Ophelia’s Ghost

Marion Wynne-Davies

doi:10.14198/raei.2012.25.12

Abstract

This essay takes as its starting point the 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet directed by Greg Doran in order to explore the ways in which Ophelia’s death and burial might be used to disturb dominant cultural codes. As such, it focuses upon the regulatory discourses framing three female subjects: the legal and religious rules governing suicide, in particular the inquest’s record of the death by drowning of Katherine Hamlet in 1579; the account of Ophelia’s death and her “maimed rites” in the Gravedigger’s scene; and the performance of Mariah Gale in the “mad scene.” In each case the female body is perceived to breach expected boundaries: the way in which the real girl’s death presents a series of questions about temporal and spiritual laws; the engagement of the play with those legal and religious discourses by locating the female character as a disturbing absence; and the use of the actress’s body in order to reiterate in performance the sense of threat encountered in the text. In so doing it employs the theories of the abject and the uncanny as discussed by Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva in order to locate where the text’s distorted repetitions uncover the tenuousness of the cultural codes used to regulate the Early Modern understanding of female suicide.

Highlights

The director of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production of Hamlet, Greg Doran, undertook some interesting research during rehearsals that he later published in Alicante Journal of English Studies the programme as “Rehearsal Scrapbook”
The notes take the form of a diary and explain how in week five the cast prepared Act IV, part of which Doran described as “the mad scene.”
The successive images —of Katherine drowning, of Ophelia’s crazed wandering along the river bank and of Gale’s inflamed skin— conflate, for Doran, into an understanding of how to direct “the mad scene”: We have agreed that each time we rehearse...the other actors will not know what route to Ophelia’s madness we are taking....what is sense to her must seem lunacy to them

Summary

Introduction: the scrapbook

The director of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production of Hamlet, Greg Doran, undertook some interesting research during rehearsals that he later published in Alicante Journal of English Studies the programme as “Rehearsal Scrapbook”. As Doran imagined Katherine Hamlet, “it occurs to us that, if Mariah were to try gathering [the flowers] ... her skin would quickly become muddy, scratched and red raw with stings Perhaps this is how to play the mad scene.”. The implications of this terminology —“border...boundary...breaking point”— signify their effectiveness for an understanding of the abject, since, for Butler, abjection must be politicized She argued that certain people appear to exist outside the borders of what constitutes “the real,” that is the normative ontology; a clear example being homosexuals who are excluded by the dominant heterosexual discourse. In order to expose the boundaries of social control, we need to search for the points at which the repetition of the social norm breaks down, where reiteration is parodied, deformed or absent

Per infortunium

Ophelia’s maimed rights

The route to Ophelia’s madness: staging

Findings

166 References