What do you think?
The Tragedy of Ophelia: Two Essays
Is Hamlet just a philosophy-drenched melodrama of action alongside inaction till its absurdist/horrific end?
Or does the play’s strongest theatrical irony work because, while Hamlet pretends to “an antic disposition” to avenge his father and save himself from vicious, smiling Claudius, obedient Ophelia—who, against her father’s judgment, loves and hopes to defend the Danish prince—once Hamlet kills her father, goes truly insane and drowns . . .?
If we answer yes to both, how do we organize a performance, with both historical punctilio and narrative accuracy, conveying both sympathy and nobility from today’s screen or stage?
THE TRAGEDY OF OPHELIA: TWO ESSAYS
In 1997 Delany won the Kessler Award for LGBTQ Studies. In 2015 he was presented with the Nicolas Guillén Award for Philosophical Literature. Other honors include the William Whitehead Award for Gay Writing, the Brudner Prize, and, most recently, the Anisfield-Wolf Award. Widely taught works include Times Square Red / Times Square Blue (1999) and his newest “fragment collection,” Of Solids and Surds (2021).
Or does the play’s strongest theatrical irony work because, while Hamlet pretends to “an antic disposition” to avenge his father and save himself from vicious, smiling Claudius, obedient Ophelia—who, against her father’s judgment, loves and hopes to defend the Danish prince—once Hamlet kills her father, goes truly insane and drowns . . .?
If we answer yes to both, how do we organize a performance, with both historical punctilio and narrative accuracy, conveying both sympathy and nobility from today’s screen or stage?
THE TRAGEDY OF OPHELIA: TWO ESSAYS
In 1997 Delany won the Kessler Award for LGBTQ Studies. In 2015 he was presented with the Nicolas Guillén Award for Philosophical Literature. Other honors include the William Whitehead Award for Gay Writing, the Brudner Prize, and, most recently, the Anisfield-Wolf Award. Widely taught works include Times Square Red / Times Square Blue (1999) and his newest “fragment collection,” Of Solids and Surds (2021).
79 pages, Paperback
Published December 1, 2021
About the author
Samuel R. Delany
288 books2,328 followersSamuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.
Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.
Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.
Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.
Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.
In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.
Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.
Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.
Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.
Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.
In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 29, 2022
(Side note: Goodreads has, as subtitle, "Two Essays"; there is in fact only one essay in the book, which is simply subtitled, "An Essay".)
This little book (103 + xii pages) consists of a long(ish) essay about, as you might guess from the title, Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, which might well serve as a set of notes for a director who wishes to do justice to Ophelia in a production. After a short preface, it is in five, or rather V, parts, corresponding to the five acts of Hamlet. Because of the emphasis on Ophelia's part in the play, acts I and V -- in which Ophelia does not speak or, so far as I remember, even appear -- are treated much more briefly than the central three.
Almost the first thing brought to our attention is that the acts, scenes, and quite possibly stage directions in the existing texts of Shakespeare were imposed upon the plays by later editors. Furthermore, many of the early editions, if not all, were taken not from Shakespeare's manuscripts (if such even existed in any complete form; certainly none survive), but from the memories of actors or, possibly, of persons who took notes in shorthand while the rehearsals or performances took place.
Another point made early: while it is possible to portray Hamlet as mad, or as feigning madness, it is completely foreign to the play (and to the Elizibethan stage in general) to attempt to portray him as "a little mad, a little pretending".
The core of the argument is found, I think, on page 18:
"The overarching irony that must be portrayed by the performances is that, while Hamlet is pretending to be mad to escape death and at the same time he exposes the guilt of the current King, his uncle, in the murder of his father, King Hamlet, Ophelia herself, in her attempt to protect Hamlet, is driven mad by the very actions she is forced, by both her love and her knowledge, to perform." (Pg. 18)
Delany, through the rest of the book, treats Hamlet (as I believe is correct) as pretending to be mad for safety's sake.
Hamlet, in this version, comes across as quite cruel in his treatment of Ophelia. When Hamlet tells her Get thee to a nunnery," Delany remarks: "...Hamlet means it literally: her general nievety, regardless of whom she is performing for, has struck him." It will be recalled that, in this scene, Claudius and Polonius are hiding behind a wall-hanging, which Ophelia knows quite well; additionally, Delany posits a lost passage in which Hamlet briefly enters the scene with Ophelia, Polonius, and Claudius, sees them preparing to hide, and backs out, unnoticed, only to return more openly. The dialogue between Hamlet and Ophelia, then, takes on the character of two people who both know perfectly well what is going on in the room, though only one of them knows that the other knows it, while neither of them dare speak of it. Either Ophelia genuinely believes Hamlet mad, in which case, she is trying to soothe his brain; or else she knows perfectly well that he is not, in which case she is trying desparately not to give the game away. Either way, her primary motivation is love of Hamlet. In return, he abuses her roundly.
