acampbell

When I was seventeen and a senior in high school, I read Shakespeare's Hamlet for the first time. Oddly enough, my experience was akin to Kenneth Branagh's almost a decade later, when he, at age fifteen, took the train to see Derek Jacobi play Hamlet. It was his first experience of Shakespeare, and he says in 1996, in the introduction to the screenplay of his film of Hamlet:

"...as I traveled home that summer evening twenty years ago, my overwhelming feeling was of having connected with an extraordinary energy. In the play itself and chiefly in the character of Hamlet, I experienced the insistent hum of life itself...it set my heart and my head racing."

And I still remember the companion April evening it all clicked for me as I stood on the stairway of my girlhood home gazing out the window as dusk fell and spring birds trilled in the near-darkness. I remember thinking: wow, this play is REALLY FANTASTIC. It hit me, just like that. That spring was the happiest time of my life; the magic stayed with me a long, long time and has never truly left me, after all these years.

I studied Hamlet for the rest of my senior year, to revisit it two years later and spend several more years studying. I read every critic, every theory about the play from modest to bizarre. I felt I knew all the famous Hamlet critics personally: John Dover Wilson, Harley Granville-Barker, Bernard Grebanier, George Lyman Kittredge, Harold Bloom...and I knew all the texts: The First & Second Quartos, the First Folio, the Ur-Hamlet and the early text by Saxo Grammaticus. I typed essay after essay on the characters, their motivations and personalities (and you all think I'm bad with SV!) on my little portable typewriter--I was certainly as much a Hamlet scholar as anyone--right up there with all those scholars of whom Richard Armour, author of Twisted Tales from Shakespeare and other light titles:

"Hamlet is unquestionably Shakespeare's magnum opus, of enormous interest to scholars and critics who would otherwise have been forced to seek honest employment." Heh. Armour's Hamlet, in illustrations by Campbell Grant, wanders around the castle with a perpetual cloud (an actual one) floating over his head. I'm sure I was an absolutely crashing bore to all my friends, and I got to know my best friend in college, Janet, because she would not only listen to me babble about Hamlet ad infinitum, but actually seemed to enjoy listening! How could I not grow to love her?

One of the reasons there's so much ongoing discussion about Hamlet is because of things that aren't specified, and because of elements that are just plain mysterious. For example: does Ophelia, after losing her reason, babble about sex because Shakespeare wanted to convey that she wasn't an inexperienced virgin, or are her bawdy declarations, as some contend, a Freudian example of a pure young woman who previously suppressed sexual thoughts and desires finally giving voice to them in her madness?

I have illustrations of Hamlet characters and scenes by myriad famous artists from the pre-Raphaelites

to Delacroix.

I have posters of Ophelia drowining in the weeping brook

and dropping blossoms in still water while seated on the branch of a tree. I find I look at Hamlet the character differently now as a middle-aged woman than I did as a starry-eyed romantic of seventeen. Hamlet seems more of a colossal brat to me, now, one of those thirty-somethings still living at home (though I realize that the King was the one keeping him there)--maybe not loafing on the couch, playing X-Box and getting drunk with his friends at night, but still hanging around being a malcontent and harshing everyone's squee. Geruthe (Gertrude in Saxo Grammaticus' Historia Danica) in John Updike's novel Gertrude and Claudius seems to feel much the same; here is Hamlet through her eyes:

"...Always some small complaint nagged at the child--colic, a rash in his crotch, endless colds and croup, fevers followed by a long lying abed that, as he aged, she, healthy and upright most every day of her life, came to resent as self-indulgent. As the powers of language and imagination descended upon him--"

(and, boy, did they descend!)

"--the boy dramatized himself, and quibbled over everything, with parent, priest, and tutor...Her heart felt deflected. Something held back her love for this fragile, high-strung, quick-tongued child...or perhaps the fault was in the child...her love, as she felt it, spilled down upon Amleth and remained on his surface, gleaming like beads of mercury, unabsorbed...his games seemed designed to repel and exclude her--inscrutable, clattering games, with sticks and paddles, bows and arrows, dice and counters, noisy imitations of war in which he commanded, with his high-pitched voice and tense white face, the buffoon Yorik and some unwashed sons of the castle garrison's doxies..."

(Don't get me wrong: I'll always love Hamlet--he's my man! But I've noticed with many of my favorite literary works that my views of them change over the years. I view my all-time favorite novel, Kristin Lavransdatter, differently now than I did twenty years ago. I can see Gertrude, with her son grown (and I always figured she was, maybe, 45 to Hamlet's 30), finally just trying to relax and enjoy this new love that's come to her in her mature years, and just wishing her son would shape up and be NICE and that everyone could just get along...)

