father’s death” (IV.v.75–76). Certainly that is the immediate cause. Ophelia “speaks much of her father” and sings about funeral rites and loss. She recalls “the grass green turf,” the “stone,” and the “shroud” (ll. 31–32) from his burial, and laments: “He is dead and gone, lady” (l. 29). The reference is clearly to Polonius: “His beard was as white as snow” (l. 193), she sings, and asks plaintively: “And will ’a not come again?” (l. 188). She answers her own question: “No, no, he is dead…. He never will come again” (ll. 190–92). It is the desolate wail of the lost child.
Laertes, called back from France, thinks, too, that this is the sole cause of Ophelia’s breakdown: “O heavens, is’t possible a young maid’s wits / Should be as mortal as an old man’s life?” (IV.v.159–60). But Ophelia herself suggests more complex causes for her insanity. “Lord,” she muses, “we know what we are, but know not what we may be” (ll. 43–44). The other subject of her mad songs, besides bereavement, is seduction. In the Saint Valentine’s Day ditty, the lover entices and then abandons the “maid” who visits his bedchamber, and “out a maid / Never departed more” (ll. 54–55). Is this an allusion to Hamlet’s actual treatment of her? In Kenneth Branagh’s recent film, the affair is made explicit, and some critics have speculated that Ophelia is pregnant. Or is this her projection of the seduction and abandonment that her father and brother warned her against? Perhaps it was a consummation that she devoutly wished but dared not pursue. The text is engimatic: The provocation for Ophelia’s lewd ballad must remain ambiguous.
In any case, the sexual abandonment, so frequent a symptom of madness and so disconcerting to those who witness it, is short-lived in Ophelia’s case. As Claudius says, excusing her shocking departure from decorum,
poor Ophelia,
Divided from herself and her fair judgment,
Without the which we are pictures or mere beasts [IV.v.84–86].
Ophelia has been too strictly trained to continue showing this “beastly” side. Throughout the play, she has been associated with flowers, fragile and transient, and in the end the extended metaphor takes on the force of prophecy. The adjectives most frequently applied to the mad girl are “sweet” and “pretty” (e.g., ll. 27, 57, 158). Her accusations of those who have harmed her are oblique: She speaks in the language of flowers, giving real or imagined “rosemary … for remembrance” to her brother, “rue” to the guilt-ridden queen, and “a daisy,” for “dissembling,” to Claudius. She has no violets, which symbolize faithfulness, she explains, because “they withered all when my father died” (l. 183). A modern audience needs footnotes to interpret such innuendoes, but the Elizabethans were well versed in the symbolism of plants.
In her brother’s eyes, Ophelia is herself a flower. Anguished by her deterioration, Laertes cries out to her, “O rose of May, / Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!” (IV.v.157–58). He marvels: “Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, / She turns to favor and to prettiness.” He means this as a compliment to her womanly forbearance and refinement. We can look beyond that euphemism to her underlying frustration and hurt. Had Ophelia been encouraged to express her “passion” and “affliction” more openly, she might not have been driven to destroy herself. Instead, in the words of the gravedigger-clown, she achieves the paradox of “drown[ing] herself in her own defense” (V.i.5–6).
The process of Ophelia’s death is entirely fitting for her repressed character: every aspect of her last moments is pretty and pathetic. While adorning herself with “fantastic garlands,” the mad young woman slips into a stream. “Mermaid-like,” she floats along, “chant[ing] snatches of old lauds,” like “a creature native and endued unto that element,” and oblivious to “her own distress” (IV.vii.175–79). By having Gertrude report this scene, instead of staging it, Shakespeare can put graceful distance on what would be an agonizingly painful struggle to witness. Everything in the account is tranquil, innocent, and passive. Ophelia does not actively commit suicide: her water-laden garments acted as murderers and “pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death” (ll. 181–82).
At her funeral, the prettification and the floral metaphor are sustained. Ophelia is “allowed her virgin crants [garlands], / Her maiden strewments” (V.i.219–20). The Queen sadly strews the flowers and utters a pretty epitaph: “Sweets to the sweet! Farewell” (l. 130). Laertes prays, “from her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring” (ll. 226–27). But we have Ophelia’s word that these symbols of faithfulness “withered all when [her] father died,” and her own death is allowed no such pretty aftermath.
