The Woman In Hamlet

by David Leverenz

• The different figures of male authority see Hamlet's identity very differently - dutiful son, lovesick heir, mad lovesick
• Mixed and contradictory expectations from different father figures
• 'part puritan' in his disgust at contamination
• destruction of good mothering
• 'diseased doubleness in everyone who has accomodated to his or her social role'
• At least players are obviously acting
• There are many voices in Ophelia's madness speaking through her (could mirror way Hamlet projects different personas for different people'
• 'Ophelia becomes the mirror for a madness-inducing world. Hamlet resists these pressures at the cost of terrifying isolation'
• cites his "whorish" doubts as the cause of his inability to take manly filial action
• Hamlet's idealizations of his father and Horatio's friendship show a hunger for male closeness
• 'Poisoning in the ear may unconsciously evoke anal discourse'
• tensions between head and heart, noble reason and diseased emotion
• 'Not a mouse stirring' later play is 'The Mousetrap'
• Horatio's first word is 'friends'
• loyalty as an identity
• 'one brow of woe' presenting his kingdom as single person
• war terms like Polonius' 'parley' and Laertes's 'shot' used in describing courtship
• first soliloquy filled with different parts of the body
• Ghost's speech designed to show his strength and Hamlet's weakness
• Ghost's speeches contradictory and mixed signals
• Ghost not interested in feeling 
• Old hamlet used to sleep on the job
• Ghost and Claudius alike in their arrogance
• Old Priam and Yorick even more father figures
• 'Olphelia mirrors in her madness the tensions that Hamlet perceives
• Ophelia driven mad by having inner feelings misrepresented, repressed etc
• continually commanded - implies distrust
• her advice to Laertes shows her awareness of his possible double self
• punning on 'recks' and 'reckless' she displays an independent wit
• 'Polonius is delibrately unconcerned what his daughter feels
• 'Polonius is preoccupied only with how he looks'
• Hamlet's 'oscillating acts of needs and repression'
• Ophelia's refusal of his letters etc echo Gertrude's inconsistency
• does what Hamlet does by going mad and her suicide reflects Hamlet's soliloquys
• She follows Polonius's saying that love leads to madness
• she is a 'player trying to respond to several imperious directors at once. Everyone has used her'
• Robin was Elizabethan colloquial term for penis and Ophelia sings 'For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy'
• Ophelia's song 'mirror every level of the play, even Polonius' flowery speech yet they do not express what Ophelia feels'
• 'the graveyard scene shows the last perversion of reason'
• 'Like ophelia, Hamlet can mirror how others talk, though with a savage irony'
• 'Even Ophelia only loved him for his words'

Laing 'in [Ophelia's] madness there is no one there... incomprehensible statements are said by nothing. She has already dies. There is now only a vcuum where there was once a person.'

her madness as a natural response to the unacknowledged interpersonal falsities of the group

Eliot Gertrudes' 'negative and insignificant'character 'arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing'