Contents
Introduction ... 3 Chapter I – Theoretical Framework ... 7 Chapter II – “How should I your true love know?” Silencing and Exploiting Ophelia’s Character through Her Songs of Madness ... 17 Chapter III - “That Song Tonight will not go from My Mind”: Desdemona’s Song of Sadness in Othello 33 Chapter IV - “Where should this music be? I’ th’ air, or th’ earth?” Dispersed Songs Sung by the
Genderfluid Spirit Ariel in The Tempest ... 50 Conclusion ... 62 Works cited ... 65
Introduction
This thesis explores women singing in three of William Shakespeare’s plays, both in the original texts and in recent film adaptations of these plays. The songs provide the female characters with a chance to express their inner feelings and their worries concerning their position in the world of the play. I shall argue, however, that directors of contemporary film adaptations have omitted many lines and songs of the singing female characters in Hamlet (1602), Othello (1604) and The Tempest (1611), and in doing so have repeated a silencing of the woman’s voice that was endemic in early modern England
It has long been recognised that “Shakespeare and The King’s Men were responding to a rising interest in dramatic music and song” and that, as a result, some of his characters had to perform a song on stage (Fuller 61). The hiring of the musical Robert Arnim around 1600 and competition with the boys’ companies of St. Pauls (where many of the players were also choristers) strengthened this engagement with song. As Richard von Ende points out, “[t]he assignment of songs to various characters of the plays had social and psychological implications … [because] [t]he custom of the Elizabethan era did not permit a person of gentle birth to sing” (49). In connection to this, David Lindley notes that “[t]hose who sing directly for “themselves” are generally drunk, mad, in their dotage, or socially subversive” (8). However, the act of singing enables a character to express their feelings and thoughts, both to the audience and the other characters on stage at the time of performance. In other words, it allows the character who performs a song to have a voice.
A struggle between women and the patriarchal dominance of men can be seen at work both in Shakespeare’s time and in post-war cinema. Valerie Traub notes that “the pressure of women pushing against patriarchal strictures can be felt throughout Shakespearean drama” (131). Moreover, in Shakespeare’s time, “England was a culture of contradictions, with official ideology often challenged by actual social practice. Competing versions of
masculinity and femininity vied for dominance, in a social contestation that is recorded by Shakespeare's plays” (Traub 131). However, other researchers, such as Carol Cook, have demonstrated that men will always be the dominant sex at the end of Shakespeare’s plays. Additionally, female characters are sometimes mocked through songs sung by men, whereas the songs that women sing in Shakespeare plays are generally sung out of madness or sorrow. Although these vocal performances allow women to have a voice in the play, some film adaptions have changed stage directions or cut out songs sung by women all together. As a result, women in these performances can become marginalized and silenced. In my thesis I shall focus on the portrayal of singing women in both Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies, as well as in the relevant film adaptions. I shall approach the adaptions from the perspective of contemporary film adaption theorists, such as Brian Mcfarlane and Linda Hutcheon, but also with regards to research on female singers by Jacquelyn Fox-Good and Linda Phyllis Austern.
The differences between film adaptation and the original written text expose both rifts and continuities in the representation of women and of ‘femininity’. Since audiences may rather watch the film adaption of a play instead of reading its script, they will gain a different understanding of the story, due to the changes directors and actors make. Laury Magnus underscores this by explaining that “[just] as Shakespeare’s dramatic words, written for stage performance in early modern England, have had a formative relation to the English language, so in our times, Shakespeare on screen has both reflected and formed the contemporary consciousness of audiences around the globe” (474).