Her brother, as rash and aggressive as she is passive, is moved to violence by this final loss. He orders the gravediggers to “hold off the earth awhile” until he has given her body a last embrace, and then orders melodramatically that they bury him alive with his sister. Hamlet, who has been eavesdropping on this rite, is outraged by the affected style of Laertes’s “grief.” He steps forward to mock this “phrase of sorrow” that “conjures the wandering stars” (V.i.242–43). Although Hamlet claims to have “lov’d Ophelia” more than “forty thousand brothers” could have, his main preoccupation is not to mourn her but to challenge Laertes: “Dost thou come here to whine, / To outface me with leaping in her grave? / … I’ll rant as well as thou” (ll. 264–65, 271). And in he leaps. Within seconds, lover and brother are “grappling” in the grave, the corpse of the woman both profess to have loved forgotten. When the other members of the court break up the shameful scuffle, Hamlet professes puzzlement at Laertes’ outrage: “What is the reason that you use me thus?” he demands. “I loved you ever” (ll. 276–77). Although Hamlet later expresses regret to Horatio that he “forgot [him]self” (V.ii.76) in this situation, at the time he seems as insensitive to the brother’s suffering as he has been to the sister’s.
In any case, Hamlet’s disruption of the funeral provides the final spur to Laertes’s revenge. Even before this confrontation, he vowed that he would willingly “cut [Hamlet’s] throat I’ th’ church!” (IV.vii.125). Now his “speech of fire” turns to plans for dishonorable action. Laertes is again Ophelia’s opposite, in imagery as well as in attitude: her element, we recall, is water. Fiery Laertes does not stop to reason or to question. He accepts Claudius’s half-true claim that neither “by direct nor by collateral hand” (IV.v.204) is he responsible for Polonius’s death. Spurred by hatred, Laertes betrays the highest principles of the chivalric code by which he has lived: honor in dueling and loyalty to the throne’s rightful heir. He conspires with Claudius to win by using an unbated sword and doctoring the tip with poison. Claudius’s contribution to this scheme, the poisoned cup, will prove his own undoing, but it is Laertes’s dishonorable actions that will cheat the prince of life.
Before the duel, Laertes restates his old values, ironically in response to Hamlet’s apology and attempt to make peace:
In my terms of honor
I stand aloof, and will no reconcilement
Till by some elder masters of known honor
I have a voice and precedent of peace
To keep my name ungored [V.ii.235–39].
Laertes is still looking to older authority figures for the definition of “honor.” Only in his last moments will he admit that it is “almost against [his] conscience” (l. 285) to win the duel by cheating. When that plot fails and he is stabbed with the poisoned rapier, he pronounces his own sentence: “I am justly killed by my own treachery.” With his dying breath, Laertes exposes the king’s plot and “exchanges[s] forgiveness” with the enemy he acknowledges as “noble” (l. 318). Hamlet uses his remaining moments to assure the political succession, restrain Horatio from suicide, and bid “adieu” to the “wretched queen” who has so preoccupied his overwrought imagination. He gives no thought to the young woman he berated and abandoned. Perhaps the final irony of the groundlessness of Polonius’s fears about Hamlet’s obsession with Ophelia is that, in the end, she is irrelevant to the prince’s tragedy.
The ultimate effect of Polonius’s parenting is devastation, of both his principles and his family. He had professed “honor” to be his major goal and had urged his son “above all”: “To thine own self be true.” But both father and son die ignominiously, in the course of treacherous acts. His daughter dies pitifully, sunken to insanity and suicide. Polonius equips neither of his children to see him objectively, to measure his homilies against his actions, or to question the role he has cast them in: son as clone, daughter as pretty possession. When he is killed, they are left desolate, Laertes desperately seeking a father figure to replace him, and burying his grief and fear in rage, Ophelia lost and helpless. Polonius has helped neither to develop a self to which to be true.