On the Frontiers of Psychiatry: Ophelia and the Jailer’s Daughter

by David P. Gontar (November 2013)

ABSTRACT

EXPOSITION

1.  Ophelia

How does the absence of a mother fit this scenario? Would she not have offered solace, counsel and reassurance to Ophelia? Might not a genuine maternal embrace have acted as a buffer between slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and her child? Even more than most of us, Ophelia suffers a deficit of love and affection. At no time does anyone seem to embrace her and assure her that she is ok and that all will be well. 

A father is not a substitute for a mother. Without the female spouse, the father-daughter relationship can assume an undesirable propinquity and intimacy, issuing in compulsive control by the isolated male parent. Love that should be directed to a wife gets deflected to the child, who is not in a position to deal with it. In the case of Polonius we find a meddling and overly directive father.

 

And then I precepts gave her,
That she should lock herself from his resort,
Admit no messengers, receive no tokens . . . .
(II, ii, 143-145)

HAMLET

I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum.
(V, i, 266-268)

GERTRUDE

each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.
So full of artless jealousy is guilt,
It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.
(IV, v. 17-20)

Fully half the riches of Shakespeare lie in nuggets like this.

ARCITE

Yet, cousin,
Even from the bottom of these miseries,
From all that fortune can inflict upon us,
If the gods please, to hold here a brave patience
And the enjoying of our griefs together.
Whilst Palamon is with me, let me perish
If I think this our prison.

PALAMON

The gall of hazard, so they grow together,
ARCITE

Shall we make worthy uses of this place
That all men hate so much?

PALAMON

How, gentle cousin?

ARCITE

To keep us from corruption of worse men.
We are young, and yet desire the ways of honour
That liberty and common conversation,
The poison of pure spirits, might, like women,
Woo us to wander from. What worthy blessing
Can be, but our imaginations
May make it ours? And here being thus together,
We are an endless mine to one another:
Is our inheritance: no hard oppressor
Dare take this from us. Here, with a little patience,
The hand of war hurts none here, nor the seas
Swallow their youth. Were we at liberty
Crave our acquaintance. I might sicken, cousin,
Where you should never know it, and so perish
Without your noble hand to close mine eyes,
Or prayers to the gods. A thousand chances,
Were we from hence, would sever us.

PALAMON

With my captivity. What a misery
It is to live abroad, and everywhere!
That woo the wills of men to vanity
I see through now, and am sufficient
That old Time, as he passes by, takes with him.
(II, ii, 55-104)

PALAMON (contd.)

Is there record of any two that loved
Better than we two, Arcite?

ARCITE

Sure there cannot.

PALAMON

I do not think it possible our friendship
Should ever leave us.

ARCITE

Til our deaths it cannot.
(II, ii, 112-115)

PALAMON

What think you of this beauty?

ARCITE

PALAMON

ARCITE

Yes, a matchless beauty.

PALAMON

Might not a man well lose himself and love her?

ARCITE

PALAMON

You love her then?

ARCITE

Who would not?

PALAMON

And desire her?

ARCITE

Before my liberty.

PALAMON

I saw her first.

ARCITE

PALAMON

But it shall be.

ARCITE

I saw her too.

PALAMON

Yes, but you must not love her.

ARCITE

I will not, as you do, to worship her
As she is heavenly and a blessed goddess!
So both may love.

PALAMON

You shall not love at all.

ARCITE

PALAMON

I that first saw her, I that took possession
First with mine eye of all those beauties
Thou art a traitor, Arcite, and a fellow
False as thy title to her. Friendship, blood,
And all the ties between us I disclaim,
If thou once think upon her.

ARCITE

And if the lives of all my name lay on it,
If that will lose ye, farewell, Palamon!
(II, ii, 153-180)

These strewings are for their chamber.  
be out. I do think they have the patience to make any
and they have all the world in their chamber.

JAILER

They are famed to be a pair of absolute men.

By my troth, I think fame but stammers
JAILER

I have heard them reported in the battle to be the only doers.

Nay, most likely, for they are noble
sufferers. I marvel how they would have looked had
they been victors, that with such a constant nobility
enforce a freedom out of bondage, making misery their
mirth, and affliction a toy to jest at.

JAILER

Do they so?

It seems to me they have no more
sense of their captivity than I of ruling Athens. They
eat well, look merrily, discourse of many things, but
nothing of their own restraint and disasters. Yet
other presently gives it so sweet a rebuke that I could
wish myself a sigh to be so chid, or at least a sigher
to be comforted.
(I, iv, 21-45)

He will never affect me. I am base,
My father the mean keeper of his prison,
And he a prince.
(II, iv, 1-4)

These eyes yet looked on. Next, I pitied him,
That ever dreamed or vowed her maidenhead
To a young handsome man. Then I loved him,
Extremely loved him, infinitely loved him . . . .
(II, iii, iv, 9-15)

And so it is that this eros-obsessed young lady uses her access to the prison to help Palamon escape, only to find that, once freed, he shows no interest in her. Though she has told him to meet her behind a sedge, he fails to appear. For this she has not a glimmer of an explanation.  

