Ophelia's Plants and the Death of Violets

As many of us may, I begin the class with a film clip. Either (or both) of two late twentieth-century film versions of Hamlet will do, and the moment is Ophelia’s return to the stage in the second half of Act IV, scene v. In Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 feature, Helena Bonham Carter, eyes deep-sunken and haunting, distributes sticks and bones to the other players on the set. ¹ Six years later, in Kenneth Branagh’s detailed four-hour-long opus, Kate Winslet attends her own delusional tea-party and stares into the air in front of her with the audience remembering her earlier appearance in a Victorian strait-jacket. ² It is important that the students notice that the actor playing Ophelia does not hold the actual plants she names and that they discover that Zeffirelli and Branagh follow a century of critical editing that posits the “imagined” nature of these plants. ³ While Sir Laurence Olivier’s 1948 classic depicts Ophelia as a wild creature of nature and has her distribute at least silk replicas of the plants, these postmodern renditions take us away from the natural world and place us in the gothic decadence (Zeffirelli) and the cerebral whiteness (Branagh) of each director’s interpretive stylings. ⁴ These film adaptations tell us that how to represent Ophelia’s plants in her madness is a directorial decision as variable as where to place Hamlet at the beginning of Act III.