That is, if I drown myself with my wits, with self-knowledge, with myself, then it is an action.
But Ophelia would definitely qualify as someone who didn’t drown herself with her wits. So even if she meant to do it, she’d be in the clear on the suicide line.
Author: erainbowd
For Here lies the point:
I don’t think this pun is actually in play here – But I can’t help imagining the point as a sword, the point of a sword, just lying in wait somewhere for someone to reach down and grab it by accident for an unwitting hand to slice itself open on the blade.
I don’t know why my mind made this metaphor today. I suspect it has to do with a sharp thing revealing itself that I wasn’t expecting. I’d planned for a creative adventure and celebration on what is often a dark day but the darkness came and got me anyway, despite my best intentions, like a sharp sword, lying in a drawer.
It cannot be else.
Each time I put on a show, I am surprised anew at how much brain space it takes up, how much time even the smallest tasks can take. Even with a small thing – something improvised, for example or a reading with no rehearsal. I willfully forget how much such a thing will require…or maybe I don’t willfully forget. I do forget but maybe it’s like the way women forget the pain of labor so that they can have another child. The body might just facilitate the forgetting of such things. We just – pretend – or fool ourselves – into thinking that it will be a breeze, that we’ve reduced so much of the work around a thing that even though every other show we’ve ever put on demanded everything of us, this one will be different. And yet –
It must be ‘se offendendo.’
She offended herself. She offed herself. She offended herself by offing herself?
This must be Latin for she offed or offended herself. Or something like that.
Someone is definitely offended.
Why, ‘tis found so.
This sounds like a conclusive finding of law
which makes me think about this thing I heard
On the Politically Reactive podcast interview with Lee Romero of the ACLU.
I think she said that law was regressive
It was always behind
That because it always bases case rulings on previous cases
It is inherently stuck in the past.
When things are found in law
They are found on the past
Not on the future we’d like to see.
I have found that this is one of the many reasons
Law would never have suited me for a career.
How can that be, unless she drowned herself in her Own defense?
It’s a joke, see. Because if you murder someone, you can get off by pleading self-defense. Joke.
I just read a bunch of notes that seemed to take this line very seriously – that Ophelia drowned herself in defense of seeing more death and destruction. I mean – come on. Joke, man. It’s a JOKE. The character making the joke may not realize that it’s a joke but it’s a joke nonetheless. It may not be a particularly funny joke. But joke.
the crowner hath sat on her, and finds it Christian burial.
Coroner can be a tricky word to say. There’s something about the R in the middle that could trip up a not so careful speaker. Put that R at the beginning and it’s no trouble at all. You could say CROWNER while drunk as a skunk but I’d bet coroner would be a real stumbling block if you had a few in you. This may, in fact, be the situation of these gravediggers. They have certainly been played drunk more than once.
and therefore make her grave straight
Most notes will suggest that the gravedigger is saying to make her grave straight away, as in, right away, as in ASAP. As this is common usage in Shakespeare, I agree. But puns are also common in Shakespeare and I’d bet that the other sense of straight is not entirely unwanted here. Make her grave straight as in, not round, not bent, not curved.
Which makes me wonder if there might have been some customs of burial that would allow for different kinds of death. Like, aren’t you supposed to bury some people face down? Like witches or something? And I could imagine a world wherein you were supposed to bury a suicide victim in, say, a fetal position, curved around themselves for comfort.
So, yes, of course, the gravedigger is saying he should make the grave right away – but Shakespeare’s propensity for wordplay makes me wonder about other ways of experiencing that “straightness.”
I tell thee she is:
I have some questions about the power dynamic between these two gravediggers. Normally in a comedy duo, you have the boss and the 2nd and/or the smart one and the stupid one. But these two keep switching status. The first gravedigger would seem to have the highest status because he speaks first but then the second gravedigger responds with a commanding, “I tell thee she is” and then an order. Sometimes the first one gives the orders and sometimes the 2nd. In the end, the first sends the 2nd for refreshment so he would seem to be top banana – but it is not readily apparent from the dialogue. The 2nd really loses his status when he fails to tell a joke well – and so the 1st can send him away.
I almost always see this played as if the Gravedigger who speaks first is the boss – but I think it would be very interesting to see them as equals, in a status competition until the 2nd loses.
Is she to be buried in Christian burial that Willfully seeks her own salvation?
Ophelia’s will is doubtful here and this debate calls into question a lot of things. In Gertrude’s account, just moments before in the previous scene, Ophelia is the passive victim of her clothes. She falls in the river, floats there and is pulled to the bottom by her garments. At no point in this description does Gertrude suggest that Ophelia means to drown herself.
We’ve seen how Ophelia was before she drowned. She doesn’t seem like someone who is WILLFUL about killing herself. If she had been seen collecting rocks to put in her pockets, then maybe we could attribute her death to drowning. But no one reports such a thing and the way her death is described does not suggest she was carrying stones with which to drown herself.
It is entirely possible that Gertrude is fabricating this story to give Ophelia a more poetic end than suicide but even if Ophelia had an armful of stones in her mad scene – as someone not in possession of her right wits, as someone divided from herself and her fair judgment, there is still an incredible lack of WILL in any self-destruction. Her will was lost with her father. If she ever had any real will to begin with.
The Hamlet Project 