IV.vii. Ophelia's Death - French Rock Opera

Funereal and pretty, Johnny Hallyday's song plays the same role as Gertrude's speech, casting events in a fantastical light, as much in the lyrics as in the music, which is filled with angelic voices and fairy twinkles. Oddly, it ends on a piano solo that seems a song apart. These sad twinkles could be Laertes' reaction, or possibly, Ophelia's last song as she sinks below the waters, the truth behind Gertrude's grandiose lyrics. There is panic in neither piece of music, as if "incapable of her own distress" was taken literally. We'll discuss the lyrics after we listen to the song. Here are the original French lyrics, then a doggerel translation for those readers who may not be up on that language.

La mort d'Ophélie
Un saule penché sur le ruisseau
Pleure dans le cristal des eaux
Ses feuilles blanches

Ophélie tressant des guirlandes
Vient présenter comme une offrande
Des fleurs, des branches

Pour caresser ses boutons d’or
Pour respirer son jeune corps
Le saule se penche

Mais sous elle un rameau se brise
Le saule en pleurs la retient prise
De part sa manche

Ophélie lui dit «qu’il est bon»
Quand le ruisseau dans un frisson
Casse la branche

Ophélie file au fil de l’eau
Qui vient gonfler son blanc manteau
Contre ses hanches

Son cri s’éteint comme une joie
La boue immonde où elle se noie
Prend sa revanche

Un saule penché sur le ruisseau
Pleure dans le cristal des eaux
Ses feuilles blanches

Ophelia's Death
A willow leaning over a stream
Weeps into the crystal of the waters
Its white leaves

Ophelia tressing garlands
Comes to present, as an offering
Flowers, branches

To caress her buttercups
To breathe in her young body
The willow leans

But under her, a bow breaks
The weeping willow keeps her from falling
On its sleeve

Ophelia tells him "he is so good"
When the stream in a shiver
Breaks the branch

Ophelia goes by on the water
That just inflated her white coat
Against her hips

Her cry is extinguished like a joy
The foul mud in which she drowns
Takes it revenge

A willow leaning over the stream
Weeps into the crystal of the waters
Its white leaves

The song is told from the willow's perspective; it stands in for Gertrude in this instance, but may weep just as much. The image is the same in French where a weeping willow is a saule pleureur, its tears its own garlands of leaves. The willow becomes the last being to have contact with Ophelia, and in these last moments, she knows love and peace. It's the stream that's villainous, that breaks the branch, that drowns the girl. Hallyday doesn't seem to believe in her suicide, and links the gravedigger's story of animated water forcibly drowning a person to redeem Ophelia. "The mud takes its revenge." While the tree is "good", the rest of Nature seems bent on killing this young woman, possibly because she has taken flowers and branches from Her. Obviously, that wilfulness is mere personification, but is Nature personified as specific people? Revenge is Hamlet's affair, and his vengeful quest is the reason her life has been smothered this day. The stream may just be the course of events, or the destructive power of Claudius, more active than muddy Hamlet, who started the ball rolling. And so the tree must be her father, her lone and ultimately useless protector. At least in her mind. One could also take the willow to be Gertrude - and my mind immediately goes to Desdemona's song in Othello, another object of men's affections doomed by them - an off-stage protector grooming Ophelia to be her son's wife, and in this story, weeping for her death and her own inability to prevent it.

IV.vii. Ophelia's Death - Classics Illustrated

Both comic book adaptations teach us about rushing through the play and its effects, though on stage, we would hardly get the same kind of superimposition caused by placing speech bubbles in the same panel/space.

The original
Gertrude is rather thrifty when it comes to telling Laertes his sister has drowned, the words coming out of her mouth even as she rushes through the door. Again, this is due to the way comics work, but keeping everything in the same speech bubble keeps pauses and hesitations out of the Queen's "voice". Her account of Ophelia's death is more detailed, taking up an entire page:

Pitched at a younger audience, Ophelia's death appears to be entirely accidental, albeit as result of her madness. In her poor judgment, she climbs up on a very slim branch, which breaks under her weight. An important lesson about safety, perhaps, but not a suicide. In the end, even her garlands desert her as she sinks to the bottom of the brook.

The Berkley version

The Grant/Mandrake adaptation is even more rushed, though it includes more dialog. Laertes is told not while he's kneeling (or did he just fall to his knees upon hearing the news?) in the cemetery. It's likely that is his father's grave. The next panel looks beautiful, though there seems to be some confusion as to who's crying eyes those are. The speech bubble pointing to the face means them to be the Queen's, but they rather look more like Laertes'. Regardless, the one shot of Ophelia is evocative of John Everett Millais' famous painting of Ophelia.

