I have just gone rather a lot deeper into facts on doves than I might have on another day. I’m just trying to work out what’s going on in this simile.
Patience, I get. Female doves are patient nesters apparently – but funnily enough, so are the male doves. They mate for life and take turns on the eggs.
The female dove DOES lay the eggs – usually in pairs – so a couplet makes sense.
And a couplet in a verse play has a lovely sense of doubled-ness. But a dove’s eggs are white, not golden.
And why are the eggs being disclosed?
Doves don’t leave their eggs alone for disclosure. So…is this dove in this analogy abandoning her eggs? And her partner suffers in silence? Or somehow Hamlet is the one whose silence will sit drooping?
Is it that a dove is drooping in silence after revealing her precious eggs? And so will Hamlet?
This is some fuzzy analogizing here from the Queen of Denmark.
- Comment
- Reblog
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
The Hamlet Project 
After I read Elizabeth Winkler’s arguments in the Atlantic about a woman having written the works of Shakespeare (see below) the idea of a female pen behind these plays began to haunt me, in a good way.
Hamlet, which I’m studying now, would seem to be a male-centric play, with that father/son dynamic and Hamlet’s misogynistic “frailty thy name is woman” thing.
But then I got to these lines, spoken by Gertrude to calm the crowd, after Hamlet jumps into Ophelia’s grave, and I started to wonder.
“This is mere madness.
And thus a while the fit will work on him.
Anon, as patient as the female dove
When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
His silence will sit drooping.”
The dove represents a poet here, with those “golden couplets,” no? What else would it be? And that poet is called out specifically as female. “As patient as… when that her golden couplets are disclosed.” What is one reason this female might have to be patient to have her golden couplets disclosed? Disclosed carries a sense, to me, of uncovered. It says that when these couplets are disclosed, his silence (Hamlet’s? William’s?) will “sit drooping.” At the end of the play Hamlet says, “The rest is silence.”
So what are these golden couplets? I want to say that Hamlet and Laertes final acts of forgiveness of one another at the end of the play might represent the golden couplets of the dove of peace.
Perhaps these lines were written by a male writer alluding to the idea that there is a feminine quality to peace. (This is also a theme in Macbeth.) But it feels to me as if, perhaps, a secret is being openly “disclosed” to the reader here.
-Adam Wade DeGraff