What happens to Ophelia?

(I think it fails the Bechdel test, too, doesn't it? Ophelia and Gertrude only ever really talk about Hamlet.)

I think what is most annoying with Hamlet is its cultural icon status - makes it seem as if we can't challenge it or play with it, or accept that Hamlet might indeed be a bit of a prick! Or indeed that we don't have to assume he's the cleverest person in the play.

I do find it quite wanky and self-congratulatory the way some male academics/poets do this 'ahhh, Hamlet ... the play speaks to my soul' guff, as if screwing over your girlfriend were generally a side issue to Deep Philosophical Manliness. And the thing is, he does have a shedload of lines but I think the idea the play is about his existential crisis and all he does is utter profundities is bollocks. His dad dies, he comes home from university (a fat guy dressed in black), barges in on his mum's new relationship and wanders around with dirty socks, his stepfather tries to get him taken care of, he has a fight on a pirate ship and escapes, kills a load of people, and ends up dying fairly clumsily in the middle of a body pile-up.

I quite like Hamlet as a play and Hamlet as a character (in some versions ... I am sure it can be dull and crap if you play it badly). But I think it is a play that's hard to study without clearing through a huge pile of other people's interpretations.

SGM - there's also the bit where Hamlet settles down to watch the play with her. He asks to lie down with her and she says no, and he says she's misunderstood, he only meant he wanted to put his head in her lap, and did she think he meant 'cuntry wise'?

I don't think there is a consensus, and I've seen it played in very different ways (that she's mad, that he slept with her, that she's fantasized the whole thing , even that she's pregnant and/or has miscarried).

Something one of my teachers said, which really stayed with me, is this: when she dies, it's offstage. It's actually Gertrude who comes and tells us about it. And if you look at the language, Gertrude is working really hard to insist that Ophelia didn't have any agency - that it was the stream that pulled her down and drowned her, not that she threw herself in or fell in. On the one hand, that would be a sort of charitable explanation, because if Gertrude told everyone Ophelia had committed suicide, she couldn't be buried in consecrated group and her soul couldn't be prayed for. But, OTOH, it does make Ophelia a scarily passive character. The other point is ... Gertrude describes the situation in a heck of a lot of details (including saying that the streambank that drowned her had flowers that look like penises on it! - Freud?!). How does Gertrude know? Was she watching? And if so ... why didn't she do something?

I have seen it played implying that Gertrude pushed her or held her down.

I'm trying to think what's good to read about Ophelia but I have to say, I think most of the really interesting stuff I did on that play was discussions or lectures, mostly but not always by women academics. I found some of teh published stuff quite dry and, as you say, quite misogynistic (that quotation about the 'dual nature' really pisses me off!).

I think she's quite interesting compared with Desdemona, too.

He also killed her dad, which probably pissed her off a bit as well.

(goes to look for Cliff Notes on Hamlet.)