Another Ophelia scene!!!

[cesario]

Previous post:
Act 1, Scene I: The Crazy Occult Forays of Marcellus and Horatio.
Act 1, Scene II: Claudius is the villain, but he's still hotter than you.
Act 1, Scene III: Ophelia's virginity is a national treasure. Just ask her dad and brother.
Act 1, Scene IV: That a ghoooooooooost?
Act 1, Scene V: "'Who's your daddy?' Now that's just

Comments

[nostalgia_lj]

I can't read Ye Olden :( It makes me feel weird, cos everyone else can, but I read the words and get no sense from them.

[cesario]

A lot of people have that problem. I was literally taught how to read out of the King James Bible, so I had the advantage of becoming conversant in early modern English at a young age, but I still can't make much out of Chaucer, even in translation. I'll tell you something that helped me, though, if you ever feel like giving it a try---slow the pace of your reading down by at least half, and see if taking the words any more slowly helps render them intelligible. I had no use at all for Shakespeare till I did that.

[nostalgia_lj]

I have tried rly slow and always get lost in the sentences :*( It makes me feel stupid and I still don't know why I can't do it given that most people seem able to understand it even if not that literate in modern English.

[cesario]

Well, at my old school, people who couldn't understand the King James were advised to sit down with a dictionary and a rule and diagram the sentences.

Might be a fun way to spend a rainy afternoon?

At any rate, when I write the story where the Master and Romana are playing Hamlet and Ophelia, I'll probably quote very little of the actual text. :-)

[tangleofthorns]

"As if he had been loosed out of hell to speak of horrors"--which is more or less exactly what happened. Ophelia has a little bit of a Cassandra thing going on.

I wonder if there's anything interesting to be made of the parallels between Polonius' fixation on his daughter's romance and the possible political implications, and Hamlet's fixation on his mother's marriage. I bet there is. Whaddya got?

[cesario]

Well the first thing that springs to mine is that female sexuality is the property of the nearest male by marriage or family. Therefore, Polonius is possessive of Ophelia's girlbits, and Hamlet of Gertrude's, because Claudius, her rightful lord, is a usurper and out of place in the family.

Bit grim, really.

[tangleofthorns]

Right, but in the case of Ophelia I would say it's kind of implicitly condemned that Polonius thinks he can totally manipulate her for his own ends. I'm not sure you can say the same of Hamlet's questioning of Gertrude...or can you?

[cesario]

I...honestly don't know what you can say about "implicitly condemned." I don't think Shakespeare does that---I don't think he ever makes it obvious which side of an argument the author thinks you should be on. Ophelia's ill treatment by Polonius is much more manifestly obvious to us than it would have been to a Victorian audience, and yet we have the same text to work with. I think we have...let's say the same freedom to judge Hamlet's treatment of Gertrude as we do to judge Polonius's treatment of Ophelia, but because our POV is so closely linked to Hamlet's it's hard for us to get sufficient distance from him to feel like we have that freedom.

[lizbee]

Interesting that you should use "voyeurism" -- I felt uncomfortably voyeuristic, reading Ophelia's speech and thinking, She's saying this to her father. There's something positively sexual about the scene, and she runs to tell Polonius? That doesn't sit at all well with me. My dislike for Polonius grows like a well-fed chia pet.

[cesario]

It is creepy as hell, and I can't even imagine doing it, but then at no point in my entire life have I been as powerless and alone as Ophelia. Well, not once I was old enough to notice, anyway.

[leggylover03]

Ok, seriously I can't take it. Will you be finishing your fic on Potions and Snitches? Please let me know.

[cesario]

This isn't really an appropriate place for you to bring that up, but I updated the story a few days ago.

[corbistheca]

I wonder. . . the purpose of this scene isn't largely to show, in relief, how howlingly unfair Ophelia's position is.

That is exactly what I think this scene is. Because there's no other way to explain it -- it's in two distinct halves, and the first half is entirely composed of Polonius saying "boys will be boys -- go spread some rumours about my son and we'll see how widely sown his wild oats are," which sets us up beautifully for the second half in which Polonius concludes that if Hamlet is upset about something it must be that he's crazed with love for Ophelia because, as we've just learned, "boys will be boys." (And Ophelia, of course, doesn't have feelings, or at least not ones that count, because she's an Object

[cesario]

and didn't realize or remember until after he grabbed her arm that a. he wasn't quite dressed and b. he was supposed to be talking to her.

Ooh, I like that. Yes, I think that's part of my interpretation now.