The cemetery setting underscores Laertes' loss of all family. Notably, his crying despite his announced restraint is cut, so this Laertes manages to hold it together. See also how Claudius' last lines, because they are included in a panel in which Laertes has not yet exited, plays like an aside. Does this Claudius actually fear Laertes' rage against HIM will start up again, or is it an unnecessary confusion resulting from the medium?

IV.vii. Ophelia's Death - Tennant (2009)

Penny Downie is a most vulnerable Gertrude, running in covered in a black shroud, with no make-up, as if having just been awakened with this news. She's actually caught out by Laertes' simple question "where?", hesitating as if she wasn't expecting him to ask. She reaches for the details, possibly inventing them based on the rough outline she's been given, perhaps hoping it actually happened as she tells it, and at times, regretting her choice of words. For example, she seems disturbed by her realization that long purples are also called dead men's fingers. The emphasis brings to the fore the idea that Ophelia is in a way in her dead father's grip, the flowery metaphor turning macabre and dragging her down to her death, in an echo of Hamlet Sr.'s ghostly manifestations. Ophelia, the female (and thus socially powerless) Hamlet, isn't visited by the specter of her father, except in this image.

Claudius seems stunned by the whole affair. Not just Gertrude's story, but Laertes' weepy reaction as well. It's true that he surprisingly lets them speak without ever interjecting, even though Ophelia's death may affect his plans. At most, he seems tired. When Gertrude reaches out for comfort, he fails to notice her gesture and instead rebukes her for what Laertes might now do. She's shaken by how little he cares about her or Ophelia, and how much he cares for his own safety.

One last note, about the director and cinematographer's intent. While Gertrude speaks, the camera moves to a slightly overhead angle so the black polished floor can take on the properties of a murky reflective pool, bringing the muddy brook into the room. It's a neat piece of staging, but not as obvious as the production would have liked it, I think. Still, an element to steal and realize better in future adaptations.

IV.vii. Ophelia's Death - Fodor (2007)

The Ophelia in this adaptation is a junkie, now in withdrawal after her sister Polonia's death, as she was her "medicator". When she finds a syringe and tries to shoot up, she dies from an overdose. Her death is intercut with the previous sequence, increasing the tension, but also drawing a link between the talk of the poison and the girl accidentally poisoning herself. Because events are so different from the ones related by Gertrude, the Queen isn't needed here and does not appear. It's a small mercy, because the actress' handle on the English language is limited. It's not clear that she would have given the speech what it needed.

In contrast to Claudius and Laertes discussing Hamlet in a dark room, Ophelia's sequences are blown-out, a pure white bleaching the color out of the film. The sound design is just as extreme. We may be hearing and seeing her madness and her ecstasy, or we may be experiencing the scenes from the Ghost's limbo. He watches as Ophelia "drowns" in her narcotic bliss, chokes, convulses and finally stops moving. Suddenly, her body is on the beach in the same position. Were we there all along? Has the Ghost moved her? The latter is suggested. He continues to watch as Claudius and Laertes run to her silent (as per the sound design) and apparently unbidden.

One of Fodor's key ideas is keeping the Ghost in the play all the way through as an unseen observer, although here it is suggested he takes an active hand in Ophelia's death. She finds the heroin under mysterious and fortuitous (in a sense) circumstances, in a room filled with his signature white light. He moves her body where she might be found by the people upon whom he wants revenge. Or since this will arguably push Hamlet over the edge, perhaps he's engineering events so that his son finally kills Claudius like he promised. The more his tardy son waits, the more blood will be shed. Fodor's Ghost is a figure from horror stories whose agency is more direct.

IV.vii. Ophelia's Death - Hamlet 2000

Because Gertrude's speech refers to things absent in the modern adaptation - the brook, the flowers, Ophelia's dress - it is completely cut from the play, as is Laertes' scripted reaction. Nothing after the multiple utterances of "drowned" can be heard from either of them, and the film instead opts for an image that contains information one would have gleaned from the text.

In Hamlet 2000, Ophelia is frequently seen flirting with the idea of drowning. She throws herself in a VIP pool with her clothes on, she walks the edge of a fountain in the lobby. It's in that fountain that she is found, drowned in barely a foot of water, and though these things happen, it is just askew enough an image to underline the madness of it. Ophelia simply let herself die. A security guard runs in to try and rescue her but is too late, which answers the question of whether Gertrude was witness to the events or not. Of course, she might have seen it happen from one of the lobby's high balconies and been unable to do anything about it, just as in an Elizabethan or Medieval setting, the Queen might have seen it all from a tower window. The shot ends on her box of letters from Hamlet, floating by her body in the fountain, telling us more definitively that her suicide was driven by lost love, though the letters are also a symbol of the tug of war between her father and her lover - the letter revealed to the Royals, the tokens returned to Hamlet as an excuse to spy on him, and so on - so does double duty.

