Marcella Chidester
Professor Richard Preiss
ENGL 5630
18 Dec 2009
Ophelia’s Death: Exploring ‘Acoustic’ and ‘Physical’ Action in Hamlet
Ophelia’s madness and death are essential to the plot of Hamlet. Her role
throughout the play appears analogous to the troubled Prince of Denmark’s psyche, and
additionally raises questions about how death is performed in theater. For example, the
last scene of the play litters the stage with the bodies of Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and
Hamlet; each person’s death has been clearly witnessed whether through the poisoned
cup or simultaneous blows of the foils. However, the deaths occurring off stage, such as
Ophelia’s, examine theater’s definition of what death is when it isn’t explicitly
performed. These off stage deaths in Hamlet examine theater as not entirely the visually
available action on stage nor what Stephen Ratcliffe calls “acoustic action,” or the sounds
creating a narrative performance. Instead, Hamlet envisions death as a contradiction of
the physical and acoustic actions. This is done by impairing the audience’s vision of
Polonius’ death, performing the Ghost and Ophelia’s deaths through verbal descriptions,
and using Ophelia’s body as a prop in the burial scene. Ophelia’s death typifies the clash
of these two actions; Gertrude’s description in act 4, scene 7 epitomizes the problems of
visual performance versus Ratcliffe’s acoustic action in her description of Ophelia’s
drowning:
There is a willow grows askant a brook,
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream.
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Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead-men's-fingers call them.
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaidlike awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death. (4.7.164-81)
Gertrude’s description has a curiously omniscient quality and raises important questions
about Ophelia’s death. How might have the Queen been informed about Ophelia’s
drowning? If she had not been informed, what might her presence at Ophelia’s drowning
mean? These questions ask the audience to think about how Gertrude’s description
further explores the conflict between physical and acoustic representation of death in
Hamlet. Gertrude’s description largely depicts what Ratcliffe calls the discrepancy
between “physical action performed on stage and acoustic action performed in words
that, in the theater at least, can be heard but not seen” (Ratcliffe 124). However,
Ophelia’s death is not the only one of its kind: Old Hamlet’s death, much like Ophelia’s,
occurs off stage as well. When appearing to Hamlet in act 1, scene 5, the Ghost relates
his own death, paralleling Gertrude’s technique by essentially performing his death
through words:
Sleeping within my orchard,
My custom always of the afternoon,
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole
With a juice of cursed hebona in a vial,
And in the porches of my ears did pour
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The leperous distillment… (1.5.59-64)
The Ghost’s account of his death as well as Gertrude’s description seem to “usurp
time” and “form” by disregarding reality. This is accomplished when time is compressed
in the two descriptions. For example, Horatio and the guards in describing the apparition
of the king’s spirit in act 1, scene 2, seem to confuse and compress time in relating their
story to Hamlet. Similarly, Gertrude in her description of Ophelia’s death manages to
perform the drowning in a matter of seconds in her speech: how long did Ophelia float in
the brook before becoming aware of her distress? Gertrude informs us, “but long it could
not be / Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, / Pull'd the poor wretch from her
melodious lay / To muddy death” (4.7.178-81). The compression of time in these two
descriptions manages to define both Ophelia’s death and the apparition of the Ghost as
outside of visually available reality, and inhabiting a sphere of uncertainty. By
disregarding reality, time collapses the symbolic value of the narratives into the actual
performance in the theater. Consequently the off stage deaths of Ophelia and the Ghost
both parallel each other as they present what Alan L. Ackerman calls, “the problem[s] of
invisibility” and additionally, these deaths disrupt the theatrical experience when “like [a]
ghost— vanish when the lights come on” (Ackerman 144).
The description of Ophelia’s death indeed presents problems of physical and
acoustic action by withholding the visual performance of her drowning. The audience
isn’t allowed access to the physical representation of Ophelia’s death on stage; instead,
they only are given the words Gertrude uses in her description. Perhaps Ophelia’s
madness, which occurs after the questionable burial of Polonius, exhibits how one reacts
to death when it is complicated physically and acoustically. Polonius’ death is an
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example of visually impairing the audience; his actual death isn’t immediately available
to the physical view of the audience. In act 3, scene 4, Hamlet thrusts his sword through
an arras, and it isn’t until “O, I am slain!” is heard from behind the curtain (3.4.25) that
Polonius’ death is revealed. Polonius’ exclamation instantaneously coincides with his
actual death; this moment typifies Ratcliffe’s acoustic action by informing the audience
through words, not action. Following the “rash and bloody deed” (3.4.28) of Polonius’
murder, the Ghost appears to Hamlet. With the corpse of Polonius still on stage and the
Ghost simultaneously available, the audience is being asked to consider the dramatic
relationship of the Ghost to the dead body. Is Polonius now a ghost? Why doesn’t his
improper burial later manifest an apparition like Old Hamlet’s? In thinking about what
the Ghost represents in this scene, we may realize that his main function in the play is to
evoke questions about his form, in other words, he may be what Bridget Gellert Lyons
calls “an impalpable object which exists only to impart meaning” (63). What then does
the body of Polonius visually represent in return? How does his complicated burial later
affect Ophelia’s madness, and eventually her own death?
