Editor's note:
This entry won joint 1st place in the English Association's 2024 Betty Haigh Shakespeare Prize.
The editor of The Rose hopes to receive and publish the winning entry of the in-school Wigoder Essay Prize as well.
Shakespeare's Ophelia in Hamlet is a passive victim of circumstance, tragically driven mad as she drowns under the weight of the tension and betrayals she experiences at Elsinore. Her function is to be affected by the plot, bolstering its effect on the audience as she is offered up as a narrative punching bag. She is designed to be pitied, activating that essential element of Aristotelian catharsis and thereby underpinning the audience’s emotional investment. For greater drama, her lack of agency is almost flaunted, such as in Act 1, Scene 3 when she complies to Polonius’ instructions to avoid Hamlet: “I shall obey, my Lord.” She exists to act and react in relation to the men around her, to the extent that even the act of suicide bestows her with minimal agency – a madwoman is not accountable for her own actions.
By fundamentally recentering the narrative, the 2018 film Ophelia (dir. Claire McCarthy) reconstructs this tragic persona. It extends Ophelia’s temporal continuity, providing her with an original backstory and a life after supposed death. We see the world of the Danish court entirely through her eyes, first as a boisterous young girl with dirt on her face, then as a well-groomed lady-in-waiting to Queen Gertrude. This lays the groundwork for a rewriting of her character’s significance and purpose. The film begins and ends with her voice addressing her audience directly. She characterises herself: “...I was always a willful girl, and followed my heart, and spoke my mind,” a declaration that counters the line of submission from the source play quoted above. Daisy Ridley plays a woman with depth, autonomy, intelligence and resourcefulness who uses her mind to navigate the treacherous social environment she finds herself in, while Hamlet is paralysed by vacillation.
The redirecting of both character and narrative trajectory is concentrated in the film’s crowning alteration of the play. Ophelia makes the same choice and is put in the same psychological situation as Hamlet – feigning madness as a strategy. What is more, she lives to tell the tale. Crucially, her pretend mental state remains pretence and her true character is uncompromised. Her insanity is not the collapse of a grief-stricken mind and broken heart, but a tool for her to move through Elsinore without suspicion and ultimately defy her doomed fate. Hamlet on the other hand falters, consumed by uncertainty to the point that his external presentation tampers with his internal being, so torn is his sense of self.
In the film, then, Ophelia succeeds at what Hamlet does not: maintaining the mental border between concrete reality and maddening equivocation for both her character and her audience. There is no ambiguity as to her sanity by the end of the film – McCarthy grants her that dignified assertion of wellbeing. Meanwhile, critics continue to disagree on the precise nature of Hamlet’s final mental state in the play. Ophelia thus acquires the “masculine” trait of psychological resilience in McCarthy’s film, illuminating the “feminine” nature of the male protagonist with an ironic twist.
This narrative divergence does more than reimagine and rescue Ophelia’s character; it alters the entire thematic resonance of the plot. Ophelia’s survival reframes the story from one of fated death, so often the mechanism behind Shakespearean tragedy, to one of rebirth which ends in the breaking of a cycle of violence and madness. This asserts the film's markedly optimistic interpretative decision, ensuring that one central character ultimately survives the treacherous world of Elsinore and doing away with the depressing aftertaste of the final frenzied bloodbath which Shakespeare indulges in. Ophelia’s identity is not bound to the doomed fate imposed on her by the original play: she is shown to be capable of outwitting destiny and forging her own path in the world.
A new protagonist means a fresh gaze on the play’s concerns. "Hamlet" explores its themes of power, corruption and deceit through the actions of male characters—Claudius’s usurpation of the throne, Hamlet’s duty for revenge, and the political machinations at court. Ophelia and Gertrude largely amount to collateral damage in this power struggle. By shifting the focus to Ophelia, the film allows such themes to be interpreted by the young woman who must witness and navigate this moral outrage. As for innovation, the film introduces the theme of female solidarity via Ophelia's relationship with Gertrude, which is depicted with a richer intimacy and nuance through scenes such as Ophelia reading to the Queen.
When putting on productions of Shakespeare’s plays, visual cues like costumes and setting are generally at the director’s discretion rather than dictated by the script, as Shakespeare is said to have been present at his own rehearsals and would have expressed any preferences directly. As a result, any symbolism attributed to Ophelia in the source text is limited to the flowers she scatters across the stage in Act 4, Scene 5, a morbid celebration of her newfound madwoman status. The film benefits from cinema’s inherently greater visual freedom, using props, costumes and sets with intentionality to mirror the character’s journey, status and emotions. The motif of flowers is picked up on; they are dotted throughout the screenplay – white lilies in particular – as a means to cultivate a sense of Ophelia’s identity. Water is similarly present in her surroundings, from the lake she bathes in to the jug she carries for the Queen’s bath, as a form of foreshadowing referencing her choice of death – or rather escape.
Regarding costuming, her clothes evolve from simple, earthy tones in childhood, reflecting her freshness and connection to nature, to the luscious jewel green of the first court dress we see her in, which in an allegorical scene she removes to bathe in the lake. Darker, more elaborate outfits are introduced as she becomes entangled in the court’s intrigues.
The settings, too, shift to reflect her inner state—lush, natural settings when she is free-spirited and in love, contrasted with the stony, oppressive interiors of Kronborg Castle when she feels trapped and endangered. These visual elements externalise Ophelia's psychology and emotionality in a way that the play cannot, facilitating the film’s objective of immersing us in her world.
A bold, self-assured reinterpretation of character roles, gender-based power and the hand of fate in tragedy, ‘Ophelia’ offers a refreshing dose of well-executed originality in its retelling of the Elizabethan classic. While respecting the confines of the play’s tragic status, the film is inspiring in its essential message of endurance and asserted identity, choosing to see in ‘Hamlet’ the potential for a new, female protagonist to lead a new life.
Commenti