IV.vii. Ophelia's Death - Kline '90

As this production recreates the play as Kline crafted it on stage, the scene does not allow a flashback to the events Gertrude describes. It does, however, make sense of how wary Laertes is. His reaction to the news is to mistrust it, and his initial question (where?) drips with disbelief. Though he's just been "turned" by Claudius, the King has also shown him how devious and underhanded he could be (the convoluted murder conspiracy). Could Ophelia have been the victim of a similar plot, lest her madness reveal some hidden truths at Court? Because we don't see her suicide, we're allowed to be suspicious as well. Gertrude is certainly sincere, but did she actually witness those events (and thus is guilty of letting them happen), or was she told? And if told, how reliable was the witness? The problem with such an interpretation is that Claudius shouldn't be upset about this death affecting his plans for Hamlet (except with himself, but that's not the performance here).

Dana Ivey stresses the words "cold maid", which is an illuminating choice, as Ophelia is indeed the coldest of maids now. It's doubly interesting because this adaptation's Ophelia, Diane Venora, seems a little old for the part. Was she really a "maid", or is that part of Gertrude's tale to cushion the blow as much as the prettiness of the picture she paints?

IV.vii. Ophelia's Death - Zeffirelli '90

In Zeffirelli's restructuring of the play, Ophelia's last scene is immediately succeeded by her suicide. We see her outside Elsinore, skipping towards the brook while, in voice-over, Gertrude tells the tale. Before cutting to the Queen and the reactions of the court, we get a close-up of Ophelia on the small bridge staring into the water, obviously disturbed. There is no doubt here that this was a suicide and far from the lyrical portrait painted by Gertrude. One simply cannot imagine this Ophelia being "incapable of her own distress"; her pain is too raw.

Is Gertrude painting a pretty picture for Laertes' benefit? She may be. From all the wide shots, including one at the very end with the girl's body floating away, no one seems to have witnessed her death. Gertrude may be enacting a sort of reconstruction based on Ophelia's old habits, the state she was found in, and her own wishful imagination. Glenn Close's performance supports that idea, tearfully smiling through most of it (except for the "muddy death" line) even though women in black are grieving behind her. She's chosen to remember the girl's prettiness, not the ugly side of her madness, and she smiles as one might at a eulogy, in fond remembrance. Laertes is simply shocked, and his "drowned" lines cut back to the scene of Ophelia's death, the camera panning away from her. He can't bear to imagine it.

Now, there are some cuts here, mostly because Gertrude didn't interrupt a conspiracy. Laertes and Claudius will only discuss Hamlet's murder after the Prince's return and Ophelia's funeral. Laertes doesn't get to forbid his tears, nor can Claudius be angry at Gertrude for disturbing his plan.

IV.vii. Ophelia's Death - BBC '80

The staging here is fairly standard, with the scene playing on a stunned Gertrude, no flashbacks, etc. Interesting things about the performance include her looking straight at Claudius when opening on "woes" (though there's no sign of ironic intent from her), and a breathless delivery, as if she was fighting the urge to pass out.

David Robb's Laertes is slightly over the top at times, but he makes some interesting choices too. His "Oh", a line that can come off as risible, plays as a sigh as he sits down, the wind taken out of his sails. And at the end, he positively shouts the tears out of his eyes, his voice blazing with anger, giving Claudius' reproach to Gertrude the carp of truth. Since Laertes does look angry, Claudius could be setting up Hamlet's death in the duel. He did his best to calm the boy down, but in the end, that's why the duel went wrong. Laertes as willing patsy.

Second Quarto vs. Folio
The Folio, usually used as master text, has Ophelia singing snatches of old tunes. The BBC adaptation uses the Second Quarto's "snatches of old lauds" instead. "Lauds" in this context are hymns praising God, while "tunes" is a more generic term that would easily include the bawdy snippets heard earlier from Ophelia. Critics have been divided on the word choice, some finding contradiction in the sexual nature of the songs we do hear and Ophelia's Christian values in her final moments. Is there though? Her last lines on stage were a prayer for mercy for all Christian souls, and it's in that frame of mind that she went to her watery grave. Her fury, sexual/marital frustration and grief all spent, a calmer, more nihilistic madness came over her in the end. It's possible Gertrude is fudging the details to comfort Laertes, but her expression makes this unlikely.

