PROJECT-HAMLET.INFO: Cassandra

Thoth Tarot (Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris): The Star
(image used by permission of the Ordo Templis Orientis, Secretary General/ International Headquarters,
Berlin, Germany)

Ophelia – Cassandra

"The fair Ophelia." I admit that for a long time I didn't find any real access to the maid – not half as much as to Gertrude, Hamlet, Claudius, Polonius, Horatio, Laertes, Fortinbras, and, yes, even the Ghost. Oh, I admired every actress taking on her role, and none more so than Helena Bonham Carter and Kate Winslet in the movies by Franco Zeffirelli and Sir Kenneth Branagh. And they made me understand some of Ophelia's complexities: her loneliness; the young woman trying to break out, leave her childhood behind and find a place of her own in the world; the way she is torn between her newly-awakened love for Hamlet, her as-yet strong obedience to her father, and those words of her brother's that she promises to keep "in [her] memory lock'd," with Laertes himself to "keep the key of it." But why does Ophelia turn mad? How does Polonius's "fair daughter" become Cassandra, that most unfortunate of prophetesses, cursed by Apollo never to be believed once she has dared to refuse his, a god's amorous attentions?

On the symbolic level, the parallel to Greek mythology seems obvious enough: Apollo, the god of archery and patron of the muses, valiant hero and promoter of civilisation, but also woefully vindictive when rejected by the fair sex (which, hard to believe as it may seem, does happen to him more than just occasionally), this same Apollo has done it again and taken cruel revenge on a woman who has turned him down. Well might Ophelia thus echo Cassandra's words from Aischylos's "Agamemnon" (Part 2):

Apollo, Apollo!
God of all ways, but only Death's to me,
Once and again, O thou, Destroyer named,
Thou hast destroyed me, thou, my love of old!

For this reason alone – although psychologically, any other interpretation doesn't make sense to me, either, but more on that later – I also don't buy into any understanding of "get thee to a nunnery" other than one of pure, unrestrained spite and anger on Hamlet's part. But Greek deities aside, and even allowing that the events as we know them are bound to have had a profound effect on Ophelia, what's so terrible that the only way her mind can cope is by leaving her "divided from herself and her fair judgment?" I mean, before the "play within the play" she doesn't even know what really is behind Hamlet's purported lunacy; and although his reactions are extreme enough (and much more understandably so than Ophelia's, one is wont to say), we know that he hasn't really gone mad. So what's her problem then ... are we just looking at yet another oversensitive chick?

Well, no; of course we aren't. But if you take that derogative tone out of the word "chick," it actually gets us a fair way towards an understanding of what is happening to her. Because what distinguishes Ophelia from every other character in the play is precisely this, that she is still in part ... a child. A girl, a very, very young woman who, unlike all of us grown-ups, has not yet developed that protective layer of scar tissue which eventually makes us insensitive to all but life's harshest tests, but also allows us to maintain our sanity. Gertrude, Claudius, Polonius and Horatio all have it; even Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras, young men but nevertheless men have been out and about in the world long enough to have acquired their first layers of that oh-so precious protective shell. They all see it tested, of course, and none more severely so than Hamlet, but though it suffers cracks and scratches – and huge ones at that – it does not break entirely. Even the dead King's Ghost, whatever pains he is made to suffer in his after-life in penitence for his earthly sins, they quite obviously don't melt away his mental shields, too; otherwise we'd surely see him walking about as a raving lunatic as well. – But Ophelia? Why, she is patently unfit to cope with what life, at the hands of none other than our lord Hamlet and in the space of at most a few months, throws at her.

Remember that since, at least in my interpretation of the play, we're talking about a medieval or early Renaissance context, she can't be more than a teenager; a girl who has grown up sheltered, the daughter of a rich and influential father, who now, as her very first experience with love, finds that she has caught the eye of Prince Hamlet, her elder brother's boyhood friend (possibly also himself a bit like a brother to her when she was little); a proud, intelligent, presumably rather good-looking young man and – although with her brother and her father I think we can indeed assume that she doesn't quite grasp the full meaning of this – the country's most eligible of eligible bachelors. She is flattered, probably a bit confused, and initially uncertain how to react, but since he doesn't seem to be up to anything untoward (and anyway, he is no stranger to her, so why should she fear him?), she permits his attentions. Quite crucially also, she doesn't have a mother or an old nanny to guide her – why that is so we never really learn, but in any event, there it is. By the time her brother Laertes catches on to what is happening, he is about to leave again for France; and even then, he mostly puts her on her guard, and although he does use some rather strong language, he doesn't go narly as far as prohibiting her "from this time forth ... so [to] slander any moment leisure as to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet" – that latter part will fall to her over-jealous father, whose handling of Ophelia's nascent attachment to Hamlet reveals him as rather ill-equipped to adequately respond to the emotional turmoil suffered by a girl in love for the first time; not only in his initial stern reaction but also later: for which understanding father would have arranged for a "chance" meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia with the express purpose of sounding out the Prince's mental state a mere day after his frightening intrusion into the maid's bedchamber?!

