Dunn, Leslie C. “Ophelia’s
Song’s in Hamlet: Music, Madness, and the Feminine.”
Embodied
Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture. Ed.
Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones. New Perspectives in Music History
and Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 50-64.
FEMINISM / HISTORY OF IDEAS / MUSIC / OPHELIA
This essay argues “that the representation of Ophelia’s
madness involves a mapping of her sexual and psychological difference
onto the discursive ‘difference’ of music” and that
“this dramatic use of music reflects the broader discourse of
music in early modern English culture, with its persistent associations
between music, excess and the feminine” (52). Early modern British
writers contend with “the conflicting ideologies of music inherited
from Platonic and Christian thought”: music represents “the
earthly embodiment of divine order,” but it also introduces “sensuous
immediacy” and “semantic indeterminacy” (56). While
Pythagorean harmony “is music in its positive or ‘masculine’
aspect,” music also possesses the capability of “cultural
dissonance” in its “negative or ‘feminine’ aspect”
(58). In Hamlet, singing allows Ophelia to become “both
the literal and the figurative ‘dissonance’ that ‘expresses
marginalities’” (59). Her representation “draws on
gender stereotypes of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage” and
simultaneously dislocates them (60): “If Ophelia’s singing
lets ‘the woman’ out, then, it does so in such a way as
to problematize cultural constructions of women’s song, even while
containing her within their re-presentation”; but her “disruptive
feminine energy must be reabsorbed into both the social and the discursive
orders of the play” (62). Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s
drowning “re-appropriates Ophelia’s music” and “aestheticizes
her madness, makes it ‘pretty’” (63). Rather than
dismiss Ophelia’s singing “as a conventional sign of madness,”
critics should “acknowledge its significance” by “making
her singing our subject” (64).
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Fox-Good, Jacquelyn A. “Ophelia’s
Mad Songs: Music, Gender, Power.” Subjects on the World’s
Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Ed. David C. Allen and Robert A. White. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1995.
217-38.
FEMINISM / MUSIC / NEW HISTORICISM / OPHELIA
After discussing the study of Shakespearean music, this
essay approaches the words and music of Ophelia’s mad songs as
“constituting her own story, using her own voice for her own grief,
and for rage and protest” (222). In the historical context of
the sixteenth and seventeenth century, music is associated with madness,
a “female malady” to borrow Showalter’s phrase (231-32).
Aside from the subversive power of music, this medium’s identification
with the female/effeminate creates “fear, which led many writers
of the period to issue strong warnings against the dangers of music
and music education” (232). Ophelia’s songs end her dutiful
silence and “constitute her character” (233). “Specifically,
in their melodies, harmonies, tempos, and generally in the bodily power
of their music, her songs are expressions of loss and emptiness but
also of a specifically female power” (233). Ophelia’s assertion
of “her power in music makes music a kind of secret code, a deceptively
‘pretty’ language”; music “is nothing (nothing
but all things); it is noting; it is to be noted, and reckoned with”
(234).
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Oshio, Toshiko. “Ophelia: Experience
into Song.” Hamlet and Japan. Ed. Yoshiko Uéno.
Hamlet Collection 2. New York: AMS, 1995. 131-42.
MUSIC / OPHELIA / RHETORICAL
This essay contrasts Ophelia’s “inability
to express herself by means of words” (131) with her expressiveness
and impressiveness “in her singing” (132). Ophelia first
appears to possess “a degree of wit, not unlike Hamlet’s
opening puns” (132) and an “earnest truthfulness”
in her exchanges with Laertes and Polonius (133). Her description of
Hamlet’s madness to Polonius reveals “dashing eloquence,”
attention to detail, and a compulsion to tell all, “even though
she may be extremely frightened” (133). As “a mere puppet”
in the nunnery scene, Ophelia’s “words do not sound like
her own,” and “Hamlet’s vicious attack” leaves
her “split in twain or, even three” (134). But her soliloquy
at the end of the scene reasserts her straightforwardness, as she disregards
the audience behind the arras (135). Unfortunately, Ophelia fails to
act, to fully express herself, or “to defend her relation with
Hamlet in the first scene”: “By internalizing her grief,
she breaks into madness” (135). She now finds release in songs
that present “a range of different images, sharply contrasted
one to another, from innocent or sacrificial victim to experienced whore”
(136). During “these alternate tones of joy and despair Ophelia
pours out her inner thoughts and feelings” (139). Fittingly, Ophelia
dies singing, expressing herself in a powerful mode. The sheer “profusion
of her songs is unrivaled in Shakespeare’s tragedies” and
“contrasts keenly with the sparingness of her speech,” suggesting
that this “character is represented fully in songs. Shakespeare
made her entire being lyrical” (141).
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