Hamlet--3 (Affection! pooh!)

Milwaukee is in many ways an old an ugly city. This might be my favorite thing about it. This morning Jackie had an appointment in what was an old, run-down part of town but has now been renovated into the uber-cool Third Ward, full of boutiques and art galleries. I went with her so that I could be all artistic sitting by the river, just at the point where the solid sheet of ice that covers it downtown breaks off into deadly cold water.

So, alright, I still have a bit of post-Ginsberg Romanticism, even if it is shot through with irony and a carefully controlled critical self-awareness. There, see, I'm even suspicious about my own irony. Anyway, from some of the prettiest parts of the city, you can look across the river and see dilapidated industrial neighborhoods, complete with abandoned factories with busted windows and rusted railway bridges.

Maybe it's appropriate that I'm at the river when we first meet Ophelia. Life provides extra foreshadowing.

Ophelia is a really interesting case, in terms of her cultural impact. We all know Ophelia--she has penetrated our cultural consciousness in a way that Shakespeare's great female characters haven't: Rosalind, Portia, Olivia, Cleopatra. These are great roles and in a couple of cases are even leading roles. But of Shakespeare's women, only Juliet is more widely known than poor Ophelia, who has a small role that lacks the spark of those other characters.

This must be because of her connection to this play and its leading man. She is the victim we most wish Hamlet would spare. And that's the thing--she is thoroughly a victim--as muted by the men in her life as any female Shakespeare character I can think of.

In this, her first scene, she is silenced by Laertes, who gives her a long lecture about how she shouldn't have sex with Hamlet. His speech is long. She responds briefly but well, saying okay, but don't show me the hard way to heaven while you take the easy way. This is the first of only two indications we get as to why Hamlet is (fatally) attracted to her. For the rest of the play, including the "to be or not to be" scene, she is completely muzzled by the men.

Sure enough, her father, that old wicked idiot Polonius, comes along in this scene and berates her, again with long speeches about not doing Hamlet. These speeches show us a recurring theme surrounding Polonius: espionage, sneaking. Polonius has "heard" about Hamlet's attentions to Ophelia, as he has heard everything. His long, slimy tentacles reach throughout Elsinore, having put Claudius on the throne already. His fatal mistake will be to think that Hamlet can be controlled and informed upon as easily as Laertes.

But Ophelia. We do not get to know her. She is a feminist rallying cry because she is completely silenced, not because of anything she says or is or does. All the men are culpable of this, Hamlet as much as anyone.