Polonius is described in death as “the unseen good old man” (4.1.12). This
visually alerts the audience to the type of embodiment of the Ghost. The Ghost’s form is
continually questioned throughout the play; the first scene opens with these uncertain
questions. In the play’s opening scene, Horatio, Marcellus and Bernardo are determined
to name the figure they see before them on the battlements during their watch: he is “the
air invulnerable” (1.1.147) or the “figure like the king that’s dead” (1.1.41). Hamlet’s
comrades never deem the figure as a ghost, but Hamlet accepts the fate of his father and
feigns madness. This inspiration may come from what Greenblatt says the ghost of Old
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Hamlet represents: “what they are seeing is not physical reality, however lifelike the
resemblance…the apparition on the battlements is a kind of embodied memory”
(Greenblatt 212). The “unseen good old man” then is like the Ghost who theatrically
depicts an ambiguous phantom while still being physically embodied on stage.
Furthermore, Polonius becomes a disembodied figure, like a ghost, but not physically
represented as such. Gertrude describes Hamlet in act 4, scene 1 as “draw[ing] apart the
body he hath killed’ (4.1.24). The disembodiment of Polonius in death makes him a type
of “impalpable object” like a ghost, but less so: he becomes the food of a “certain
convocation of politic worms,” (4.3.20) digested through the guts of a beggar. The
confusion between the disembodied Polonius and the physically present Ghost distorts
the physical action of theater by substituting and displacing their functions. This is
important because it explores death as a confusion of physical and acoustic representation
in theater.
Ophelia’s madness is a product of the disembodied quality of Polonius’ death.
Stephen Greenblatt observes Ophelia’s madness as an “excess of remembrance”
(Greenblatt 218). Greenblatt suggests that Ophelia’s madness resembles the uncertainties
of her father’s death, what Laertes sees as the “obscure funeral” (4.5.207). The lack of
“trophy” or memorial for Polonius’ death determines Ophelia’s mad behavior. Her
strongly sexualized language in her madness suggests a relationship with Hamlet;
however, her songs repeatedly revert to her father’s improper burial:
Song
They bore him barefaced on the bier
And in his grave rained many a tear –
Fare you well, my dove! (4.5.161-3).
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Ophelia merely absorbs the feelings of people surrounding her and furthermore,
embodies them in excess. Without an embodied figure like Old Hamlet’s ghost, Ophelia
becomes mad and the conflicting images of the physical and acoustic action of the play
are apparent when a gentleman says she “speak[s] much of her father, says she hears /
There’s tricks i’ th’ world, and hems, and beats her heart / Spurns enviously at straws,
speaks things in doubt / That carry but half sense” (4.5.4-7). Ophelia’s understanding of
Polonius’ death exhibits the same visual anxiety the audience experiences following his
murder. Claudius’ observation of Polonius’ death reveals the impaired visual availability
of the event, which was “done but greenly / In hugger-mugger to inter him; poor Ophelia
/ Divided from herself and her fair judgment, / Without the which we are pictures or mere
beasts” (4.5.83-6). In other words, Polonius’ funeral was done secretly, not openly
visible on stage. The disembodied quality and secrecy surrounding Polonius’ death
makes Ophelia a “picture or mere beast” or divided from herself. Does the audience, like
Ophelia, become divided from themselves from lack of physical action in Polonius’
death?