In any case, after her father's stern warning to stay away from the Prince, Ophelia suddenly finds herself in a predicament. And for a girl in love for the first time of her life, a girl just in the process of discovering all those sweet and tender feelings, it's a pretty big predicament, because she is not only an obedient daughter, she also feels affection for her father (and of course, her brother) – so where does she belong? Juliet Capulet, her sister-in-spirit and very likely of about the same age, for her part decides that love is more important than even her and her Romeo's families' long-standing feud:

"'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself."

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
(Act II, Scene 2)

Had Ophelia come to that same conclusion, who knows, Hamlet might likewise have responded, "I take thee at thy word: Call me but love, and I'll be new baptised" ... and this particular tragedy would have had at least one level of complexity less; or else, the Bard would have had to revamp a love story he had already written six years earlier and somehow work it into the goings-on at the Danish court. But Ophelia, much to her credit as a dutiful daughter (and probably also in light of those words of her brother's that she is keeping "in [her] memory lock'd") decides to comply with her father's wishes – and immediately conjures up the Prince's scorn. Because let's face it, folks, our young Apollo is rather used to having his way; and to suddenly be turned down by any woman, but especially by the daughter of that "tedious old fool" calling himself royal Counsellor and assistant for a state, that guy who can't even get enough of his act together to stand by the rightful heir to the throne against that usurper Claudius – to thus be turned down on his wishes, to see his wishes placed over whatever affections Ophelia had permitted herself towards Hamlet – that can't possibly have gone down very well with our young hotspur. I imagine that he will probably have persisted for quite a while in trying to get close to his lady love, and further, that her shutdown was as complete as it was sudden from his point of view, because Ophelia has not yet learned the art of diplomacy; the art of telling a man "no" without, at the same time, mortally wounding his pride. So when, as the fair maid tells her father at the beginning of the second act, Hamlet suddenly shows up in her "closet" (i.e., her bedchamber), I suspect that he is literally at the end of his tether.

And now consider for a moment what that intrusion of Hamlet's must have meant to her. She is not only very young and this is her first experience with a man (in that precise role) at all; he also breaks into her very own bedroom – and this in an era when any woman's bedroom, but certainly that of a girl as young as Ophelia, was near sacrosanct. Moreover, he is the Prince; the lord of the manor. To even get to her bedchamber, he first had to enter her father's house – in itself an intrusion only someone in his position could have gotten away with; anybody else would surely have been detained by her father's servants, or maybe by Polonius himself, because we know that he is at home when this happens: he is in the process of dispatching Reynaldo on his little espionage trip to France, following Laertes. But Hamlet is a different matter of course – nobody dare stop the Prince; particularly not in the state he is in. And now picture him storming into Ophelia's bedchamber in that disturbed state: "with his doublet all unbrac'd, no hat upon his head, his stocking s foul'd, ungart'red, and down-gyved to his ankle; pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, and with a look so piteous in purport as if he had been loosed out of hell to speak of horrors." Even if my reading of "Before you tumbled me, you promis'd me to wed" isn't quite as explicit as Sir Kenneth Branagh's, I very much believe that if Shakespeare had had Hamlet rape Ophelia coram publico, on the open stage, he could hardly have contrived a more grievous invasion of her privacy; a more brutal initiation into womanhood, and instantly violated womanhood at that, than with the Prince's terrifying appearance in her bedchamber.

So whatever has or hasn't happened between Hamlet and Ophelia during their initial courtship and in the approximately three months between her father's admonition to keep the Prince at a distance and Hamlet's breaking of the penultimate boundaries, their love story is essentially over with that very moment. There is no way Ophelia will ever be able to trust Hamlet again; and as for him, even if his initial intention really was merely to give it one last try (or take one last look at her before giving up on her for good), there is no question that after he has been to her bedchamber she has moved from innocent virgin to fallen woman in his eyes, just like his own mother by her marriage to Claudius.

