I wrote this in 2008 and put it up on my old website. But now I realize my old website is no longer there. So here it is again:
Has anyone noticed
that Ophelia is pregnant? In all the productions of Hamlet that I've seen, she
is interpreted as an innocent girl in love with the doomed Prince. He breaks
her heart, and her sanity goes with it. She drowns herself out of madness.
But maybe her
madness has method to it. In Ophelia's first scene (I, iii), her brother
Laertes warns her to beware of Hamlet's affection for her
"For Hamlet and the trifling of his favor,
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood...
no more."
In other words: the
Prince is toying with you. Ophelia demurs ("No more but so?") but
appears to submit to her brother's wishes.
Later in the same
scene, Ophelia's father Polonius complains,
"'Tis told me, he hath very oft of late
Given private time to you, and you yourself
Have of your audience been most free and bounteous."
That is, "You've
been spending a lot of time alone with this guy," with a hint of "you've been giving him too much." Ophelia, in the
time-honored tradition of daughters lying to fathers, claims the relationship is completely
innocent: "he hath importun'd me with love / In honorable fashion."
In II, ii, while
pretending to be mad, Hamlet warns Polonius that "Conception is a
blessing, but not as your daughter may conceive - friend look to't'.
[Thanks to reader Winnie H for this point.]
Then, as Carol Malone
notes in her
blog post about this very article, Polonius observes,
"How pregnant
sometimes his replies are!" (II.II, 220)
If the audience thinks
Ophelia's pregnant -- having her put her hand on her belly once in Act I will
do it -- then having Hamlet pun on "conceive" and then having
Polonius obliviously say Hamlet's replies are "pregnant" -- well, the
groundlings are elbowing each other in the ribs at this point.
Act III kicks it up a
notch. In III:i, Hamlet probably overhears the King and Polonius setting
Ophelia to spy on him. (I say probably, because all that's needed is for Hamlet
to enter seven lines before he speaks; that explains why he turns on her.) Ophelia
listens to his famous so-called soliloquy. Then he pretends to notice her for
the first time, and says, with beautiful poetry and really amazing viciousness:
Nymph, in thy orisons
be all my sins remembered.
Orisons are prayers:
"Girl, remember all my sins in your prayers." This could mean just,
"Pray for me," but Shakespeare's slyer than that. How can she
remember his sins, unless they sinned together?
(It's not a soliloquy,
as David Ball notes in his excellent book Backwards and Forwards;
it's a monologue. Hamlet knows she's listening. He even calls death, "The
bourne from which no traveler returns" but he knows better. His father has
bloody well returned from it!)
Hamlet really lays
into Ophelia in III:i, ending by telling her, "To a nunnery, go!" In
high school they tell you that "nunnery" was slang for a whorehouse,
but it is also, more literally, an excellent place for a family to send a pregnant,
unmarried noblewoman. The nuns will take care of her, and keep her out of
sight, and the baby can be handed off to someone else to raise.
But it is the mad
songs that Ophelia sings in IV:7 that really give away her secret. More than
half of her songs are songs of mourning; after all, Hamlet has just killed
Ophelia's father. That might be why Ophelia warns, "Lord, we know what we
are, but know not what we may be." After all, she is no longer the
daughter of the King's chamberlain; she is now only the daughter of a dead old
man. But perhaps she knows all too well what she soon may be, for shortly she
sings:
Tomorrow is St. Valentine's day
All in the morning betime
And I a maid at your window
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose and donn'd his clothes
and dupp'd the chamber door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.
Why is Ophelia singing
about a maid seduced by her lover? Aside from the songs of mourning, all her
songs are songs of betrayed love. A few lines later, she is singing an even
more pointed song:
Quoth she, "Before you tumbled me,
You promis'd me to wed."
He answers:
"So would I ha'done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed."
It is hard to avoid
the thought that Hamlet has seduced and abandoned her.