I shall argue, however, that in spite of the fact that Shakespeare has provided the female characters in his plays with songs to express their feelings, these female characters are not treated in the same way as are the men in the plays. Rather, most of the female characters in contemporary film adaptations are silenced, as their lines and scenes are excised, and their
bodies are exploited for more profit. To support my argument, I have chosen three different plays, Othello, Hamlet and The Tempest, because these plays include a song sung by a female character, or in the case of The Tempest a genderfluid or ‘unsexed’ character, in both the original play texts and in film adaptions. In Othello, I shall focus on Desdemona who
performs “The Willow Song” before going to bed. I shall analyse Ophelia’s songs of madness in Hamlet. Furthermore, I shall explore Ariel’s songs in The Tempest. For my analysis I shall compare the text of these plays by Shakespeare with two film adaptions from the following directors. I shall examine Lawrence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) to compare the presentation of Ophelia’s song. For Shakespeare’s Othello I shall investigate the adaptations by Orson Welles (1951), John Dexter and Burge and Oliver Parker (1995).
Finally, I shall analyse Derek Jarman’s The Tempest (1979) and Julie Taymor’s version of the play (2010).
According to Russell Jackson, it is important to take into consideration that “films exist both in their own time and for years afterwards, and that like dramatic scripts, their effect on viewers and readers changes with their age” (“Shakespeare and Cinema” 231). I have therefore chosen to examine film adaptions from different periods of time and directed by different people. As pointed out by Jackson, “the images and sounds – the visions – that Shakespeare has provoked in film-makers will remain potent … and will continue to imprint themselves on the way viewers perceive not only other Shakespeare films, but also their play-script originals” (“Shakespeare and Cinema” 231). With my research it is my aim to
contribute to the discussion of the portrayal of women who perform a song in Shakespeare’s plays and the relevant film adaptions.
This thesis consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, I shall examine the gender conventions in Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies in relation to feminist theory and film adaption theory. These theories shall act as the basis of the methodology employed in the
analyses in the following chapters. In the second chapter, I shall analyse Ophelia’s songs of madness in Hamlet. In the third chapter I focus on Desdemona’s song of sadness in Othello. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I explore Ariel’s androgyne character and the spirit’s songs. The chapters that are focused on the songs and the women who sing them will be introduced by an analysis of the scenes in question, using techniques derived from close-reading. After this analysis, I shall examine how the song is adapted in each relevant film adaption.
Chapter I – Theoretical Framework
In 2019 approximately 1,419 films are credited to the writings of William Shakespeare. These numbers indicate that Shakespeare is the most filmed author ever in any language (Voigts-Virchow 92). Linda Hutcheon points out that: “[a]daptations are obviously not new to our time; Shakespeare transferred his culture’s stories from page to stage and made them available to a whole new audience” (2). However, “[i]n writing for the mainstream cinema it is axiomatic that dialogue should be kept to a minimum”, because “a screenplay is a story told in pictures” (Jackson “Playscript to Screenplay” 16; Field; 56). Since Shakespeare’s plays are first and foremost verse dramas, this complicates the creation of adaptations. In order to understand the complexity of adaptation and to properly analyse the film adaptations in the next chapters, I shall analyse Hutcheon’s and Brian McFarlane theories on adaptation. Additionally, I will examine how Valerie Traub applies feminist literary criticism to
Shakespeare and how her discoveries relate to the way women are depicted in film adaptations.
In her book A Theory of Adaptation (2012), Hutcheon describes adaptations as having a double nature, a fact which does not mean that an adaptation should be analysed on the basis of how close it is to the original text. To describe a work as an adaptation is to acknowledge its relationship to another source or sources (Hutcheon 6). Sarah Cardwell suggests that adaptation studies are therefore generally comparative studies (9). However, this does not mean that “adaptations are not also autonomous works that can be interpreted and valued as such” (Hutcheon 6). In this way, the quality of a film adaptation should not only be measured by its fidelity to the original source. McFarlane takes this even further, as he suggests that fidelity “to the original text (however distinguished) is a wholly
reading is “a highly individual act of cognition and interpretation”, it is impossible for directors to create a work that suits each personal reading of the text in question (15). Directors do not simply aim to duplicate the original source on screen; their adaptations can also possibly figure to “consume and erase the memory of the adapted text or to call it into question” (Hutcheon 7). Others are interested “in how far works of earlier centuries might be made to seem relevant to later generations in settings and times far removed from those in which they had their origins” (Mcfarlane 17).