Anyway, tomorrow I am going with Leah to see the opera version of Hamlet by French composer Ambroise Thomas. This is a French opera, first performed in 1868 at the Paris Opera.

Christine Nilsson sang Ophélie.

When I was younger and a fan of both Shakespeare and opera, I knew early on there was an opera version of Hamlet, but was never able to obtain a recording of it--all I could find was an album of Maria Callas' entitled: "Mad Scenes," in which she sang Ophelia's--oops, I mean: Ophélie's mad scene.

Things have changed since then. The opera has risen from obscurity during the past thirty years and is now regularly revived. Now I have a DVD of Hamlet, recorded in 2003 and starring Natalie Dessay as Ophélie and Simon Keenlyside (whom I believe sings tomorrow) as Hamlet.

I've read singers and critics alike say both that "there is nothing from first to last in this opera that moves me," and that it is the most wonderful opera ever.

I do find this opera almost amusing, for one big reason. The French are ALL ABOUT OPHELIA---oops, Ophélie. One of the first musical pieces in the opera is a love duet between Ophélie and Hamlet. They never get anything like this in the play: any romance in the play took place in the antecedent action, and though film versions occasionally throw in an affectionate glance or two, and Branagh even throws them into bed together (it's a long-standing topic of critical discussion: whether or not Hamlet and Ophelia had sex) there is nothing in the text to indicate any affection in real time. Hamlet's obsession with his father's murder, disgust at his mother's marriage which appears to extend to a loathing of women and sex in general, combined with Ophélie's adherence to her father's command to shun Hamlet with clearly no explanation to the prince, combine to make their love a thing of the past.

Then Laerte asks Hamlet to watch over Ophélie. We have a scene in which Ophélie is concerned at Hamlet's indifferent coldness and has a lengthy solo on the subject. Ophélie asks to leave the court, but the Queen begs her to stay. Gertrude, who is even present for the equivalent of the Nunnery Scene, later tries to persuade Hamlet to marry Ophélie, but he refuses, more focused on forcing his mother to confront her guilt. Ophélie returns the ring he gave her, and in the opera is is Hamlet's rejection, that is, solely disappointment in love (as the murder of Polonius by Hamlet is omitted(!)) that causes her to go mad and drown herself.

Before her death, she, alone on stage, enjoys a mad scene that lasts at least half an hour and earns Dessay, in the DVD production, a good, solid five minutes (at least) of ovation.

The final scene of the opera takes place at the graveyard. Before the funeral, Hamlet sings of his remorse for his ill treatment of Ophélie (which he assuredly never does in the play) and when he learns she is dead, his anguish knows no bounds and he comes perilously close to suicide. Three other plot elements vie for the most astounding of all: the only person to die at the end of the play is Claudius, the Ghost of Hamlet's Father shows up at Ophélie's funeral and Hamlet LIVESl! though a Covent Garden version has him embracing Ophélie's body as he dies.

In Shakespeare's play, both Gertrude and Ophelia have scant time on stage and scant dialogue: We see very little of them as individuals: Ophelia has only one short soliloquy and Gertrude only a few lines in an aside. Shakespeare seems to have seen them mainly as foils, almost abstractions. Hamlet never mentions Ophélie (except through some debatable and oblique hints) when he's not in a scene with her and 80% of the time they are on stage together he treats her with harsh cruelty and disdain. So that's why it amuses me that Ophélie is so pivotal in the opera and what a big deal is made of their love for each other. There's no Fortinbras, no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, no Voltimand, Cornelius, and really, hardly any Polonius!--much has been swept away to allow Ophelie more space, time, and presence.

The Wikipedia page on the opera has an introductory section titled: Ophelia Mania in Paris, which describes how the French fascination with the "prototype of the femme fragile" began when Irish actress Harriet Smithson, part of an English company that played at the Odeon in September 1827, played the part of Ophelia.

"Men wept openly in the theater, and when they left they were 'convulsed with uncontrollable emotion. The composer Berlioz, present at the opening night performance, became totally infatuated and eventually so obsessed with Smithson that she inspired his Symphonie Fantastique and eventually became his wife! though the marriage did not endure. According to the account, Smithson's star faded within a year and a half, but the Parisian fascination with the character of Ophelia continued unabated.