ABSTRACT
Did Gertrude drown Ophelia? To a Shakespearean, the question seems absurd, yet students and readers ask it repeatedly in class and online in fan-sites such as Shakespeare Geek, or in response to the amateur video artists who upload vers ions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which the hero’s vindictive mother drowns his innocent love. 1 It might be tempting to dismiss such attempts as crowd-sourced ignorance, but if we pay fan culture the compliment of taking it seriously, it can teach us something new about the plays and speeches that we think we know well. Moreover, as early as 1805 Shakespearean editor E. H. Seymour asked why Gertrude did not save Ophelia instead of watching her drown and listening to her old lauds or old tunes. 2 The young women (or users who self-identify as women online) who accuse Gertrude of murdering her potential daughter-in-law are responding to Gertrude’s characterization in the play as what we might call a culpable “ekphrast.” Analyzing Gertrude’s best-known and widely anthologized speech—her floral eulogy to the drowned Ophelia—and building on Laura Mulvey’s influential essay about the “male gaze” of the camera in classic Hollywood cinema, Martha Ronk argues that Gertrude occupies a male, ekphrastic subject-position and that she frames the dead girl as analogous to the subject of a painting, aestheticized, sanitized, objectified, and restrained into art, as she attributes overwhelmingly to the dead girl the quality that Mulvey calls “to-be-looked-at-ness.” 3 Ronk suggests that some readers encounter Gertrude’s speech as an admission of guilt—or at least, as a failure to save Ophelia—because the text establishes a distantly voyeuristic subject-position for the queen, one that evokes no “maternal intimacy” such as that later implied by Gertrude’s expressed wish to have cast flowers on Ophelia’s marriage-bed, rather than her grave. 4