Stating that adaptations cannot be defined by their original sources raises the question of what the proper way of describing adaptations is. Hutcheon distinguishes three kinds of adaptation. First, it is “[a]n acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works” (8). This can involve different means of transposition, such as another frame or a shift in focalisation. Second, Hutcheon describes adaptations as a reinterpretation, framed through a creative process. The creation of adaptations “always involve[s] both (re-)interpretation and then (re-)creation” (8). Finally, Hutcheon suggests that an adaptation is “[a]n extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work” (8). The experience of adaptations works through the memory of other works; people watch a film or hear certain music that reminds them of something else. As people should not focus on the fidelity of the adaptation, it is more important to focus on “the intricate interaction of mise-en-scène (what is visibly there in the frame at any given moment), the editing (how one shot of a film is joined-to/separated-from the next) and sound (diegetic or non-diegetic, musical or otherwise)” (Mcfarlane 16).
One thing that films and literary works have in common is narrative. Paradoxically, however, what contrasts films and literary works is precisely the mode of narration.
According to Mcfarlane, narrative is “a series of events … connected by virtue of their involving a continuing set of characters” (19). Narration, on the other hand, can be described as “all the means by which the narrative has been put before reader or viewer” (19). Whereas
both films and written works “create ‘worlds and lives’ in more amplitude and with potentially more regard for representational realism in their detail than the other literary forms” (20), they differ in the means of achieving this creation. Hutcheon suggests that a potent contrast between playscripts and films is the ability easily to skip or re-read texts, which a book allows its reader. Contrastingly, “with the move to the mode of showing, as in film and stage adaptations, [people] are caught in an unrelenting, forward-driving story” (Hutcheon 23). Some researchers, such as W.J.T. Mitchell, argue that “communicative, expressive acts, narration, argument, description, exposition and other so-called ‘speech acts’ are not medium-specific” (Mitchell 160). Hutcheon suggests, however, that “[t]elling a story in words, either orally or on paper, is never the same as showing it visually and aurally in any of the many performance media available” (23). Although from a formalist-structuralist perspective film and novels can be both considered as ‘fixed’ in the sense that they are recorded, Julie Sanders argues for the fluidity of film because directors can “take a text from one genre and deliver it to new audiences by means of the aesthetic conventions of an entirely different generic process” (20).
The problem with creating adaptations is that there are, generally, too many words. Although it depends on the play, in many cases until a play shifts from written work to the stage it only evolves around talking with an occasional stage direction. Syd Field, however, insists that a film is a story told through succeeding images, “and there will always be some kind of problem when you tell the story through words, and not pictures” (56-57). This is not to say that actors should not speak in movies, but rather that images play a determining role when it comes to film. Jackson points out that “[a]iming for the ‘ideal’ running time of less than two hours, most Shakespeare films have used no more than 25-30 per cent of the
original text” (“Playscript to Screenplay” 16). In other words, when it comes to films, actions should speak louder than words. Mcfarlane points out that “[i]t is not, however, a matter of
talk per se that is a problem to film: the quality of the talk is one obvious criterion one would want to apply, but also how it is delivered, … shot, … and what it reveals” (25).In other words, there can be problems with the artificial ways in which conversations play out on film due to the stylised and rhetorical nature of Shakespeare’s poetic drama. Dialogue is thus not “necessarily the enemy of the “cinematic”; it is only so if used in conjunction with that inferior filmmaking which disregards the other strategies available to the filmmaker” (Mcfarlane 25). Additionally, “adapters are more likely not only to abbreviate dialogue, but to use it outside the framework provided by the original” (Jackson “Playscript to Screenplay” 19).