Already on the occasion of their "chance" meeting arranged the next day by her own father and by Claudius, all Hamlet has left for her is scorn; and indeed, that scorn is fueled even more, I think, when he discovers that she is now guilty of as atrocious a breach of his privacy as he has committed the day before – although I don't think he has actually owned up to himself what he has done to her in the first place; for whom does he blame, almost preemptively, for Ophelia's increasingly disturbed state of mind? Why, none other than Polonius, by invoking the image of Jephthah, the biblical judge and military leader who sacrificed his beloved one and only daughter in fulfilment of a vow to God made in a plea for divine assistance before an all-important battle against an overwhelming enemy.

In any event – and I'm addressing this in greater detail in the context of the soliloquy in question – although Ophelia is present during ""To be, or not to be," and although Hamlet therein expressly mentions "the pangs of despis'd love" as one of the many "whips and scorns of time" one would only want to take in this life "but that the dread of something after death ... puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of," I don't think the Prince becomes aware of her presence until after he has concluded his consultation with his own conscience. However, given the nature and the depth of the questions he has just pondered, I cannot begin to imagine the fury he must feel upon discovering that he is not alone, and worse, that the person who is present is none other than "the fair Ophelia." So now he really starts to give her hell, and double and triple hell after becoming suspicious that she is there on Polonius's behest, and that, worst of all, her father, that "tedious old fool," is hiding somewhere and has probably likewise overheard everything.

Now, I also do believe that Ophelia's death does make our Prince suddenly wake up and smell the roses – hence his violent confrontation over her grave with Laertes, who has cause to feel (and express) nothing but the purest and most profound grief over her loss – but by that time, of course, it is way too late. For indeed, even after "Get thee to a nunnery," and after then again taunting Ophelia most cruelly, most explicitly, and most publicly before the cataclysmic "play within the play," what does Hamlet do? How does he follow up on what he has already done to her, just in time before being shipped off to England himself? He kills her father, who, ill-equipped to deal with her situation as he may be, is the only person in the world she has left to hold on to, and the very person on whose bidding and for whose affections' sake she has, with a heavy heart but nevertheless, decided to reject the Prince's attentions in the first place. And by this time it doesn't make one iota of difference that Hamlet didn't commit murder aforethought, or that Ophelia thinks he has gone mad, as we learn from her sorrowful conclusion after he has left her at the end of "Get thee to a nunnery." ("O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown! ... And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, that suck'd the honey of his music vows, now see that noble and most sovereign reason, like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh; that unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me t' have seen what I have seen, see what I see!") Now woe is her indeed; now she herself has reached the end of her mental tether, and, left without any other devices, without any other way to shield herself, she flees into that same state of "ecstasy" in which she supposes her spurned lover.

And thus, Cassandra's fate nears its tragic conclusion. Because now, of course, nobody will listen to the seemingly muddled prophesies conjured up by her disturbed brain; which is all the worse for the fact that, emotionally unable to shield herself as she still is, she is the only one of those remaining at Elsinore who does sense what is really in the air; and thus, anybody who had paid attention to her most certainly would have had cause to listen up. For a while, Horatio is there to take care of her and assume a sort of stewartship over her in lieu of her father. But when Hamlet returns to Denmark and summons his friend to his side, he accedes to the Prince's wish only too gladly – and thus, in an unguarded moment, Ophelia is left to drown – or drown herself? – in a brook. (How Horatio feels about this, we are left to guess as much as whether the maid's death is suicide or an accident, but I imagine that when he realises who will be buried in that graveyard that he and Hamlet pass on their way back to Elsinore, he, too, feels considerable sorrow, and probably also a fair share of guilt over having abandoned his duties towards her so rashly upon the Prince's beckoning.)

Does she exist in the world of actors, my little teenage priestess – or rather, teenage druidess – somewhere between the sweet innocence of Jean Simmons's Ophelia in her "sane" phase in Sir Laurence Olivier's movie, the expressiveness and vulnerability of Helena Bonham-Carter's and Kate Winslet's Ophelias in the movies by Franco Zeffirelli and Sir Kenneth Branagh, Dominique Swain's child seductress Lolita in Adrian Lyme's adaptation of the novel by Vladimir Nabokov, and the creature of instinct and child of nature that I see in Jodie Foster's Nell in the movie of the same name? I certainly hope so. I would for nothing in the world want to cast Ophelia with an adult actress; I think her very youth and innocence are absolutely key to the course of her fate: we need to see how seriously the dreadful events she experiences in the space of, at most, half a year upset her soul's balance, until her mind sees no other refuge but than to shut down, while at the same time leaving her completely open and unshielded to the world emotionally. And of course, it takes truly outstanding talent to get all this across credibly, seamlessly blending together all these different and contrasting elements. So I confess that for once I'm a bit reluctant to settle on any one young actress in particular – but I am very confident that she is waiting for this role somewhere out there. It's just a matter of finding her ...