Once upon a time I went to College and I studied English. The great thing about being an English major is how everything is up for interpretation, also, you read Shakespeare. I mean almost ALL of Shakespeare. And what Shakespeare class would be complete without reading Hamlet? In this post I want to share some thoughts I had from a Shakespeare in film class. The assignment was to write a character study, below you will find my thoughts on Ophelia.
I think Ophelia is a fascinating character. She is famously known as the young girl who was in love with the Danish Prince Hamlet and then kills herself when he rejects her. But what if this wasn't the case? It is my opinion that Ophelia is much more complicated.
In the play, after Hamlet sees the ghost of his father and is told to avenge his death he says he will perform an “antic disposition” to fool the king into confessing to the murder. It is not unreasonable to assume that Ophelia is also performing madness. There are 4 films that I watched to compare Ophelia performances. The first, and my favorite, is Kenneth Branagh. His interpretation of Ophelia is unique. He is the only director that says, “Yes, Ophelia is a performer”. His Ophelia takes the road less traveled, playing a girl who sees suicide as her only option. The other directors, Zeffirelli, Almereyda and Doran have the more traditional performances of Ophelia.
Branagh goes to great lengths in his film to show that Ophelia and Hamlet are in a relationship. As Ophelia is being interrogated by her father she remembers the time she and her prince were together, and when she and Hamlet meet in the lobby of the palace, his greeting is more than that of a friend. Branagh follows the popular notion that Ophelia is distraught over Hamlets treatment of her and that she is terribly grieved by her father’s murder by him. That is where the similarities with the traditional portrayal of Ophelia end. The first time the audience sees mad Ophelia is when she meets with the queen dressed in a strait jacket. Her speech is nonsensical at first but it soon becomes apparent that it is all an act.
When Branagh’s Ophelia has moments of lucidity he uses close ups of her face. For example, when she says “we must be patient...” Branagh cuts from lucid Ophelia to confused king and queen then back to a close up of “sane” Ophelia’s face. He does this again when Laertes witnesses his sister’s madness. Just before Ophelia goes back into her padded room the camera zooms in on her face, she looks over at her brother, recognizes him and says “g-d by you” before going of her own will into her room. The last view we have of Ophelia is of her receiving “treatment” for her madness, being sprayed by water hoses. As the attendants leave her, closing the door with a satisfying click, Branagh again closes in on Ophelia’s face to show her taking the key out of her mouth. When next we hear of Ophelia, she has committed suicide.
While Branagh is exploring new territory for the character, Franco Zefferelli displays a traditional reading of Ophelia. He shows Ophelia as that of fragile girl broken by the death of her father and Hamlet’s vicious personal attack. To show her impending madness, Zefferelli has Ophelia always apart, isolated from other people. The very first time we see her she is in a sewing room full of women, but when Laertes finds her she is separate from them. As she and her father go to see him off she walks behind the men, a chaste figure in white. Zefferelli also has Helena Bonham-Carter play Ophelia as a simpering girl, always differing to her father and brother. This view of the sweet obedient girl who is jilted by Prince Hamlet is shown most clearly in the scene where Ophelia is mad.
In this sequence Ophelia is introduced in a close up that emphasizes her disheveled appearance, then slowly pulls away to show Ophelia wandering around Elsinore singing about the dangers of allowing a man into your bed. Throughout this scene Zeffirelli continues his technique of showing Ophelia apart from the rest of the court. Entering Elsinore, she is framed by the giant oak doors and the crowds of people who have all moved away from her. Her exchange with Gertrude is nonsensical, as are her emotions. She moves from manic to despondent from second to second. There is no moment in this sequence when the audience doubts that Ophelia has lost her wits. Her nonsensical behavior guarantees that the audience feels sympathy for the poor girl jilted in love and driven mad by the grief of a lost father.
A more modern adaptation on this “traditional” madness is in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet. His Ophelia is modern, hip, and relatable to a younger audience because of her relationship with her father and brother. Almereyda portrays Julia Stiles’ character as a young girl pressured by the adults around her to act and behave a certain way and is therefore driven to madness.
In this production the first sign that all is not well with Ophelia is just before she meets with Hamlet, as her father and the king and queen are taping a microphone to her shirt. Before the camera cuts to her and Hamlet in his apartment, it shows a close- up of Ophelia’s face and the tears on her cheeks. Clearly, the actions of the people in authority are wearing down on her. Then, in the opening of this version of act four, scene five a camera angles down to the visual representation of Ophelia’s mental state. A spiral walk way where Ophelia is running up. As she approaches Gertrude, the audience can tell that she is distraught, her cheeks are wet and her clothing is inside out. The editing out of the majority of the lines from this scene serves to convey the lack of sense in Ophelia’s words. Her rhyming is more about her descent into insanity and the loss of her father than about being jilted in love. Finally, the tracking shot of her and Gertrude walking around the spiral walkway further illustrates Ophelia’s descent into madness.
Another modern Ophelia may be seen in Gregory Doran’s production. In this portrayal of Ophelia, she is a classy young lady, always calm and poised. It is this composure that makes her madness so disturbing. Her meeting with Gertrude shows her to be even more disheveled than Almereyda’s Ophelia, a drastic change from the preppy girl who sees her brother off to school. The medium shots and the stage like setting in the act four, scene five, sequence allows the audience to have the illusion of watching the play in the theater. This gives the witnessing of Ophelia’s madness a greater intimacy. And the brilliant medium shot of the queen with a broken mirror behind her, reflecting Ophelia to the audience, represents the fracturing of the young girls mind.
While Zefferelli’s, Doran’s and Almareyda’s Hamlet adaptations present different performances of Ophelia’s madness, they all portray her as truly insane. Branagh takes all of the available material on the play and is able to direct a performance of Ophelia that is unique. His Ophelia is devastated by the actions of her boyfriend and the death of her father, but she is not insane. She is in despair and sees suicide as the only way out of her situation. However, she lives in a catholic country and believes she will not be correctly buried if she is not seen as blameless. Therefore she “performs” madness, puts on an “antic disposition”, and is able to be buried according to her faith.