Although some theories of adaptation suggest that the story-line determines what should be transposed, Hutcheon argues that there are three “different modes of engagement – narrating, performing, or interacting” (10). Besides a story-line, directors can choose different elements of a source to adapt, such as “its themes, events, worlds, characters, motivations, points of view, consequences, contexts, symbols, imagery, and so on” (Hutcheon 10). Millicent Marcus distinguishes two separate sides on this issue: “either a story can exist independently of any embodiment in any particular signifying system or, on the contrary, it cannot he considered separately from its material mode of mediation” (Marcus in Hutcheon 10). Gaudreault and Marion, however, claim that “although the latter is obviously true for the audience, whose members experience the story in a particular material form, the various elements of the story can be and are considered separately by adapters and by theorists” (45).
As fidelity should not be the criterion on which to measure the quality of an adaption, and because adapters enjoy a great freedom of choice on what to adapt exactly and how, directors can give new directions to the classical Shakespeare plays. This allows adapters to give women a different status in film adaptations, for instance by making them more
Shakespeare’s words”, in the sense that a voyeuristic interest in the female body has become ever more central to the experience of cinema (Rutter “Women on Film” 247). This ties in with Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze, which will be discussed later in this chapter. Consequently, film adaptations have responded to commercial demands and to the privileging of the gaze in regards to film by showing more of the female body. As such, “it
coincidentally redistributes the balance of power between men’s and women’s roles: not only are there more women in Shakespeare films than playtexts but they have much more to perform” in contemporary adaptations (247). As this may be the case for some scenes and characters in film adaptations, many lines and songs of female characters are omitted from film adaptations, as I shall argue in the next chapters of this thesis.
In the late sixteenth century, households were generally patriarchal. Amussen explains that “as wives were subject to their husbands, so women were subject to men, whose
authority was sustained informally through culture, custom and differences in education, and more formally through the law” (3). Therefore, what Shakespeare knew and wrote about, was a resolutely hierarchical culture, “with women, no matter what their wealth or rank,
theoretically under the rule of men” (Traub 130). In spite of the fact that England was ruled by a female, Elizabeth I, “the majority of women found their access to the public sphere decreasing, as the economic roles they played in the late medieval period contracted” (Traub 130). Similar to how women were not allowed to sing in public or to perform on stage, women were expected to keep their bodies enclosed (Traub 131). The notion of an enclosed female body refers to “a woman’s closed genitals, closed mouth, and her enclosure within the home” (Stallybrass in Traub 131). Accordingly, Stephen Orgel points out that in the
Renaissance, “for a woman to display herself on stage was to violate all the canons of female modesty and chastity” (226). Where Shakespeare’s acting company, the King’s Men, were bound to use male cross-dressers for the female roles, film adapters enjoy the liberty to use
female actors. Through their performances they can give the female characters the voices that Shakespeare once had envisioned for them. Since Shakespeare’s plays almost always consist of a disruption of the social hierarchy, it experiments with the implications of men and women behaving in contrast to the conventions of their gender. However, as Traub argues, “[t]he conclusions of the plays … tend to restore the social order. And because chaos is often expressed as an inversion of gender hierarchy, the reconstruction of order tends to reinstate masculine authority” (132). Lynda Boose supports this, as she observes that women in Shakespeare’s plays are “invariably qualified by [his] overriding conviction that social
harmony requires male control” (721). In other words, the female characters in Shakespeare’s plays try to become the more dominant sex, or at least equal to men, through the chaos that is created, but at the end of each play men restore their dominant place in the hierarchy.
