Over in the “He Made Good End” thread we’re discussing the Hamlet/Ophelia relationship and I thought it’d be fun to see if I could take a peek through some of the various interpretations throughout the years. I went hunting for a very specific scene – when Ophelia tries to give back Hamlet’s gifts, and he has to decide on the spot how to react. The big question, in my mind, is to what degree Ophelia deserves the treatment she gets from Hamlet.  Is she just a pawn, moved one way by her father and another by her boyfriend?  Does Hamlet agonize over his decision to crush her, or is he so far removed from that relationship that he doesn’t think twice about it? [Note that most of these clips are in fact the To be or not to be soliloquoy, so you’ll have to wait to near the end for Ophelia’s entrance.] Here we have an old “Great Performances” clip, but I do not know the actors.  At best I can say that it portrays something of a traditional, conservative take on the classic.  Hamlet here clearly looks like someone who is pretending to be something he is not.

  Speaking of traditional, here’s the Laurence Olivier .  As mentioned in the other post, it can take years to get this Ophelia out of your head.  She is…mindless.  It’s sad, really, to see just how patronizing he is toward her.  Perhaps Laertes earlier speech about how Hamlet’s no good for his little sister had some merit?  I think that Hamlet *wants* Ophelia to be a stronger person, but knows full well that she is not.  I’m sure he’s disappointed by this, but really, did he ever have reason to expect anything else? Surely he knows her character, or lack thereof.

  Ooooo….the Richard Burton version.  Cool.  I’ve never seen this before, and heard that his is one of the best.  Since it is a stage interpretation it’s hard to get the same comparison as modern film versions. 

  Kevin Kline .  People who know Kline only from his comedic roles may not appreciate just how fine a Shakespearean actor he is.  In this scene I particularly note the joy with which he first sees and approaches Ophelia, like “here is the only person who has not turned against me…” and then the sheer denial and physically backing away as he realizes that she, too, is lost to him.

  Derek Jacobi ?  Wow, I tripped over this one just as I was ready to post the rest.  Cool!  His Hamlet, to me, looks like he’s already gone over the edge.  He doesn’t so much as blink at Ophelia, and he’s practically attacking her (verbally) from the minute she says Hello.  He’s nuts.

  Mel Gibson .  The strongest part of this clip is actually Ophelia, one of the few I’ve seen that is strong enough to storm right up to him and hold her own.  She’s clearly one of those Ophelia’s who is doing her father’s bidding because she has no choice – but she most certainly has feelings on the subject.  Hamlet, for his part, looks a bit paranoid, like he’s afraid she’s going to see right through him. 

  Ethan Hawke .  I had trouble finding this clip, there’s plenty of him wandering around the video store doing To Be, and later of him breaking up with Ophelia (“no more marriages”) over voice mail, but nothing in the middle.  This clip is actually a collection of Ophelia moments, and Ethan Hawke / Julia Stiles is in there at about 45 seconds.  It’s pretty bad, and I include it only for completeness.  It’s not worthy of comparison to Kline or Brannagh or the others.

  Lastly we have modern perfection, Kenneth Brannagh .  I did not necessarily love his version on first viewing, I thought he made some unusual choices particularly near the end.  But when you pick out individual scenes and look only at the acting, and the delivery of the lines, it’s quite genius.  Look at Brannagh’s eyes when Ophelia returns his gifts.  Look at the mix of rage and anguish as he tries to keep it together and not blow his cover.  Wow.

http://www.merrimackrep.org/home/default.aspx Ok, Google is awesome.  I’m checking some GMail and I see a reference to “Merrimack Rep” pass by in one of the ads. I happen to live near Merrimack College, so I think that it is a local reference. I google “Merrimack Rep”. Turns out that it’s a theatre in Lowell, MA. Guess who is playing?  The Karamazov Brothers, one of the best juggling/vaudeville acts going today. Guess what they’re performing?  Something called Flings & Eros. Guess what it’s about?  Romeo and Juliet!   Looks exciting.  Best part is I think that a friend of mine has season tickets.  If that’s the case it’d be a golden opportunity to see this one, without trying to explain to the wife how I’m dragging her to yet more Shakespeare :).

