Shakespeare Headcanons

I think it’s very unlikely. It makes no narrative sense, I can’t even begin to imagine the motivation for such a thing (’I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife’ [4.7.233]!), and I really don’t think it stands up to textual evidence. I’ve certainly never heard any scholars suggest this, and a quick search on research databases brings up nothing either.

I do believe I know why it’s been suggested though. It’s because Gertrude is the one who reports Ophelia’s dead (and in great detail), isn’t it? It probably seems odd that she didn’t try to save her if she was watching it happen. 

The first thing to note (and I’ve said this before) is that, if there is anything significant that Shakespeare wants to communicate to the audience, he usually lets them know pretty explicitly. Yes, his language is subtle and contains many interesting suggestions, but something as big as one major character killing off another is not going to be passed on in a possible interpretation. 

You just can’t judge Shakespeare by the later conventions of the realistic novel. Unless relevant to the main plot, characters don’t tend to have a backstory or even a life off-stage. It’s basically irrelevant to ask what a character was or wasn’t doing at a particular time if the text doesn’t mention it. For similar reasons, while many of Shakespeare’s characters are amazingly vivid, they don’t necessarily have a consistent character, and they can step out of character to deliver speeches required by the play. This is why there are often speeches that go beyond the scope of the character speaking them (like a lots of Shylocks lines in The Merchant of Venice), or the needs of the play (such as Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet, or Prospero’s speech in The Tempest about the ‘insubstantial pageant’ [4.1.155] of a world we live in).

Shakespeare tends to use extended poetic imagery for things that can’t be depicted so that the audience can imagine it instead, and he sometimes gives such speeches to people who can’t possibly have seen what they’re describing (like Edgars’ ‘Dover Cliff’ speech in King Lear). In Gertrude’s case, her speech serves as an important narrative device and a poetic elegy for Ophelia. Ophelia’s death needs to be reported, partly because it can’t be performed, and partly because exactly what happened needs to remain unclear (more on this below). Gertrude needn’t have seen what she’s describing. Her report reads like a set-piece which could be spoken by anyone: none of it is in first-person, it doesn’t contain her reactions, and even though it’s extremely detailed, there’s no indication that what Gertrude is saying is the account of a first-hand witness.

But there may be another reason why the Queen is so descriptive, especially if her account is a fleshed out story rather than an eyewitness account: she might be trying to compensate for something. She emphasises the accidental nature of Ophelia’s death and supplies the details to make the story and image realistic (so realistic that it’s one of the most popular painted scenes in all Shakespeare). She is the first to report the incident, and she shapes the view of her listeners (Claudius, Laertes and the audience). From Gertrude’s narrative, it certainly sounds like an accident, and indeed, from all the emphasis on nature and flowers, an entirely natural accident. But we find out in the scene immediately following that the death was ‘doubtful’ (5.1.209), a suspected suicide (imagine if that was the first you heard of her death?) – it becomes clear what Gertrude was trying to hide in her flowery speech: not guilt, but shame. If the Queen’s speech is unnatural, then it’s because it’s a practised speech, like a defence lawyer’s. It’s very likely that this testimony and the queen’s position is responsible for the ‘great command’ that countermanded the fact that Ophelia should have been buried in ‘ground unsanctified’ (5.1.217-8). If anything, it’s a case of women standing up for other women, not of Gertrude killing off Ophelia! 

You can argue and believe what you like, of course, but the idea that Gertrude killed Ophelia seems more of a conspiracy than a reading of the play, and it may add unnecessary complications to a play that already has plenty of legitimate complications.

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John Cawse painted this Shakespeare illustration—Falstaff and the Recruits, From “Henry IV, Part II"—in around 1818.

It depicts a scene from the middle of Henry IV, Part II in which Falstaff selects men to bring with him to war, mainly by making fun of their names.

Cawse conflates two moments in the scene—the two most suitable-looking men are already paying Bardolph to let them out of serving, while Falstaff still chooses amongst the others.

The man Falstaff currently interrogates is Feeble, a women’s tailor (to judge by his shears). Though he initially chooses to conscript Feeble, Falstaff will ultimately turn him away (along with all but the sorriest of the lot on offer), saying "for a retreat; how swiftly will this Feeble the woman’s tailor run off!”

But the theatergoer has just heard what Falstaff hasn't—namely, Feeble (in response to the possibility of buying his way out of service) presenting the following beautifully high-minded, if roughly worded, monologue:

“[A] man can die but once: we owe God a death: I’ll ne'er bear a base mind: an’t be my destiny, so; an’t be not, so: no man is too good to serve’s prince; and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”

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Sir Frederic Leighton painted The Feigned Death of Juliet between 1856 and 1858.

Juliet’s mother leans over her apparently lifeless body, while her father reaches unseeingly backwards—perhaps to comfort Paris, who arrived (musicians in tow) expecting to marry the woman he has just found dead. The rose crown he wears matches that on the table beside Juliet, another artifact of their (now foiled) wedding. The friar, though, catches Paris’ arm with a guardedly knowing expression—appropriate to his role as mastermind of Juliet’s faked death.

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Washington Allston, an American artist trained in England, painted Hermia and Helena sometime before 1818.

Their dress is deliberately ambiguous: they wear the high empire waists and curled hair of the Regency, but their slashed sleeves, squared necklines, and dark fabrics are more akin to nineteenth-century depictions of Medieval and Renaissance style.

ideas for redoing “a midsummer night’s dream”, but it’s about four people who crash land a spaceship on a strange planet at the exact same time that a traveling acting troupe does the exact same thing 

UNOFFICIAL TYPING BY: anonymous

Introverted Feeling (Fi): Hamlet as a character constantly stuck in a moral dilemma of how feels at the present moment. Sentiment is everything for Hamlet, best displayed at how grieved he was at the death of his hero father, showing no hesitation to burst out at court at his disgust of his mother marrying his uncle. Hamlet’s depth of feeling is also shown in his early love to Ophelia, regardless of his actions to her later on. Throughout the play, Hamlet becomes increasingly self-involved as his fake madness chips away at his melancholic soul. Hamlet’s extensive moralizing stems not from it effects on others, but rather his individual reaction and judgment to the sequence of events that befall him. The “To-Be or Not to Be” speech, one of the most famous in the entire literary canon, is a perfect example of internal feeling, as he weighs the benefits and shortfalls of mortality and whether life is at all worth living. While not a trait of all Fi doms, self-destructive moralizing is a notorious side effect of unheathly internal feeling.

Extroverted Intuition (Ne): Essayist William Hazlitt words it best when regarding Hamlet, he titles him, “He (Hamlet) is the prince of philosophical speculators” and this could very well be his highly developed intuition, manifesting in an excessive use of his imaginary faculties. Aside from alluding to Greek Myth more than any other character, Hamlet expresses a constant interest in potential. When told of his father’s ghost, Hamlet barely hesitates, as he had be seeing him constantly in his mind’s eye, the act of making it actual was too intriguing to doubt. Elsewhere in his love of theatre and aimless mind, Hamlet’s intuition constantly is in the clouds, dreams, and mythology.

Introverted Sensing (Si): When not lost in philosophical speculation, Hamlet is often dwelling on past images, usually glossed with the rosy glasses of Fi nostalgia. Before even catching wind of his father’s ghost, Hamlet is stuck in a loop of sentiment and anger towards his memory and the present state of affairs. The strongest example comes in the famous graveyard scene, when looking at the skull of his childhood jester, Hamlet muses into the past with immense detail, serving as a vessel of contemplating his own mortality.