Hamlet: Act 4, Scene II

[cesario]

O HAI I BET YOU THOUGHT YOU'D SEEN THE LAST OF THESE. But no, I want to finish Hamlet at least. I tend to come back to Shakespeare every spring, so possibly that is when I will pick up with a new play. But for the moment, we're a little more than half through this one, so onwards!

Previous posts:

First Act:
Scene I: The Crazy Occult Forays of

Comments

[slashfairy]

Found this via The Unified Theory of Ophelia via prufrocking's Tumblr repost of hellotailor's post of "I tried to argue that Ophelia resonated because Shakespeare had made an extraordinary discovery in writing her, though I had trouble articulating the nature of that discovery. I didn’t want to admit that it could be something as simple as recognizing that emotionally unstable teenage girls are human beings. …

When Ophelia appears onstage in Act IV, scene V, singing little songs and handing out imaginary flowers, she temporarily upsets the entire power dynamic of the Elsinore court. When I picture that scene, I always imagine Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and Horatio sharing a stunned look, all of them thinking the same thing: “We fucked up. We fucked up bad.” It might be the only moment of group self-awareness in the whole play. Not even the grossest old Victorian dinosaur of a critic tries to pretend that Ophelia is making a big deal out of nothing. Her madness and death is plainly the direct result of the alternating tyranny and neglect of the men in her life. She’s proof that adolescent girls don’t just go out of their minds for the fun of it. They’re driven there by people in their lives who should have known better." originally posted by peachpulpeuse, and I am thrilled.

I am a late comer to Shakespeare and lit theory, taking it up where I can, and here the tides and ways of the internet have brought me to these posts of yours. Thank you for not deleting them. It makes me so happy to have yet another way to learn to learn from and about Shakespeare and reading.