We last talked about this question back in November 2006, and it continues to be the most popular item on the site (at least for Google hits, if not comments).  I tend to blog and forget, and I don’t always take time to remember that people stumbling across the blog now don’t always cruise through the archives or use my cool new search box over there… Anyway, how old is Romeo?  It’s a harder question than you might think.  We know that Juliet is 13, it says so right in the story.  But if you’ve found yourself thinking “That must make Romeo 13 as well…” not so fast. Some highlights from the original conversation, which I encourage people to check out…

I have always read Romeo as being on the upper end of 15, or early 16. (Some of the arguments I’ve heard putting him toward 18 always seemed inexplicably "off.") This way, he’s just young enough to be so wanton and so reckless with his sentiments (c.f., the Rosalind fiasco), but not quite old enough to have had enough experiences to jade him accordingly.

The Juliet in the original novel – Romeo and Guilietta – is eighteen.

Modern (i.e. post German Romantic) make him younger than he originally was. a 21 year old would have been right – but suggestions of molestation to modern audiences wipe out the possibilities.   I think it’s awfully creepy that Juliet was like 13.  My little sister is very mature for her age but it makes my heart sick to think of her in a similar situation of Juliet.

General opinion seems to have him in his late teens, possibly as old as 21.  Whether or not that’s creepy, or normal for the time, is the subject of much discussion. 🙂

Quick, what’s the saddest line in Hamlet? Maybe you went for “Good night sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,” Horatio’s final words to his dying friend (often spoken while cradling Hamlet’s head in his lap).  I have to admit, that’s a good one.  But it doesn’t tear me up like it used to.  [If you’re going to stake out the final lines of a Shakespearean tragedy for sadness, give me Lear leaning over his dead daughter, believing that she’s still speaking to him.] For me it comes earlier, and it comes from a different character.

“I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. They say he made a good end—”

That’s spoken by Ophelia, whose boyfriend Hamlet (apparently crazy in his own right) has killed her father Polonius.  Hamlet is now banished to England.  Her brother Laertes, for what it’s worth, is off back to school as well.  So she’s quite alone to deal with this turn of events. Ophelia has lost her mind by this point (in stark contrast to Hamlet’s “feigned” madness that still has method in it, Ophelia makes little sense at all) but it’s clear that her father’s death has hit her very hard.  Though much of her song is about Hamlet (and being tumbled before being wed, whatever she’s alluding to there…), most is about “being dead and gone….will not come again….” and "lay him in the cold ground…at his heels a stone….” I’m intrigued primarily by the second half of that sentence.  They say he made good end.  Well technically no, he didn’t – he was run through quite unexpectedly and unfairly when he was hiding behind an arras in the queen’s bedchamber.  Never even had a chance to defend himself.  I suppose you could argue that he stayed in the room at all in an attempt to protect the Gertrude? Question – where at this point do you think Ophelia’s line comes from?  Do you think somebody actually told her the circumstances of Polonius’ death, and if so, do you figure they embellished?  I suppose that’s the likely answer – “Your father gave his life to protect the queen, when Hamlet, clearly mad, attempted to do her harm.” Do you think she knows the real story, and this is something of a denial – she’s tells herself, out loud, that he made good end as a way of coping with the unfortunate circumstances that really occurred?  Refuses to believe that her father was taken away so quickly and cruelly in such a pointless manner? [We haven’t done one of these  in a while, and I should really post more like this.  This is the stuff I like.  Some people love to dig into punctuation and “form” and such, but for me it’s the psychology of the characters I find most fascinating.  I could forever read between the lines of what Shakespeare does not tell us.]