The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0344 Monday, 29 June 2009
[1] From: Martin Mueller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 24 Jun 2009 22:35:17 -0500
Subj: Re: SHK 20.0337 Hamlet and Ophelia, Typologically
[2] From: Felix de Villiers <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 25 Jun 2009 09:45:33 +0200
Subj: Hamlet and Ophelia, Typology
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Martin Mueller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 24 Jun 2009 22:35:17 -0500
Subject: 20.0337 Hamlet and Ophelia, Typologically
Comment: Re: SHK 20.0337 Hamlet and Ophelia, Typologically
About typological readings of Ophelia (and other things): It helps to
remember that the literal meaning of 'allegory' is 'saying other' and
that it was a technique of reading before it became a technique of
writing. You take the 'other-saying' route when, for whatever reason you
don't like what the text appears to be saying on the face of it.
You can read anything allegorically or 'typologically' and, given the
initial problem allegory was meant to solve -- i.e. that you want the
text to say something else -- there is no end of it. There are, of
course, ways of writing allegorically, but once you're in the habit of
reading allegorically there is no easy way of drawing a line between
what you would like for the text to mean and what you think the author
intended.
There are a variety of ways in which one could put Hamlet/Ophelia,
Othello/Desdemona, and Red Cross/Una in the same paragraph and learn
from the comparison. What you see clearly (or I see clearly) is that
Spenser writes very explicitly in a figurative framework and that
Shakespeare does not. You learn something from looking at Shakespearean
situations 'as if' they were figurative, as long as you are aware of the
difference.
I remember Northrop Frye referring to Roy Battenhouse as the 'peeping
Thomist'. I learned a lot from Battenhouse in a graduate seminar at
Indiana many years ago, but often the things you learn from a teacher
are not the things he meant to teach. What I took away was that some
connections are more tenuous than others and that to force them is to
destroy them. 'Allegory' is a technique of making a text mean something
else. The trick is to know when and where to stop.
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Felix de Villiers <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 25 Jun 2009 09:45:33 +0200
Subject: Hamlet and Ophelia, Typology
Concerning typologies, I have a revolutionary statement to make: Ophelia
is Ophelia. Undoubtedly types exist in Shakespeare: the fool, the
villain, the tragic hero. Is Hamlet not, among other things an
apotheosis of the type of the fool? Like our editor, I felt
uncomfortable with this theme from the beginning. In the end the
typologies can be just about anything that pops into our heads: Ophelia
as Divine Wisdom, the Virgin Mary, Laertes as the Messiah, and so on. In
my last comment (18/06/09), I went along with this game, but really with
the intention of undermining it and going more deeply into the play.
With the richness of detail and characterisation in his plays,
Shakespeare himself undermines the allegories that may be hovering as
abstractions above his theatre. I can imagine his caustic reaction if
someone had asked him whether Ophelia represented the Virgin Mary. I
know that there have been plays with heavily allegorical figures in
them, but Shakespeare humanises these out of recognition.
"To me, I humbly confess, 'allegory', rightly or wrongly, means
nuisance," wrote Sir Leslie Stephens, Virginia Woolf's father, in an
essay on Tennyson. "The meaning which it sticks on to a poem is
precisely what the poem cannot properly mean. (-) But when the
personages, instead of obeying the laws of their own world, are
converted into allegory, they lose their dream (fictional FdV) reality
without gaining the reality of ordinary life. The arbitrariness
especially ceases to be delightful when we suspect that the real
creatures of the fancy have become the puppets of a judicious moralist."
Apparently Tennyson was asked whether the three Queens that appear on
the lake in the Morte d'Arthur were not Faith, Hope and Charity. He
replied that they were and were not; that they might well be the three
Virtues or the three Graces, but added that there was nothing in his
poem that might not be explained without any mystery or allegory
whatever.- When Ophelia is described as the Virgin Mary, she loses her
fascination, she loses herself.
My citations of Leslie Stephens come from an old schoolbook of mine:
Tennyson, Oxford University Press, London, 1967
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