When Ophelia returns,
she has gathered herbs. "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray
you love, remember..." The various herbs have symbolic meanings
well-documented in the scholarship, but the only herb she intends for herself
is rue: "...there's rue for you, and here's some for me; we may call it
herb of grace o'Sundays; O, you must wear your rue with a difference."
The symbolic meaning
of rue is regret. Ophelia has much to rue, but the symbolic meaning is not the
only one. The herb rue (ruta graveolens, aka Herb-of-Grace) is a
powerful abortifacient. My herbiary notes that rue is "Lethally
toxic, do not use during pregnancy."
Herbal abortifacients
are mild poisons. You poison yourself to the point where your body decides it's
too sick to support the growing embryo, and rejects it. If you miscalculate in
one direction, continued pregnancy; in the other direction, you die. No one
would take rue as a poison; it's an ugly way to go. Presumably Shakespeare
would have given Ophelia something painless if she had intended to poison
herself; hemlock, say.
A girl who has been
seduced and abandoned need fear no more than a broken heart, provided there is
no evidence of her shame. But if she is pregnant, then there is no way to hide
what she has done, unless she can abort the child, or kill herself. And, indeed,
shortly thereafter, Ophelia drowns herself.
The conventional
interpretation is that Hamlet has broken her heart and killed her father. But
the play seems to suggest strongly that Hamlet has seduced her, and to hint
that she is pregnant as well.
It is not hard to
imagine Ophelia falling in love with the romantic Prince, and giving in to his
passions. He has promised to marry her, and it is not an impossible promise.
The Queen later says of Ophelia (V: 2) "I hop'd thou shouldst have been my
Hamlet's wife." Ophelia might well have hoped to become Queen when Hamlet
ascended the throne, as his uncle Claudius has promised.
Hamlet has been away
at Wittenberg long enough for Claudius to murder Hamlet's father and then to
marry his mother Gertrude, and then for the news to reach Hamlet. Presumably
this would be a few months at least, long enough for Ophelia to know she's pregnant.
When he returns, she is hoping he'll do the right thing.
But Hamlet rejects
her, kills her father, and to destroy all hope, is sent by King Claudius to
England to be executed. What will become of the mother of the doomed prince's
bastard? There is only one way to preserve her honor, and she takes it.
The point is, the next
time someone puts on Hamlet, Ophelia really ought to be showing. Okay?
NOTES: A reader writes in to remind me just how
specific Gertrude is when she later describes Ophelia's suicide -- as if she
saw it, but did nothing about it. That would make perfect sense if Gertrude
knew Ophelia's problem, and agreed that suicide was her only real option.
Amy Aldro writes in to point out that the heroine
of The Rape of Lucrece "kills herself after Tarquin rapes
her to preserve her honour." So it's a theme Shakespeare is familiar with.
Autumn S points out that during the play Ophelia
says it has been "Twice two months" since his father's death. After four or more
months of being pregnant, would people not begin to notice the pregnant belly
that she had?
Well, it could be that
Ophelia is showing, and people are talking around it; it could
also be that Ophelia's pregnancy is not so obvious in an Elizabethan dress.
Jack K writes in:
Parts of what is said
to the queen by a gentleman may also imply that there is talk of Ophelia being
pregnant with Hamlet's child. Especially if she is singing in public the things
she later sings in that scene.
Gentleman:
She speaks much of her
father; says she hears
There's tricks i' the
world, and hems, and beats her heart;
Spurns enviously at
straws; speaks things in doubt,
That carry but half
sense: her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use
of it doth move
The hearers to
collection; they aim at it,
And botch the words up
fit to their own thoughts;
Which, as her winks,
and nods, and gestures yield them,
Indeed would make one
think there might be thought,
Though nothing sure,
yet much unhappily.
'Twere good she were
spoken with; for she may strew
Dangerous conjectures
in ill-breeding minds.
I.e. "Her crazy
talk is giving people ideas; tell her to cut it out." He's a bit vague
about what sort of ideas, but note the "ill-breeding minds."
Shakespeare was super fond of double-entendres. Only ill-bred people would
gossip about Ophelia; but maybe she's been breeding, and that's the problem.