Most important in examining Ophelia’s madness is the meting of flowers in act 4,
scene 5. The recipients of Ophelia’s flowers are unknown, and furthermore, the actual
presence of flowers onstage cannot entirely be determined. Is Ophelia physically passing
out flowers, or does she simply imagine them? This moment further complicates the
physical action on stage, and asks the audience to imagine for themselves the flowers and
furthermore, the meanings attached to them. Although this scene gives semblances of
possible meanings for the flowers, they are still unclear. Lyons examines this scene by
drawing attention to the uncertainty it incites. In some cases, the flowers do have
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meaning, such as pansies for thoughts and rosemary for remembrance. However, in other
cases “she suggests that the same plant can have different meanings for different people,
or that it can have double meanings” (Lyons 66). Perhaps these different meanings
perform the lack of memorial for Polonius’s death. Ophelia sings lauds to suggest
acoustic substitution for the “noble rite” or “formal ostentation” that Laertes insisted was
absent from Polonius’ burial:
Song
And will a not come again?
And will a not come again?
No, no, he is dead;
Go to they deathbed;
He never will come again.
His beard was as white as snow,
Flaxen was his poll.
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan.
God ‘a’ mercy on his soul.
And of all Christian souls, God buy you. (4.5.184-94)
The idea that Ophelia’s flowers don’t hold rigid meanings displays the dismemberment
occurring in her madness and furthermore, the source of her insanity: the ambiguities of
physical and acoustic action. This ambiguity springs from the complications of Polonius’
death; because of the lack of ceremonial performances ensuing it, physical action of the
ceremony is replaced by Ophelia’s madness. Laertes merely recognizes her catalogue of
flowers as “a document of madness, thoughts, and remembrance fitted” (4.5.173-4).
However, this moment is especially important because it displays doubleness and
disjointedness in Ophelia’s character, revealing the same contradictions of physical and
acoustic action.
Ophelia’s doubleness is apparent in the way that Hamlet speaks to her in
innuendos and insults: “I have heard of your paintings well enough. / God hath given you
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one face, and you make yourselves/ another. You jig and amble, and you lisp…”
(3.1.142-44). In other words, Ophelia appears as one thing to the audience: chaste and
undefiled; however, Hamlet imagines that her physical appearance actually does no
justice to the true carnality of her nature. Alison Chapman discusses the doubleness in
Ophelia’s madness as a result of her being “caught between two models of female
behavior” i.e. one that is realistic, and one that is unrealistic (Chapman 123). This
unrealistic behavior may stem from the physically complicated nature of Polonius’ death.
Ophelia reacts to his “hugger-mugger” burial much the same way the audience might feel
towards the dismembered quality of Polonius’ death: what can be done to substitute the
lack of closure? Ophelia’s madness may provide the closure she seeks by displacing the
complications of visual representation on to a physically available subject: her own self.
The discrepancy of Ophelia’s actual insanity and Hamlet’s feigned madness
becomes apparent in examining how death is physically and acoustically performed in the
play. Hamlet feigns madness after his father, who has had proper burial rites, is “doomed
for a certain term to walk the night” (1.5.10). On the other hand, Ophelia legitimately
goes mad even though no ghost is manifested on stage after Polonius’ improper burial.
When first appearing to Ophelia in his madness, Hamlet displays a dress entirely different
from his “inky cloak” in act 1, scene 2: “Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, /
And with a look so piteous in purport / As if he had been loosed out of hell / To speak of
horrors…” (2.1.80-3). Greenblatt states that this behavior is “entirely consistent with an
excess of remembrance, precisely such an excess as we later see unsettle the mind of the
grief-crazed Ophelia” (Greenblatt 218). Furthermore, Hamlet’s appearance before
Ophelia resembles his encounter with his father’s spirit; essentially, Hamlet in his
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madness resembles a ghost. The pale appearance and the “horrors” hearken back to the
Ghost’s appearance on the battlements. In addition to resembling a ghost, Hamlet also
performs a dumb show before Ophelia, much the same way the Ghost did before Horatio
and the guards. Without acoustic action being performed on Hamlet’s part, Ophelia
describes his dumb show:
He took me by the wrist and held me hard.
Then goes he to the length of all his arm,
And with his other hand thus o’er his brow
He falls to such perusal of my face
As a would draw it. Long stayed he so.
At last, a little shaking of mine arm
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,
He raised a sigh so piteous and profound
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk
And end his being. That done, he lets me go,
And with his head over his shoulder turned
He seemed to find his way without his eyes,
For out o’doors he went without their helps
And to the last bended their light on me. (2.1.86-99)
Hamlet’s dumb show before Ophelia exhibits an absence of words; furthermore, it is
nothing but physical action. This is significant in determining the nature of visually
available action on stage versus acoustic action. Perhaps Hamlet’s interpretation of the
Ghost is entirely consistent with how theater depicts apparitions: a confusion of physical
and acoustic action.