In spite of the fact that women are allowed to perform on stage and in films, their social position in society is still mirrored in adaptations, for instance through mise-en-scène. Carol Chillington Rutter points out that “film returns again and again to certain motifs … women framed; … dressing up and dressing down; women seeing themselves in mirrors, both literal and figurative” (“Women on Film” 247). Through editing, directors of film adaptations can determine the ways women are represented. Robert Stam claims that “[i]n a multitrack medium, everything can convey point of view: camera angle, focal length, music,
mise-en-scène, performance, or costume” (Stam in Hutcheon 55). Mulvey supports this, as she argues
that “[p]laying on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing) cinematic codes create a gaze” (17). In films, women are generally depicted from a male-perspective, or according to Mulvey’s concept, a “male-gaze” (11). This gaze provides a “woman-object through a male gaze that projects his own fantasy on the female figure in two ways – voyeuristic (which sees the rebel woman as temptress and prostitute) or fetishist (the
docile and redeeming woman represented as the Virgin Mary” (Sassatelli 124). These two ideas of the depiction of women correspond to the notions that the male characters of
Shakespeare’s plays share. Although women were “considered to be more lustful than men” (Traub 129), they were expected to be silent and, above all, chaste. The difference is,
however, that the audience perceives a play differently on stage or by reading the playscript in comparison to watching a film adaptation on screen. When it comes to film, the director decides from which angle spectators will watch, whereas a theatre audience can decide where to look to a certain extent.
Another telling difference between theatre and cinema lies in the contrasting ways in which the characters on stage and on screen are perceived by the audience. Rosenkrantz argues that, to an audience, characters of a theatre production are perceived as “objects of mental opposition” because of their true presence, whereas characters on screen are “objects of identification” (Rosenkrantz in Bazin 420). As a result, film audiences are more likely truly to identify with a character in a film, whereas characters on stage are identified as actors who are performing in a play by a theatre audience. The highly influential critic, André Bazin points out that theatre relies on the virtue of the audience’s “participation in a theatrical action across the footlights and as it were under the protection of their censorship” (422). However, when it comes to cinema the audience watches “a spectacle that is unaware of [their] existence” (422). Leo Braudy underscores Bazin’s point of view, and develops this concept further as he argues that “[f]ilms add what is impossible in the group situation of the stage … a sense of the mystery inside character, the strange core of connection with the face and body the audience comes to know so well, the sense of an individuality that can never be totally expressed in words or action” (430). According to film theorists at least, theatre production is unable to accomplish the same, as the audience will always be conscious of the fact that the actors are merely a portrayal of their characters.
In spite of the fact that the plot of most Shakespeare plays end with a restored early modern hierarchy, adapters have the liberty to differ in how they depict female characters. Mark Burnett and Ramona Wray argue that “the means whereby modern-language adaptation is capable of pushing into productive proximity early modern constructions of gender and twenty-first-century reflections upon life-work balance and male-female relations” is particularly distinctive in a selection of adaptations from the twenty-first century (11). In Shakespeare’s plays Othello, Hamlet, and The Tempest the female characters Desdemona, Ophelia, and the genderfluid spirit Ariel, get a voice through the songs they have to perform. Additionally, in Othello and Hamlet the moment of singing is, to some degree, also a moment in which the individual voice of the female character is also beleaguered or under threat. The fact that they have the ability to have their voices heard also gives them the chance to become more dominant within the social order. Paul Faber points out that “Shakespeare’s audience would have been shocked simply by the ‘public’ nature” of these performances (60). To perform a song was “contrary to all sense of propriety for an Elizabethan gentlewoman” (Sternfeld 54). This links to Bruce Johnson’s argument that “Shakespeare is using popular music … to evoke shared memories, but in ways that suggest the disruption of the order they represented … [T]hey would thus carry associations for the audience that would be essential in their contribution to meaning and affect” (262). Although the audience would recognise the music and songs that the female characters perform, it disrupts the order as the female characters are not meant to perform those songs in public, or in Ophelia’s case, in front of the Court.
