Other People's Shoes by Harriet Walter

Author:Harriet Walter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nick Hern Books

I know there is a danger in too schematic an approach to acting, particularly Shakespeare, and that I could easily have been carried off course by the sheer fun of theory-building, so I made sure that I took from Laing only what I needed, and relied on Shakespeare and events in the rehearsal room for the rest. The exercise was not about diagnosing Ophelia as a schizophrenic, but about gaining insight into the text. I started to hear the other characters’ words from Ophelia’s point of view, as traps and ambushes, and as means of controlling her mind.

‘To thine own self be true,’ Polonius advises Laertes as he sees him off on his travels, while in the same scene he tells Ophelia, ‘You do not understand yourself.’ Young men should learn to fend for themselves in life’s battles, gaining confidence through experience, whereas women must be kept in fear and ignorance of their very natures.

Ophelia submits to another battering from Polonius: ‘Do not believe his vows’, ‘Affection. Pooh. You speak like a green girl.’ He asks her, ‘Do you believe his tenders as you call them?’, and to Ophelia’s simple reply, ‘I do not know, my lord, what I should think,’ he answers, ‘Marry, I shall teach you, think yourself a baby.’ He does such a good job on her that by the end of the scene Ophelia has promised to reject Hamlet, send back all his letters and never speak to him again.

Other Shakespeare heroines have fought back under like circumstances. Jessica defies Shylock and runs off with Lorenzo. Rosalind, Imogen and Julia risk punishment and banishment in search of true love, but a lifetime of indoctrination, together with a particularly impressionable nature, ensures that Ophelia cannot resist.

From that moment on she puts herself entirely in her father’s hands. Having been terrified by an encounter with the seemingly deranged Hamlet, rather than try to talk to him she rushes to her father and blurts out the whole story. Polonius in his turn reports everything back to the King, and all this culminates in the plot to test Hamlet’s madness in which Ophelia is quite wittingly used as bait. Guilt, love, duty and, above all, terror confound her. Given this state of affairs, imagine the following exchanges from Ophelia’s point of view.

Ophelia offers to return Hamlet’s gifts.

HAMLET: I never gave you aught.

OPHELIA: My honoured lord, you know right well you did.

(Which one of them is going crazy?)

. . .

HAMLET: Are you honest?

OPHELIA: My lord?

HAMLET: Are you fair?

OPHELIA: What means your lordship?

HAMLET: That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.

OPHELIA: Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?

(Holding her own pretty well; but then . . .)

HAMLET: Ay, truly. For the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.