What happens to Ophelia?

That's interesting LRD - and also I think because men were seen as the active ones, so it was OK for them to have strong emotions and run around in pursuit, but v. undignified for women to do anything except embroider and wait for suitors.

Actually, I wonder how much women didn't write love poems like that (well, some do I know, but I agree it's more of a bloke thing), because it used to be perfectly ok for a man to sigh after a woman (even if, apparently, he's married to someone else), but if a woman does, there's a suspicion she might be having The Sex and her babies would be illegitimate?

mooncup - I love Much Ado so much.

Wilkie Collins is fab - The Law and the Lady has a pregnant detective heroine who fearlessly dives in to sort out her husband's mess while he whimpers in a corner somewhere.

Back to Shakespeare, Claudio's humiliation of Hero in Much Ado is absolutely vile. But Shakespeare is very sympathetic to the suffering caused, both Beatrice and Benedick leap in to help Hero and the Claudio/Hero reconciliation is rather underplayed as I recall.

Midsummer Night's Dream? I don't like the idea that they're still drugged up with whatever Puck give them at the end and you don't know if it'll wear off and Demetrius will still be an abusive arsehole. Loads of schools do that as a play for end of primary/beginning of secondary and play him being a git to her for laughs ... really nasty, actually.

Ok ... maybe I should give Dickens another try. I got put off quite young.
Sorry elephants - back to Shakespeare!

For that reason, you can feel quite glad of the ice maiden in Great Expectations -- because she alone has been taught to withhold from men. The trouble of course is that that independence is represented only as sterility and loss: she isn't given the chance to go anywhere with it.

At least dickens has the grace to castigate himself (in the person opf Copperfield) for going overboard for the appalling Dora types. There are very wise young women in his novels (the daughter of the man with whom Copperifeld stays while studying, and despite her saccahrine(sp) goodness the young woman whe gets smallpox in Bleak House. The trouble is that their wisdom is in the service of a concept of virtue that is basically about serving men -- often by protecting them from their own stupidity.

Agree generally re Dickens, LRD, but I've just read Our Mutual Friend and would like to put in a word for Bella Wilfer, who starts off as a shallow girly but grows up and becomes a decent believable human being; she also has a very close and touching relationship with her father.

Dickens also has some decent female characters who are young or old - they are all a bit caricatured but then so are most of his men. He was clearly one of those Victorians who went all mushy over a certain type of Innocent Young Woman, a la the ghastly Dora in David Copperfield and various other identikit types.

Truly ROFLing at that, LRD!

garlic - great, I can see the A Level essays now: 'Hamlet is a play where the hero is called a patheticums, which in the English they spoke back then means he had anal sex with lots of men, in Germany. There was also Ophelia, who died. And something about Elephants.'

elephants Nooooooo! You hate all the people I like! Actually I don't like Dante but I do like Virgil. If we're going to hate men in fiction, can we put forward anything Dickens ever wrote? None of the women characters are ever more than cardboard cutouts.

Thanks for that excellent addition to my vocabulary, Elephants!
Patheticums. Rolls off the tongue, dripping contempt

If anybody googles that phrase now, LRD, they'll end up on this thread

Sadly, I googled "anal sex in Shakespeare's plays" and got nothing.

Maybe if we repost in Chat in a few days?

Oh, oh, still nothing about Ophelia's role, but I just found this top answer about Denmark. Here's half of it:

For much the same reason MAS*H was set in the Korean War.

Hamlet didn't have as much to say about English politics as say Henry V did, but there was some stuff in there that could be controversial given the times. Setting a play in another country or an earlier time period, however, allows the author to comment about politics in their own time and place with more freedom.

I cite MAS*H because much of it was a condemnation of the Vietnam war. However, condemning the Vietnam war was tricky business. You risked angering viewers, having network censors nix your plotlines, jumping the gun on events that later turn out not to be so clear-cut, etc. But if you set the show during a previous war (the Korean conflict), then you can condemn the horrors of that war as a way of condemning the horrors of the current one.

The rest of the answer is on Wikipedia (an old Nordic legend with British parallels)

Ha!

I can't imagine the anal sex angle getting much coverage at our Irish convent, either, Pan.

I did Hamlet for 'O' level - at a boys grammar school in the 70's - we didn't cover the anal rape angle. Funny that.

Simply can't comment LRD through sheer ignorance but am finding the thread fascinating.