After examining the complications of physical representations on stage versus
acoustic action performed off stage, it is important to return to Gertrude’s description of
Ophelia’s death, which explores the difficulties of visual representation in theater. First,
Gertrude is interested in describing the environment surrounding Ophelia’s death: she
begins with “There is a willow grows askant a brook” (4.7.164) and places the audience
within close proximity to the drowning. The orientation of the spectator is important in
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understanding physical action versus acoustic action; it directly involves the audience in
Ophelia’s drowning. Furthermore, whether she was present at Ophelia’s drowning or
merely informed of it, Gertrude reflects on Ophelia’s madness displayed earlier by using
a language of flowers. The catalogue of “crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples”
(4.7.167) recalls the flowers that Ophelia passes out in act 4, scene 5. Gertrude, in
referring to a “grosser name,” recalls the “discordant nature of her sexuality” (Lyons 69)
as displayed in Ophelia’s songs. Additionally, she gestures at the possibility of a world
existing outside Elsinore: the “cold maids” and “liberal shepherds” refer to an
environment visually absent from the view of the audience. The orientation of the
spectator between a visually unavailable environment and an acoustically performed
sphere is especially important because it explores the way that theater involves its
audience. Ratcliffe further explored how Gertrude’s speech implies that a witness to
Ophelia’s death was “paralyzed with a kind a fascinated horror—the thirst that draws the
arsonist to gape at the terrible beauty of his fire, the killer to watch the beauty of his
victim’s death—at the final unfolding moments of her life” (Ratcliffe 142-43). In other
words, Gertrude’s acoustic description may be a device to involve the audience
personally in the death of Ophelia.
Laertes’ reaction to Gertrude’s description is also particularly intriguing. “Alas,
then she is drowned?” he asks (4.7.182). Laertes appears much like Hamlet, who after
hearing of his father’s apparition, similarly asks where his father’s ghost was seen, how it
looked. The two are entirely concerned with physical appearances, namely the Ghost and
Ophelia’s. Bert O. States furthers this by noting Ophelia as “overwhelmed by scenery” in
Gertrude’s description (States 511). He says that the description of Ophelia’s death is
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completely overwhelmed by descriptions rather than a focus on Ophelia. Although this
may be true, Laertes additionally speaks his remorse, by saying “Too much of water hast
thou, poor Ophelia, / And therefore I forbid my tears” (184-85). In other words, Laertes
refuses to cry, since the act of tears would essentially reenact the death of his sister. This
moment is peculiar because it draws our attention back to Gertrude’s description.
Ratcliffe examined in great detail how the Queen’s acoustic action may be responsible
for Ophelia’s death: “What we can say with certainty is that Gertrude, in reporting
Ophelia’s death, removes her—in effect kills her—from the play” (Ratcliffe 144).
Act 5, scene 1 is also particularly important in examining the nature of physical
action on stage. Ophelia’s corpse, unlike Polonius’ missing body, or the Ghost’s
ambiguous shape, is physically available on stage and visually available to the audience.
The effects of using Ophelia’s dead body on stage are important because they provide
neither the ambiguous acoustic action nor the physical action of the dumb show.
Ophelia’s body is simply dead weight, a prop or device to explore the complications of
interpreting theater. Her dead body, while obliquely described as having accidentally
drowned, is now legibly open to scrutiny. The Gravedigger complicates Gertrude’s
description by announcing Ophelia’s death as suicide: “It must be se offendendo; it
cannot be else. For / here lies the point: if I drown myself wittingly, it argues / an act,
and an act hath three branches –it is to act, to / do, to perform. Argal, she drowned
herself wittingly” (5.1.9-13). This description further allows questions to be asked about
Ophelia’s death, and allows the audience to determine what physical versus acoustic
action does. Perhaps Gertrude’s acoustic description tells the audience that Ophelia’s
death was accidental, however, the funeral procession and “maimed rites” physically
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show signs of a suicide. The gravesite also becomes a place of conflicting images: at
first, it is the scene where Old Hamlet’s bones “burst their cerements” and the
“sepulchre…oped his ponderous and marble jaws” (1.4.48-50) to cast the Ghost up again.
Then, it becomes a site where a skull, King Hamlet’s old jester Yorick, “is ventriloquized
by yet another of the king’s doubles, Hamlet, his son” (Rutter 310). This scene is
particularly intriguing because the Gravedigger “—who sings at his work, cracks jokes,
talks politics, and makes the grave the site of livelihood—demystifies and discloses what
Hamlet, in the Ghost’s report, originally represented as harrowingly undiscloseable”
(Rutter 309). In other words, the Gravedigger reveals Ophelia’s grave as a shared burial
site with Yorick and demystifies death in the process. Ophelia then “makes the audience
look death in the face” (Rutter 311).
