Oh Ophelia, if only you’d given yourself something before. If only you’d considered yourself as you considered everyone else. While you were busy obeying all the men in your life, if you’d also heeded your own orders….perhaps you could have avoided this equitable flower distribution in madness.
Author: erainbowd
There’s rue for you.
Rue is one of those words we don’t use nearly enough anymore. There’s the flower, I suppose, but because I don’t hang out with gardeners or florists I don’t hear that a lot. And there’s “rue the day” but I almost never hear rue used without “the day.” I’m not sure how I’d even use it in modern life.
“After the meal, I began to rue my decision to have fries with that.”?
I mean…I’d just use regret. But.
There’s a world of missing overlap if we don’t use rue so much. Let’s try to bring it back.
There’s fennel for you, and columbines.
I’m sure she means the flower of fennel, but I can’t help picturing fennel, the vegetable, since I’m much more familiar with that.
It would be funny if she’s here handing out a whole bunch of flowers but then randomly throws in a big bulbous fennel. Then returns to some sweet delicate columbines.
A document in madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted.
It’s sort of like a text book case, adapted with all the thought and remembrance fitting, Like….there’s a document – a list of all the symptoms of madness and there are little empty slots to individualize the diagnosis. Like “patient is obsessed with_____” and then here we could fill in “flowers” and “songs about death.”
All fitted.
That’s for thoughts.
A notebook.
A blank piece of paper.
A canvas.
A silence.
An empty theatre.
A deserted stretch of beach, ocean climbing up the shore.
A mountain.
A train journey.
A moment alone.
A rock, to sit on.
And there is pansies.
When I was a child, pansies were my favorite flower. I’m looking at an image of them now, trying to swim backward in my thought to figure out why. I like them, still, but I don’t know if that’s because I used to like them so I associate them with my childhood affection. They are colorful, certainly.
And intrepid. They will grow when nothing else will. That’s why I like them now – their resilience and robustness.
But why when I was little? Was it the name? The colors? The shape? The way they looked like faces? Their height? When I was small, they were much closer to me than they are now.
But I love them still. Whether it’s because I loved them before or not, I will never know. But if someone handed me a bouquet of pansies, I would find it endlessly charming.
Pray, love, remember.
It’s interesting, the effect of this comma before love.
Usually, I hear or see this line as Pray Love, Remember. As if she’s calling someone “Love” – usually Laertes…or, as some editions will suggest that she’s confusing Hamlet and Laertes and calling her brother “Love” when she shouldn’t which is some big misstep like calling your father “baby.”
But with this comma here between Pray and Love…it becomes a list. It’s three things to do 1) Pray 2) Love 3) Remember.
I wonder, though, if there’s some discrepancy in text…I’ve also usually heard this line as “Pray you, love, remember.” Which leads one to the calling someone “Love” idea more than without the you. But still…even then…it could be three things to do. And we know Shakespeare loved his lists!
There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance;
Most productions I’ve seen, including the one I did, use something other than rosemary, pansies, fennel, columbines, daisies and rue to be these plants. It’s easier to, say, collect a bouquet of sticks, which is what we did in the show I was in, than to collect a bunch of prop plants. But it changes Ophelia’s madness a bit to have her completely mis-identify things. She’s mixing up people, sure. She’s singing at inappropriate times – but her madness doesn’t seem like the kind where you misidentify objects. That’s a pretty specialized madness.
She could be pretending, like a child, proposing a symbolic game. She could see asking the group to play with her in thinking of air or a stick as Rosemary but…it’s almost too advanced in her thinking at this point.
It feels more transgressive actually for her to have made her way to some kitchen garden and picked all these flowers. I imagine her trodding through the palace kitchen garden, collecting flowers and herbs while the royal cook’s assistant tries desperately to stop her. Maybe the whole kitchen staff chases after her through the herb beds and flowers.
It also makes sense that these are actual flowers and herbs because of her death. She doesn’t die strewn with sticks – No. She drowns covered in flowers, ones we presume she’s picked on her journey to the brook. And, in a moment of dark desperation, it does make sense that she would be drawn to the beauty of flowers, to collect them to make herself feel better.
This nothing’s more than matter.
What is Laertes responding to? There are bits of things that Ophelia says that make sense – the stuff about a funeral, a father, etc – but the last few lines are some of the nonsensical as far as I (and most notes) can tell. This made me think that there would be some requirement to create a shared story between Laertes and Ophelia that one of these lines might reference. If I were directing this play, I’d want to figure out what bell Ophelia is ringing for Laertes here that is not obvious to the rest of us. It would also make for an interesting and poignant tenderness between them to develop a secret shared history.
It is the false Steward, that stole his master’s daughter.
I see “Steward” and I think of Malvolio.
And Malvolio could be seen as attempting to steal his master’s daughter – one assumes he was steward to Olivia’s father before he became steward to her.
It would be funny if Ophelia was making a reference to Malvolio and Olivia here.
It would be like a crossover in a TV series – like when Richard Belzer as Detective Munch shows up in multiple TV shows. I don’t think that’s what’s happening here – but it is funny that she uses the word “steward” – this is not a word that shows up all over the canon.
There are not stewards in every play. Only a handful and none of them are as fully fleshed out as Malvolio. Goneril’s steward, Oswald, only manages to come in a distant second.
The Hamlet Project 