Shakespeares Hamlet †Ophelia Discussed Essays -- GCSE English Litera

critical point Ophelia Discussed Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks in Making Mother Matter Repression, Revision, and the Stakes of Reading Psychoanalysis Into Kenneth Branaghs Hamlet make a statement regarding the effect of Ophelias words, even though she was considered mad at the time Hamlets own disgust toward the body and sexual behaviour, conjugate with Ophelias erotically-charged songs, did not suddenly become about sexuality after Freud. On the contrary, censorship of the play in performance during various historical time periods indicates that the tragedy has always been perceived of as highly erotic, and often dangerously so. Even in the context of twentieth-century interpretations of Hamlet, critics have been reluctant to engage in genuine confrontations with the conundrum of the plays sexuality and its underlying anxiety. For this reason, Jacqueline Rose has claimed that critics writing on Hamlet, beginning with T. S. Eliot, have conflated their puzzlement over the p lay with the Western notion of woman as the immune carrier of an impenetrable secret. (2) Shakespeares tragedy, Hamlet, presents almost a dozen male characters for every one female character. The only prominent female characters are two Ophelia, Laertes baby and Polonius daughter and Gertrude, the queen and wife of Claudius and mother of Hamlet. This essay will explore the character, role, and importance of Ophelia. The protagonist of the tragedy, Prince Hamlet, initially appears in the play dressed in severe black, mourning the death of his puzzle supposedly by snakebite while he was away at Wittenberg as a student. Hamlet laments the hasty remarriage of his mother to his fathers brother, an incestuous act thus in his first soliloqu... ...akes of Reading Psychoanalysis Into Kenneth Branaghs Hamlet. Early Modern Literary Studies 6.1 (May, 2000) 2.1-24 http//purl.oclc.org/emls/06-1/lehmhaml.htm Pennington, Michael. Ophelia Madness Her Only Safe Haven. Readings on Hamlet. Ed. get in Nardo. San Diego Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. From Hamlet A Users Guide. New York Limelight Editions, 1996. Pitt, Angela. Women in Shakespeares Tragedies. Readings on The Tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego Greenhaven Press, 1996. Rpt. from Shakespeares Women. N.p. n.p., 1981. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http//www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html Wilkie, Brian and pile Hurt. Shakespeare. Literature of the Western World. Ed. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. New York Macmillan Publishing Co., 1992.