IV.vii. Ophelia's Death - Olivier '48

Olivier opts for a very literal interpretation of the scene, done completely in voice-over, showing Gertrude's story as fact. In the restructuring of the play, we go directly from Ophelia's madness scene to the suicide, though the literalism turns it into an accident. The camera struggles to follow her out of doors, and turning the corner, finds she's gone. But the brook is in the background outside the next doorway. We then cut to a shot of the swampy stream under the weeping willow and, panning left, find Ophelia singing some songs normally in the previous scene. floating on a cushion of vines. She floats out of shot, vines trailing her for a while, and by the time the camera pans to where she would be, she's gone, swallowed up. As painless for the audience as it is for her. Fade to the next scene's tombstones.

A rather efficient and fairly unambiguous scene then, though one could make the claim that we're seeing a product of Gertrude's or Laertes' imagination.

IV.vii. Ophelia's Death - Branagh '96

Laertes already isn't the most voluble of characters, but learning of his sister's suicide has him react with a simple "oh", an example of Shakespeare showing he wasn't paid by the word, but actually fit word to emotion. What would you say in that situation? What is there to say? Michael Maloney's Laertes is stunned, can't process the information, and by the time Gertrude finishes her account, is still on "she's drowned". Did he even hear the story, need she have told it? Once he's cried, the woman will be out, not just his "female" nature, but he'll have exorcised Ophelia from his life as well. We might compare this image of grief to Hamlet's refusal to exorcise his dead father.

Julie Christie's performance as Gertrude has a lot to fawn over as well. The pace at which she tells the story tells us it's not a prepared speech, she's feeling herself through it, either reliving the experience herself (Branagh's take) or fabricating it out of whole cloth (a cynical take in which the truth might have Ophelia escaping her cell, getting pursued and falling accidentally into the brook). Either way, she couches her words to bring Laertes comfort, making it sound like Ophelia never suffered, her death a lyrical event filled with flowers and prettiness. Christie's hesitation is precisely what highlights Gertrude's word choice.

And if she means to console Laertes, Claudius' angry reaction is even more of a bad move. It shows his motives were self-interested, while hers were genuinely altruistic. She refuses to follow him when asked, and he realizes he's said the wrong thing, and that their relationship is no longer what it was. In effect, she not only refuses his protection, but condemns him for offering it.

Before moving on, we're given a single shot of Ophelia's face a watery surface. And then it's off to meet the clowns. Shakespeare's ironic editing.

IV.vii. Ophelia's Death

The tail end of Scene 7 is Gertrude's description of Ophelia's suicide, which immediately asks the question: Did Gertrude watch the girl die and do nothing? Is she instead recounting news as related to her, and who is the original witness who failed to intervene? Even more choices are open to film director who may, unlike stage productions, actually show the event, perhaps without even the benefit of Shakespeare's words supporting the images. This is why I've chosen to isolate such a short sequence. Before heading into the various adaptations, let's take a look at the language itself. As usual, the Bard is in italics, and I use normal script to break in.

Enter QUEEN GERTRUDE

CLAUDIUS: How now, sweet queen!
QUEEN GERTRUDE: One woe doth tread upon another's heel,
So fast they follow; your sister's drown'd, Laertes.
LAERTES: Drown'd! O, where?

A strange question. Not "how", but "where". The "why" is self-evident, and so perhaps is the "how". Laertes may assume it's a suicide and not an accident, from what he's seen of his sister's madness, and only wants to go to her.

QUEEN GERTRUDE: There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:

The vegetable imagery, already associated with Ophelia, is here distinctly melancholy. The scene takes place by a "weeping" willow, and dead men's fingers are at once a reference to her dead father and through their grosser name (usually dogstones, but there's a selection of testicular nicknames that might be appropriate), to the question of sexuality and whether or not she slept with Hamlet. The two ideas intermingled in her mad rants.

There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds

With "coronet" we get the image of a flowery crown, a parody of the crown she might have worn had she become Hamlet's queen. Like Hamlet, her royal destiny has been aborted by Court intrigue.

Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:

The mermaid image takes us to the sea on which Hamlet has recently sailed. Like her, his life has been saved by that sea, but only temporarily. For Ophelia, death comes swiftly. Hamlet gets another Act, but no more.

Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
LAERTES: Alas, then, she is drown'd?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Drown'd, drown'd.
LAERTES: Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears: but yet
It is our trick; nature her custom holds,
Let shame say what it will: when these are gone,
The woman will be out. Adieu, my lord:
I have a speech of fire, that fain would blaze,
But that this folly douts it.

Exit

KING CLAUDIUS: Let's follow, Gertrude:
How much I had to do to calm his rage!
Now fear I this will give it start again;
Therefore let's follow.

Exeunt

In reality, Claudius fears Laertes' rage will be smothered by this new grief, though he says the opposite. We'll see how the acting and staging impacts the sequence in the weeks to come.