Shakespeares Hamlet †Ophelia Discussed Essays -- GCSE English Litera

Hamlet – Ophelia Discussed Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks in "Making Mother Matter: Repression, Revision, and the Stakes of 'Reading Psychoanalysis Into’ Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet" make a statement regarding the effect of Ophelia’s words, even though she was considered mad at the time: Hamlet's own disgust toward the body and sexual behaviour, coupled with Ophelia's erotically-charged songs, did not suddenly become "about" sexuality after Freud. On the contrary, censorship of the play in performance during various historical time periods indicates that the tragedy has always been perceived of as highly erotic, and often dangerously so. Even in the context of twentieth-century interpretations of Hamlet, critics have been reluctant to engage in genuine confrontations with the problem of the play's sexuality and its underlying anxiety. For this reason, Jacqueline Rose has claimed that critics writing on Hamlet, beginning with T. S. Eliot, have conflated their puzzlement over the play with the Western notion of "woman" as the bearer of an impenetrable secret. (2) Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet, presents almost a dozen male characters for every one female character. The only prominent female characters are two: Ophelia, Laertes’ sister and Polonius’ daughter; and Gertrude, the queen and wife of Claudius and mother of Hamlet. This essay will explore the character, role, and importance of Ophelia. The protagonist of the tragedy, Prince Hamlet, initially appears in the play dressed in solemn black, mourning the death of his father supposedly by snakebite while he was away at Wittenberg as a student. Hamlet laments the hasty remarriage of his mother to his father’s brother, an incestuous act; thus in his first soliloqu... ...akes of 'Reading Psychoanalysis Into' Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet." Early Modern Literary Studies 6.1 (May, 2000): 2.1-24   http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-1/lehmhaml.htm Pennington, Michael. â€Å"Ophelia: Madness Her Only Safe Haven.† Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. From Hamlet: A User’s Guide. New York: Limelight Editions, 1996. Pitt, Angela. â€Å"Women in Shakespeare’s Tragedies.† Readings on The Tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Rpt. from Shakespeare’s Women. N.p.: n.p., 1981. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html Wilkie, Brian and James Hurt. â€Å"Shakespeare.† Literature of the Western World. Ed. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1992.