Is it this or the death of her father which finally causes her to go mad? Delany believes that it is Hamlet's actions in this scene that do the job, and the murder of Polonius, presumably, reinforces it.
The other key section on which Delany spends a higher proportion of his attention consists of the two scenes, in Act IV, in which Ophelia's madness is displayed.
"It is generally on that [Ophelia's] flowers are symbolic, but severa disagree what each flower means: one critic argues that fennel is for flattery, columbines cuckoldry, rue means sorrow for Ophelia and repentance for Gertrude; daisy dissembling; violets faithfulness." (Pg. 84)
I won't go on further in describing Delany's content. His argument, while it may be disputed, seems sound to me.
The book, as an artifact, is a bit more problematic. It clearly _has_ been proofread, but not to a professional standard (this appears to be a self-published book); nor is it well laid-out. For example, the Table of Contents is in no case correct regarding the numbered pages where each section begins. Neither of these things greatly affects readibility, but I would that Delany had made use of some of the nigh-rabid fans his work has earned to help with these matters. Many of us would have worked for free to help bring the book into the world in better shape.
This little book (103 + xii pages) consists of a long(ish) essay about, as you might guess from the title, Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, which might well serve as a set of notes for a director who wishes to do justice to Ophelia in a production. After a short preface, it is in five, or rather V, parts, corresponding to the five acts of Hamlet. Because of the emphasis on Ophelia's part in the play, acts I and V -- in which Ophelia does not speak or, so far as I remember, even appear -- are treated much more briefly than the central three.
Almost the first thing brought to our attention is that the acts, scenes, and quite possibly stage directions in the existing texts of Shakespeare were imposed upon the plays by later editors. Furthermore, many of the early editions, if not all, were taken not from Shakespeare's manuscripts (if such even existed in any complete form; certainly none survive), but from the memories of actors or, possibly, of persons who took notes in shorthand while the rehearsals or performances took place.
Another point made early: while it is possible to portray Hamlet as mad, or as feigning madness, it is completely foreign to the play (and to the Elizibethan stage in general) to attempt to portray him as "a little mad, a little pretending".
The core of the argument is found, I think, on page 18:
"The overarching irony that must be portrayed by the performances is that, while Hamlet is pretending to be mad to escape death and at the same time he exposes the guilt of the current King, his uncle, in the murder of his father, King Hamlet, Ophelia herself, in her attempt to protect Hamlet, is driven mad by the very actions she is forced, by both her love and her knowledge, to perform." (Pg. 18)
Delany, through the rest of the book, treats Hamlet (as I believe is correct) as pretending to be mad for safety's sake.
Hamlet, in this version, comes across as quite cruel in his treatment of Ophelia. When Hamlet tells her Get thee to a nunnery," Delany remarks: "...Hamlet means it literally: her general nievety, regardless of whom she is performing for, has struck him." It will be recalled that, in this scene, Claudius and Polonius are hiding behind a wall-hanging, which Ophelia knows quite well; additionally, Delany posits a lost passage in which Hamlet briefly enters the scene with Ophelia, Polonius, and Claudius, sees them preparing to hide, and backs out, unnoticed, only to return more openly. The dialogue between Hamlet and Ophelia, then, takes on the character of two people who both know perfectly well what is going on in the room, though only one of them knows that the other knows it, while neither of them dare speak of it. Either Ophelia genuinely believes Hamlet mad, in which case, she is trying to soothe his brain; or else she knows perfectly well that he is not, in which case she is trying desparately not to give the game away. Either way, her primary motivation is love of Hamlet. In return, he abuses her roundly.
Is it this or the death of her father which finally causes her to go mad? Delany believes that it is Hamlet's actions in this scene that do the job, and the murder of Polonius, presumably, reinforces it.
The other key section on which Delany spends a higher proportion of his attention consists of the two scenes, in Act IV, in which Ophelia's madness is displayed.
"It is generally on that [Ophelia's] flowers are symbolic, but severa disagree what each flower means: one critic argues that fennel is for flattery, columbines cuckoldry, rue means sorrow for Ophelia and repentance for Gertrude; daisy dissembling; violets faithfulness." (Pg. 84)
I won't go on further in describing Delany's content. His argument, while it may be disputed, seems sound to me.
The book, as an artifact, is a bit more problematic. It clearly _has_ been proofread, but not to a professional standard (this appears to be a self-published book); nor is it well laid-out. For example, the Table of Contents is in no case correct regarding the numbered pages where each section begins. Neither of these things greatly affects readibility, but I would that Delany had made use of some of the nigh-rabid fans his work has earned to help with these matters. Many of us would have worked for free to help bring the book into the world in better shape.
March 1, 2024
This was easily my least favorite Delany book of the dozens I've read. I think this is a self-published volume of two essays he wrote quite a long time ago. A couple of interesting insights, but it's a topic I don't particularly care about and a lot of the short book was spent on long excerpts from and summary of Hamlet.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews