ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with its searching meta-theatrical moments, mysterious player’s speech, inscrutable Gertrude, and mad Ophelia, vividly manifests the trope of the excessively grieving woman that we have already encountered in Shakespeare’s King John, Richard III, and Titus Andronicus, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and Webster’s The White Devil. In these plays grieving women are associated with the deleterious impulse for revenge and denounced by other characters, who, threatened by the public display of female grief, attempt to prevent or curtail it. Structurally, the mourning women are repeatedly distanced from those for whom they mourn, rendering their tears, however compelling or threatening, dramatically disjointed and excessive. As the dramas unfold, the women’s sorrow is eventually displaced, supplanted, or subsumed by a male mourner. The obsessive repetition of this pattern in Hamlet indicates that the ethos of female grief is one of the tragedy’s central concerns. Peter Sacks argues that the play moves “toward a position that seems to restore the fabric of belief and to renew the power of a mourner’s words” (89). But Sacks focuses only on the words of the male mourners. The words of the female mourners in Hamlet are disturbed and disturbing. The focus of intense scrutiny, they are paradoxically both feared and dismissed. There are five representations of mourning women in the play: Hamlet’s description of his mother following his father’s corpse (1.2.138-51); the First Player’s description of Hecuba’ mourning over Priam (2.2.496-509); the Player Queen’ “passionate action” over her husband in the dumb show that precedes The Mousetrap (3.2.120-30); Ophelia’s mourning for Hamlet, the loss of Hamlet’s love, and the death of her father (3.1.151-62, 4.5.21-70, 4.5.157-200); and Gertrude’s pastoral elegy for Ophelia (4.7.141-58). Of equal significance is a moment of female mourning that is not represented. Hamlet interrupts The Mousetrap just prior to the Player Queen’s mourning over her dead husband. In each of these instances, the expression of female grief is contained in some way: it is denounced, dismissed, interrupted, silenced, portrayed as mad, or subsumed by another genre. The first three representations of female sorrow are heavily mediated. Gertrude’s mourning is reported by Hamlet, Hecuba’s grief is narrated by an actor, and the Player Queen’s sorrow upon finding her husband dead is rendered mute through the device of the dumb show. Hamlet succeeds in denouncing and
repressing female grief in the first half of the play. But in the second half of the play, the denouement is driven by women’s mourning. In a counter movement, lyric disrupts narrative, and the sorrowful voices of Ophelia and Gertrude, however muted by madness and courtly constraint, not only shape but interpret the play’s tragic dimensions. In this chapter I explore this repetitive pattern of interruptions and denunciations of female grief, arguing that these interventions rehearse the discursive practices of the reformers, manifesting cultural angst over England’s disrupted funerary rituals. Debates over the proper way to commemorate the dead echo debates over the ethical effects of tragedy. Moreover, via the First Player’s impersonation of tragic Hecuba, Shakespeare engages in an oblique dialogue with Sir Philip Sidney’s critique of tragedy in The Defence of Poetry. Shakespeare’s play, like Sidney’s defense, is preoccupied with the ethical effects of tragedy. Sidney defends tragedy for its ability to elicit tears of “commiseration,” using for his example Euripides’ Daughters of Troy, a play in which the entire action is comprised of women ritually lamenting for their dead. Hamlet, in contrast, reveals anxiety over both the portrayal of female mourning and the potentially debilitating effect of tears on the audience. The play’s ambivalence toward female grief and the feminizing dangers of tragedy manifests itself in Hamlet’s desire to define himself against grieving women, even as the play’s tragic score is sustained by their songs of sorrow.
