Search Results

This chapter examines Shakespeare's Hamlet and seeks to understand the Good life. It notes that Prince Hamlet naturally preferred a private life, subordinating himself to the rule of others, and even courted Ophelia, which suggests an opening to domesticity on his part. It further seeks to explore the ultimate dependency of Good on understanding. It notes that in order to be able to conclude that the Good is elusive; one must have a reliable sense of what is truly good. It points out that whatever openness Hamlet had had toward domesticity seems to have been seriously disturbed by what happened to what may have been his model of a good marriage. It notes that his mother need not be considered to have been aware of the murder of her first husband, but her hasty remarriage can arouse suspicions that Gertrude and Claudius had had some “understanding” while King Hamlet was still alive.

One of the aspects of women's lovesickness which has caused the most confusion is its relation to three other female maladies: hysteria, green sickness, and uterine fury. Although many critics assume that lovesickness is a version of one or several of these illnesses, lovesickness, hysteria, green sickness, and uterine fury are understood as separate maladies in the early modern period, with their own unique set of symptoms, stereotypical sufferers, and cultural associations. There is, however, an exception. When a woman's lovesickness develops into full-scale madness (as in the case of Ophelia), her illness is frequently seen to be related to her virginity and menstrual cycle and is thus represented as being similar to uterine disorders. This chapter outlines the medical constructions and literary representations of green sickness, hysteria, and uterine fury, and examines Shakespeare's Hamlet and Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen, two texts that associate lovesickness with uterine disorders.

This chapter argues that William Shakespeare's play Hamlet does carry answers to puzzling questions, through signals that one has lost the skills to read, not all of which are clearly ‘in the text’. Instead, the nature of the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia is conveyed through a complex interplay of spatial and transactional markers, represented through architecture and gift-giving, that would have been vividly evident to the play's early audiences. These markers are drawn from powerful contemporary ideologies, and bear some relation to legal evidence, but they find their full power only on stage. And those signals coalesce on Hamlet's letter to Ophelia. The chapter suggests that, in important ways, Hamlet and Ophelia were already contracted to be married.

Hamlet is the most prolific letter-writer in William Shakespeare's drama. He writes a love letter to Ophelia. He writes to his uncle and stepfather king Claudius, advising him that he has returned to Denmark. He writes to his mother. He writes to his friend Horatio, with news and instructions on how to deliver other letters. He writes to the king of England, although not under his own name. Three of his letters are read out on stage in their entirety. Four, if not all, of these letters make a physical appearance on stage. Hamlet is thus filled with letters, its plot often dependent on them, and its hero its leading writer. As this chapter suggests, however, it is through the writing — or rather the rewriting — of one of Hamlet's letters that Shakespeare provides a different perspective on one of the play's central themes: how and what to remember.

This chapter reflects on the author’s first encounters with Shakespeare on the page, and how identity formations occur between and among languages for a reader and a writer at an early stage in their career. The piece circles around ideas of what it means to be Latinx in US culture, how portals of the imaginary may be unlocked in unexpected ways and how writing is essentially an act of freedom. The author’s own feminist interventions into Shakespeare–12 Ophelias, Perdita Garcia, The Breath of Stars, and more—are referenced as well as her experience as a translator and adaptor of theatrical material.

This chapter explores the acceptable version of scepticism that is embodied in the figure of Hamlet. Ophelia's folklore is an anthropomorphicisation of nature and at the same time an affirmation of the ‘objective’ existence of perennial human feelings. Hamlet is the fictional equivalent of Shakespeare himself in his inheritance of a variety of traditions. Each of these traditions advances an idea of what human nature is or should be. Hamlet questions both limits and limitlessness, ‘nature’ and the eradication of nature. In Hamlet, freedom often equates to aimlessness and an ‘anything goes’ form of relativism. Hamlet is mocking mockery's tendency towards satire, cynicism and emptiness. The existential tremble which the graveyard sets off in Hamlet – the realisation that life ends or may end in only skull, bone and worm-eaten flesh – provokes an awareness of the need for humans to cling to each other for comfort.

This chapter examines Cecilia McDowall's works. It shows that the cycle featured here is suitable for a youthful, light-voiced soprano with a well-placed upper range. McDowall, justifiably admired for her choral writing, has a great empathy with the way the voice works and feels, and she consistently displays a deft touch and fine ear, combined with a strong awareness of practicalities. The four songs are well contrasted, and they offer ample scope for the singer to exhibit a degree of vocal virtuosity without being unduly stretched in portraying these disparate characters with skill and aplomb. The tonal idiom, notated in standard fashion, replete with key signatures, is agreeably fresh and direct, and the music flows along with a natural momentum and openness of expression. A relatively simple but effective piano part supports the voice, often illustrating and embellishing the texts. Vocal lines cover a broad compass, and some sit rather high, but in these instances the composer wisely avoids strain by allowing the voice to relax while refocusing on the lower range.

This chapter analyzes a third-grade public school classroom. Moral panic discourse asserts that media damages girls; media literacy scholarship argues that girls and boys need skills to make sense of and resist media; and after-school and empowerment programs maintain that producing media is good for girls. All of these assumptions partly subscribe to the Ophelia Thesis assumption that girls are vulnerable, that the media exploits that vulnerability, and that protective structures must be built around girls. The chapter then turns to the idea of the thinking girl and identifies four ways in which girls (and boys) engage with media analytically: they focus on minute details; they ask endless questions; they reflect on media structures through creative production; and they pay a great deal of attention to the cultural production of gender.

