Maurice: I have shared with Alec
Clive, AN INTELLECTUAL: Shared what?
(I mean, I don't know Clive, maybe his toothpaste? His disappointment in you? Who knows Clive who knowsš¤”)
(But what we do know is that the D in Durham stands for Dumbass)
Finally finished this :) Idk which version I like better
Started listening to Malevolent and I gotta say, the tumblr posts were right, this show fucks hard
literally my greatest shame is that i still don't know alphabetical order in ancient greek. i literally never memorized it. i've translated a full greek tragedy but i could not tell you what order the dictionary goes in
this comes up so frequently in our screaming about malevolent that i figured, might as well make it a meme
[id: a modified version of the āI canāt believe itās not butterā logo that says āI canāt believe itās all Harlan!ā / end id]
Hmmmm
āesotericā
some twitter dot com shenanigans, might as well post this here too :D
sorry i was so weird but you invoked a topic i am incapable of being normal about
@morethanfantasy iām in the airport and i have a few ophelia thoughts left rattling around in my skull so letās do this
i think the thing that makes ophelia so fascinating to me out of all the characters in hamlet is that we never really get to see what sheās thinking. every scene sheās in, every interaction she has, is colored in a certain level of uncertainty, because the complicated power dynamics involved mean itās hard to tell whatās genuine and whatās a carefully curated persona to survive in elsinore. take her first scene with polonius. iāve played it several different ways in the past: sheās genuinely confused about hamlet and wants his advice, sheās fully in love but heās kinda talking her out of it, sheās rolling her eyes behind his back⦠we donāt actually ever get her take on this scene, so textually any of them could be a correct read.
The only time that Ophelia speaks directly to the audience and not to another character is directly after the nunnery scene. Hamlet runs out and Ophelia spends a few lines lamenting his change (lines that tell us a lot about the previous dynamics at elsinore and i think could be incorporated into design and directing choices a lot more), and then Polonius and Claudius leave their hiding place and discuss what to do next.
While this monologue could be read as Ophelia telling us her true feelings, I have two problems with that. First: she doesnāt? really? say anything?? donāt get me wrong, hamlet being the rose of elsinoreās court is fascinating, but it doesnāt tell us anything about how ophelia feels. it doesnāt tell us if she loves him, if she stopped loving him, if theyāve had sex and sheās freaking out cause now heās said that heāll never marry her (something that she may well be thinking based on the mad scenes). even when talking to the audience, sheās putting up a bit of a front. sheās telling us much less than we think she is.
Second (and this may explain the first): the entire conceit of this scene is that ophelia is being observed. claudius and polonius are watching from hiding the whole time, and while hamlet may or may not know that, ophelia is perfectly aware of it the whole time. sheās still performing because sheās still being watched. she canāt scream in anger or punch the wall or laugh hysterically or respond with any genuine emotional reaction because sheās still under her father and the kingās censorious eyes. Itās appropriate. The one time ophelia seems to speak her own thoughts, and sheās not really alone, just pretending to be, in front of the most powerful people in the world. hamlet may be fucking around with metatheatricality, but opheliaās the one whoās really on a stage.
a lot of shakespeare plays have characters that never really talk to the audience directly. itās normal. but it would be a very different experience if we never knew what juliet was feeling, or whether regan truly loved her father, or if malcolm wanted his country back. and itās especially fascinating that we have this inscrutable character here, in the introspection play! iād argue that we can tell what pretty much any of the other characters are feeling based on genuine conversations and monologues, which makes ophelia a fascinating foil to the obsessively introspective hamlet. how much different would the story be if the perspectives were flipped, if we got opheliaās thoughts and not hamletās? would her inner monologue look like his or something completely different? i could spend YEARS trying to develop a coherent idea of opheliaās psyche and iād never know if itās true.
and of COURSE that expresses itself in opheliaās madness. hamlet makes jokes and puns and messes with his clothes and acts like heās smarter than everyone else. ophelia starts fully speaking in code. you need 5 layers of context, some of which is known only by her, to follow what sheās saying. it does seem like it all has a meaning, though. my read on it is that for the first time in her life ophelia is able to say exactly what she thinks, without couching it in politics or politeness, by using songs and references and obliqueness so that none of the people around her have any idea what sheās saying to their faces. is that intentional on her part? up to interpretation. she might have truly been driven mad by grief and fear and powerlessness and this is the only way she can make sense of the world now. she may have simply decided to quit the power games of elsinore and is entirely lucid. (side note, itās definitely relevant that scholars have been having the is-the-madness-real discussion about both hamlet and ophelia for ages. more parallels!) the point is, weāll never know. weāll never know if her death was a suicide, an accident, or a murder. in a play where we know everything about hamlet, we know next to nothing about ophelia.
personally, i think that tells us quite a lot. hamlet has some fascinating power dynamics, and the fact that even the structure of the play gives hamlet freedom to express himself at length while taking away opheliaās voice is a clever way to show their positions in elsinore and the way that the social structure traps characters in the narrative. it also shows us our own blind spots as an audience, if weāre willing to see them. while the play is all too willing to show us the story of hamlet, thereās another story going on that it does its best to obscure from us. by the time we see that something invisible is going on with ophelia, itās too late. itās the mad scene and sheās already gone.
well you heard em
He/They ⢠ftm ⢠digital art ⢠mostly random fandom stuff
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