He has mistook the brake I meant, is gone
In me hath grief slain fear, and, but for one thing,
I reck not if the wolves would jaw me, so
He had this file. What if I hollered for him?
If he not answered, I should call a wolf
And do him but that service. I have heard
Might call fell things to listen, who have in them
A sense to know a man unarmed, and can
And then they fed on him. So much for that.
Be bold to ring the bell. How stand I then?
Myself to beg, if I prized life so much
Food took I none these two days,
Sipped some water. I have not closed mine eyes
Save when my lids scoured off their brine. Alas,
Lest I should drown or stab or hang myself.
O state of nature, fail together in me,
Since thy best props are warped. So which way now?
The best way is the next way to a grave,
Each errant step beside is torment. Lo,
The moon is down, the crickets chirp, the screech-owl
Calls in the dawn. All offices are done
Save what I fail in: but the point is this,
An end, and that is all.
(III, ii, 1-38)

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the fraught bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon her heart?

To which the physician replies,

(V, iii, 42-48)

DOCTOR

That intemperate surfeit of her eye hath
distempered the other senses. They may return and settle
again to execute their preordained faculties, but they
are now in a most extravagant vagary. This you must
do: confine her to a place where the light may rather
come to eat with her and to commune of love. This
eye become the pranks and friskins of her madness.
Sing to her such green songs of love as she says
sweet flowers as the season is mistress of, and thereto
make an addition of some other compounded odours
which are grateful to the sense. All this shall become
Palamon, for Palamon can sing, and Palamon is sweet
and every good thing. Desire to eat with her, carve
her, drink to her, and still intermingle your
petition of grace and acceptance into her favour. Learn
what maids have been her companions and playfreres,
and let them repair to her, with Palamon in their
mouths, and appear with tokens as if they suggested
for him. It is a falsehood she is in, which is with
falsehoods to be combated. This may bring her to eat,
into their former law and regiment. I have seen it
approved, how many times I know not, but to make
the number more I have great hope in this. I will
between the passages of this project come in with my
appliance. Let us put it in execution, and hasten the
success, which doubt not will bring forth comfort.
(IV, iii, 67-98)

The final dialogue is poignant and positive.

And shall we kiss too?

WOOER

A hundred times.

And twenty.

WOOER

Ay, and twenty.

DOCTOR  (to the Wooer)

Take her offer.

Yes, marry, will we.

But you shall not hurt me.

WOOER

I will not, sweet.

ARGUMENT

3.  The Voice of Literary Criticism

What say the scholars?

(4. 5. 46, emphasis added).

criticism of all the love relationships she has witnessed, which label women either bawds or passive models of chastity.

QUEEN GERTRUDE

Come hither, my good Hamlet. Sit by me.

HAMLET

Polonius (aside)

O ho, do you mark that?

HAMLET (to Ophelia)

Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

OPHELIA

No, my lord.

HAMLET

I mean my head upon your lap.

OPHELIA

Ay, my lord.

HAMLET

Do you think I meant country matters?

OPHELIA

I think nothing, my lord.

HAMLET

OPHELIA

What is, my lord?

HAMLET

Nothing.

OPHELIA

You are merry, my lord.
(III, ii, 104-116, following the RSC edition)

thanking them for their counsel.

LAERTES

O thou vile king,
Give me my father.

QUEEN GERTRUDE

Calmly, good Laertes.

LAERTES

Cries cuckold to my father, brands the harlot
Even here between the chaste unsmirched brow
Of my true mother. 
(IV, v, 114-118)

(Here is the one oblique reference to the presumed mother of Ophelia.)

CLAUDUIS

What is the cause, Laertes,
Let him go, Gertrude. Do not fear our person.
That treason can but peep to what it would,
Speak, man.

LAERTES

Where is my father?

CLAUDIUS

Dead.
(IV, v, 119-126)

Ophelia is the only character who directly challenges the gender system, both through her words and through the transgressive act of theatrical madness. Her demise, more than any other event, indicates that something is rotten in the state of Denmark beyond the regal crises of the moment. Something is rotten in the body of Denmark, where sexuality and corruption cannot be separated.

1.  Paul Bertram recognizes that her will to rise above her station, rather than an inexplicable lust for Palamon, is the real source of her madness.

Here are the problems.

3.  There is no demonstrated connection between an inability to advance socially on the basis of marriage and any established psychiatric malady.

4.  Conclusion

 ___________________

WORKS CITED:

Mythogyny: Madness and Medicine in Hamlet and The Two Noble Kinsmen, Michelle Erica Green, online, and works cited therein.

William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2d edition, G. Taylor and S. Wells, eds., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2005.

William Shakespeare Complete Works, Jonathan Bate, Eric Rasmussen, eds., The Royal Shakespeare Company, Random House, 2007.

                                                                               ***

For a more complete account of Hamlet, the reader is respectfully referred to Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays, New English Review Press, 2013.

 

 

To comment on this essay, please click here.

To help New English Review continue to publish thought provoking essays such as this one, please click here.

If you have enjoyed this essay by David P. Gontar and would like to read more, please click here.