When we read or hear about young African American women in our society, we usually find that the emphasis is on problems—from welfare and teenage pregnancy to violence and drugs. Rarely do the media focus on the success of young Black girls in school or of African American women in professional careers. For example, despite the fact that the nation’s teenage pregnancy rates have steadily declined since 1991, and that the majority of the nation’s pregnant teenagers are not Black, it is common nevertheless for the American public immediately to associate the expression, “babies having babies,” with young Black girls. This association is largely created and reinforced by images presented in the media of young African American women in trouble, either as unwed mothers or, in more recent years, as gang members. Less well known are the significant accomplishments and value of African American women and the enormous role they can, and do, play in our nation. Consider the prose of Nobel Prize-winning writer Toni Morrison, and the courageous voice of one of America’s most eloquent child-advocates, Marian Wright Edelman. African American women are achieving at the highest of professional levels, from college presidencies to cabinet posts. Consider, for example, the appointments of Dr. Shirley Jackson, a physicist and the first African American female to earn a Ph.D. in any field at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one of America’s major technological universities, or of Dr. Condoleezza Rice as the President’s National Security Advisor. Notwithstanding these positive accomplishments, most Americans— Black and White—still know very little about these high achievers. Increasingly, entertainers—both women and men—send mixed signals to young Black girls about who they should aspire to become as they move toward womanhood. Often, these images, which tend to be unflattering and even at times degrading, focus on a culture that is excessively influenced by glamour, sex, and violence. In Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher discusses the powerful influence of the media in shaping girls’ definitions of themselves through teen magazines, advertisements, music, television, and movies.

Mrs Patrick Campbell played three Lyceum Shakespeare heroines: Juliet (1895), Ophelia (1897), and Lady Macbeth (1898). Campbell’s oscillations between society drama, Shakespeare, and Maeterlinck highlight fin-de-siècle anxieties about child suicide, sexuality, and the unhealthy female body. Her reception in Shakespeare reveals fin-de-siècle audiences’ enthusiasm for more complicated collisions between actress and role than has been previously assumed. Campbell’s celebrity iconography also extends our definitions of the New Woman aesthetic. The chapter challenges fin-de-siècle histories of Campbell as ‘created’ by performances in Pinero, revealing how her early career in open-air Shakespeare was crucial to building the wealthy aristocratic coterie audience whose prestige rivalled that of any theatrical dynasty.

This chapter investigates the series of mythical associations between woman and water evoked by the mask: Ophelia, the naiads of European folklore, mermaids, beautiful maidens who took their own lives. It begins with an investigation of the mask’s resonances in the work of Belgian painter René Magritte, then considers the dramatic piece by Ödön Von Horváth, The Unknown Woman of the Seine, along with a number of poems, namely Nabokov’s poem ‘L’Inconnue de la Seine’, Grout’s Poèmes à l’Inconnue, and a fairly narrow corpus of texts from German Expressionism. The chapter underscores the importance of the mask’s relationship to a specific visual and textual legacy, and reveals the figuration of the Inconnue as Muse to be caught up between simulacrum and liminal figure. It sees the mask as a residual deposit of Western culture: a symptomatic articulation of what this culture makes of the object of repression and obsession—death.

Song is accompanied by a persistent sense of dislocation from Shakespeare’s fictions, often fitting only loosely or incompletely into dramatic plots. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania’s four singing fairies connect the play to the children’s company repertoire that preceded it and foreground the question of how performing bodies are transformed into media. Dream’s playful, self-conscious inquiry into the nature of theatrical mediation anticipates Hamlet, where Ophelia is objectified as a medium by her father, brother, lover, and queen. Yet Ophelia trenchantly resists the logocentric representational economies that confront her. Through her recycled, nonauthorial balladry, Ophelia produces a musical form of poetry that is restlessly subversive and irreducibly performative, articulating a new understanding of poetic mediation that is imbued in its environment.

This chapter observes that many undergraduates find themselves drawn to more than one religious tradition, philosophical perspective, or lifestance. Indeed, the concept of “multiple religious belonging” may describe a very common circumstance, in which human beings find themselves drawn to, and sometimes overwhelmed by, an eclectic blend of beliefs and practices. Certain parallels may be drawn between these experiences and the broader experience of adolescent women, who find themselves pulled in many directions by the demands of contemporary culture. The chapter brings together a discussion of Mary Pipher’s book Reviving Ophelia with the example of “Sheila” in Habits of the Heart (ed. Robert Bellah et al.). Rather than assuming that experiences of multiple belonging result from confusion or indifference, the author counsels meeting these perspectives where they are, exploring how this quest for meaning might positively shape vocational reflection and discernment.

This chapter describes Edward MacDowell's marriage to Marian Nevins on 21 July 1884. Two days after the wedding, the couple sailed to England for a brief honeymoon. They visited Exeter and Bath, and then traveled to London, where the highlight was attending performances of Shakespeare. This blissful time awakened Edward's creativity, and the recollections of Marian and the evidence of a sketchbook from the period allow us to re-create his creative process. In the winter of 1884/85 Edward devoted himself to Marian and to composition. The first large-scale orchestral work that he completed was Hamlet and Ophelia, op. 22.