著者

熊谷 次紘

出版者

広島修道大学

雑誌

広島修大論集 人文編 (ISSN:03875873)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.41, no.1, pp.237-271, 2000-09

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Although Ophelia is, as Elaine Showalter pointed out, "probably the most frequently illustrated and cited of Shakespeare's heroines", she has not been well appreciated in criticism as she might deserve. Rather, for many critics Ophelia is an insignificant minor character and the trend of her unpopularity in today's criticism seems to be almost irreversible. She is generally considered to be immature, vulnerable, naive and too obedient to her father and brother to be able to decide anything for herself. G. R. Hibbard, editor of Hamlet of the Oxford Shakespeare, for example, complained that "timid by nature-she has been 'affrighted' by the whole incident-and in obedience to her father's orders, she fails to respond to Hamlet's dumb plea for love, understanding, and help"; in the same vein Linda W. Wagner also remarked that Shakespeare "intended her to be a minor character, using her sparingly and almost forgetfully throughout the plot." Contrary to these negative views of Ophelia, the present paper attempts to appreciate her more positively by focusing on the favourable aspects of her and investigating into the meaning and value of her love for Hamlet. It is not quite difficult to see how gracefully Shakespeare infused life into Ophelia if only one compares her with the corresponding woman in the original story of Saxo Grammaticus's Historiae Danicae or the girl in F. de Belleforest's French translation of it. Without doubt Shakespeare's Ophelia is created incomparably superior to these women in the sources in terms of her elegance, refinement, purity and beauty. Shakespeare deliberately eliminated from the love story of Ophelia and Hamlet the sexual relations which had existed between the loose girl and Amleth (Hamlet) in Belleforest's story, thus greatly elevating the tragic quality of his hero and heroine. There is also an important clue to understanding Ophelia in a song about Jephthah's daughter which Hamlet hums in Act II Scene ii. The original story of the daughter is in the Old Testament (Judges 11:30-40). By comparing her with Jephthah's daughter, this paper also aims to elucidate the significance of Ophelia's tragedy that Shakespeare must have intended the Elizabethan audience to understand. As Harold Jenkins puts it in his Arden Edition of Hamlet, "the beautifully imagined and beautifully wrought sub-plot of Ophelia's constant and forsaken love is one of the most poignant things in Shakespeare." It may be true that she is lacking in courage and activity, though we do not actually have enough evidence for it, but surely she possesses a well-balanced radiant character and is endowed with a number of virtues such as modesty, delicacy, purity, discretion, prudence and gracefulness, the fact which suggests that she would have become an ideal wife to Prince Hamlet if they both had survived. At Ophelia's funeral, Gertrude bids her farewell strewing her body with flowers and saying, "Sweets to the sweet, farewell!/I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife./I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid,/And not have strew'd thy grave." (V. i. 243-46). In the same scene, leaping into Ophelia's grave, Hamlet protests, "I lov'd Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers/Could not with their quantity of love/Make up my sum." (V. i. 269-71). Not only do these speeches evidently indicate how priceless Ophelia's love was for Hamlet but also denote how exquisitely she was created as a significant major character indispensable for this tragedy.