hamlet-ophelia-mucha

Sheila has a post up with a vast gorgeous array of images of Ophelia through the ages. Etchings, drawings, paintings, photographs of actresses who’ve played Ophelia. It’s a smorgasbord of beauty.

Her post made me remember a piece from one of my all-time favorite artists, Alphonse Mucha, so I thought I’d make my minor contribution to the idea here. It’s one of his Sarah Bernhardt paintings/posters for which he become famous: Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, actually, and even though Hamlet dominates the frame here, if you look closely, underneath Hamlet, you’ll see Mucha included an image of Ophelia, in the chill of death, clutching her flowers.

I love contemplating what Mucha intended with the composition — Ophelia boxed in a kind of pretty casket at the bottom, Hamlet’s dark foot breaking the frame — doing what? acknowledging her? reaching to her? oppressing her? what? To me, it’s not accidental that the foot is outside the frame. She is literally under his foot here. It’s not like I picture Mucha having composition issues and being forced to paint the foot out of frame or not giving his subject’s legs and whatnot, like some people I know. Maybe it’s only interesting to me. A roomful of people could go round and round discussing the relationship between these two and, at the end of it, come to a roomful of different conclusions about it. And the views on their relationship shift with the times and the culture. This is a lithograph from 1899, late Victorian era, to give it a context, and based on the feel of the piece, I thought it would be interesting to include a couple of contradictory quotes on the Hamlet/Ophelia relationship from two prominent Victorian women.

The first, from writer Anna Brownell Jameson fromShakespeare’s Heroines: Characteristics of Women:

I have even heard it denied that Hamlet did love Ophelia. The author of the finest remarks I have yet seen on the play and the character of Hamlet, leans to this opinion… I do think, with submission, that the love of Hamlet for Ophelia is deep, is real, and is precisely the kind of love which such a man as Hamlet would feel for such a woman as Ophelia.

~ Anna Brownell Murphy Jameson, Shakespeare’s Heroines:Characteristics of Women.

The second, from a well-known Victorian actress who played Ophelia, Helena Faucit:

I cannot, therefore, think that Hamlet comes out well in his relations with Ophelia. I do not forget what he says at her grave: But I weigh his actions against his words, and find them here of little worth. The very language of his letter to Ophelia, which Polonius reads to the king and queen, has not the true ring in it. It comes from the head, and not from the heart – it is a string of euphemisms, which almost justifies Laertes’ warning to his sister, that the “trifling of Hamlet’s favour” is but “the perfume and suppliance of a minute.” Hamlet loves, I have always felt, only in a dreamy, imaginative way, with a love as deep, perhaps, as can be known by a nature fuller of thought and contemplation than of sympathy and passion.

~ Helena Faucit, Lady Martin, On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters (1888).

I, for one, although I like how Brownell states her point, tend a bit towards Faucit’s interpretation. The composition and the general feel of Mucha’s piece makes me wonder if he did, too. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but, let’s face it, my entire life is based on reading too much into everything.