Throughout the play, the deaths of the Ghost, Polonius, and even Yorick are
visually beyond the audience’s reach. Ophelia’s corpse on stage forces the audience to
finally interpret how the play uses physical and acoustic devices to determine what death
looks like. The play does this by complicating Ophelia’s body and the Ghost’s form
before revealing Ophelia’s corpse in the burial scene. For example, Ophelia’s body is
continually represented in terms of other objects throughout the play. Polonius and
Laertes most commonly refer to her as a commodity, her honor being something she
should guard as Laertes cautions her to, “weight what loss your honor may sustain”
(1.3.29). The Ghost’s form is a source of disgust for Hamlet; the materiality of his
father’s death is described as “foul and most unnatural murder” (1.5.25), the image of the
encrusted corpse further disrupting his form. In what Chikako D. Kumamoto calls “the
abject,” Hamlet combines Ophelia and the Ghost under the same category, and thereby
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“confine[s], control[s] and expel[s]” these figures based on the “impossibility of an ideal
realm to which his material body aspires” (Kumamoto 56). In other words, Ophelia
inhabits a realm of “corporeal authority” while the Ghost describes no memories of
physical experience, which Hamlet aspires to in his “to be or not to be” speech. The
descriptions of Ophelia throughout the play put her on an “ideal realm”; this makes her
final appearance as a corpse attractive to the audience’s eye, and furthermore, explicitly
performs death, which has been hidden and ambiguous during the whole play.
The image of Gertrude’s description has long-lasting effects; Ophelia’s dead
corpse outlasts her reticent, docile image. Magda Romanska specifically examines how
Ophelia’s role has been defined in the image of her dead corpse. Rather than defining
Ophelia’s function in terms of her “ethical subject,” theater and art have developed an
eroticized image of Ophelia based on Gertrude’s acoustic description. Romanska
suggests that Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy helped to displace Ophelia’s
identity: “historically excluded from Hamlet’s existential contemplation, Ophelia’s
psychic reality became self-enclosed and inaccessible” (Romanska 486). However, the
image of Ophelia’s dead body in the burial scene outlives the acoustic action of
Gertrude’s speech and even Hamlet’s soliloquy. Rather than “inaccessible,” Ophelia in
fact exhibits physical availability in the burial scene. Without Laertes jumping into her
grave, saying “Hold off the earth awhile / Till I have caught her once more in mine arms”
(5.1.239-40), Ophelia’s body does not become the focus of the contradictions throughout
the play. Hamlet’s outburst in the scene also suggests the deeper intentions of reviving
the dead, an attempt to create physical action out of an already silenced prop. Ophelia’s
final scene, the product of Gertrude’s acoustic performance and the result of physically
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ambiguous action, shows the audience what theater does with these concepts: it reveals it
as blatantly occupying the space between by being both dumb and motionless.
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Works Cited
Ackerman, Alan L. “Visualizing Hamlet’s Ghost: The Spirit of Modern
Subjectivity.” Theatre Journal 53, (2001): 119-144.
Chapman, Alison A. "Ophelia's 'Old Lauds': Madness and Hagiography in
Hamlet." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual
Gathering of Research, Criticism and Reviews 20, (2007): 111-135.
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Remember Me.” Hamlet in Purgatory (2001): 205-257.
Kumamoto, Chikako D. “Gertrude, Ophelia, Ghost: Hamlet’s Revenge and the
Abject.” The Journal of the Wooden O Symposium 6, (2006): 48-62.
Lyons, Bridget Gellert. "The Iconography of Ophelia". ELH 44, no. 1
1977: 60-74.
Ratcliffe, Stephen. "What Doesn't Happen in Hamlet: The Queen's Speech."
Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 10,
no. 1 (Spring 1998): 123-144.
Romanska, Magda. "Ontology and Eroticism: Two Bodies for Ophelia."
Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 34, no. 6 (September
2005): 485-513.
Rutter, Carol Chillington. “Snatched Bodies: Ophelia in the Grave.”
Shakespeare Quarterly 49, no.3 (Autumn 1988): 299-319.
States, Bert O. “The Word-Pictures in Hamlet.” The Hudson Review 26, no. 3
(Autumn 1973): 510-522.