Some of the anxiety generated around singing females was based on the fact that songs and music express feelings. Fox-Good points out that “[s]uch feeling as music is expressive of is affiliated, especially in the Renaissance, with specifically sexual feeling, desire, eroticism, the body” (245). Austern mentions that because women were associated
with Mary and with Eve they were regarded as both the agents of “salvation and destruction”; in the same way music was associated with divine ecstasy and lust (420). Therefore, female performers were regarded “with profound suspicion, as moralists claimed that listening to their songs could produce effeminacy and irrationality” (Eubanks Winkler 302). In 1586 The
Praise of Musicke was published as a defence against Puritan ideas on music. However, in
spite of the fact that The Praise of Musicke argued for the importance of musical education for both sexes in the sixteenth century, in practice women were not allowed to employ any musical professions including in church or the theatre (Austern 428). Although women were not supposed to make music or perform female musicians are nonetheless portrayed in sixteenth and seventeenth century paintings. These portraits “served as political propaganda … They helped to solidify or advance the social status of artists, sitters and owners alike” (Austern in James 146). However, many of these portraits that feature women musicians are Italian in origin. In the sixteenth century, where mores were different, Italy did not forbid women to perform and as Ann Rosalind Jones points out, Italy signified “another country, a country of others, constructed through a lens of voyeuristic curiosity through which writers and their audiences explored what was forbidden in their own culture” (101). In fact,
Shakespeare himself was no stranger to this cultural curiosity, as many of his plays are staged in Italy or derive from Italian sources.
As fidelity is not supposed to be the measure of the quality of an adaptation, directors and female actors have the chance to change the status of the vocal performances of women in Shakespeare plays. However, as I argue in this thesis, many directors have chosen to silence the female characters in their film adaptations even more or exploit their bodies for more profit. In the succeeding chapters I analyse how Ophelia, Desdemona and Ariel are depicted when they perform their songs in film adaptations made by different directors in
different periods of time. The next chapter will focus on Ophelia’s songs of madness and how Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh have depicted their version of Ophelia.
Chapter II – “How should I your true love know?”: Silencing and
Exploiting Ophelia’s Character through Her Songs of Madness
After Hamlet accidentally murders Ophelia’s father, Polonius, Ophelia enters a state of madness, a state of mind that manifests itself through the songs she sings in Act IV, scene V. In this chapter, I shall analyse the several songs Ophelia sings in this scene. First, I will examine the songs in Shakespeare’s written work Hamlet, and the possible reasons that prompt her to sing her songs. After this analysis, I shall compare and contrast the ways in which Ophelia is depicted in the film adaptations by Laurence Olivier (1948), and Kenneth Branagh (1996).Many critics have joined in the debate about the reason for Ophelia’s madness, which remains a subject about which little is settled. As pointed out by Carroll Camden, Ophelia, “[a]s a minor personage of the tragedy” has left many critics questioning her role in the play, and the reason for her madness, which in part is to contrast with Hamlet’s ‘faked’ madness (247). In fact, Carol Thomas Neely argues that “Ophelia in her mad scenes serves as a double for Hamlet during his absence from Denmark and from the play. His madness is in every way contrasted with hers … to emphasize the difference between feigned and actual madness” (53-54). Many scholars, such as John Draper and Roderick Benedix, suggest that Ophelia’s state of mind is due to the death of her father. According to Draper, the madness “comes about … because that father, whom she loved so dearly, came to a sudden and shocking end” (61). Benedix supports this view, as he states that Polonius’ death “is the cause of Ophelia’s madness” (Benedix in Camden 247). He remarks, however, that “[n]o girl becomes insane because her father dies, least of all Ophelia” which would imply that there is another reason for Ophelia’s madness (Benedix in Camden 248). Indeed, Peter Seng suggests that “[t]here can be little doubt that a partial cause is the death of her father … but the major cause must be laid to her loss of Hamlet” (151). Similarly, Camden argues that “it is more ‘the pangs of
despiz’d love’ which cause her tragic fate than the death of Polonius” (248). Camden is hinting at the way Hamlet rejects Ophelia in Act III, when he discovers that she is spying on him. After telling her that he has never loved her (III.i.129), he bids her farewell and leaves Ophelia feeling like the “most deject[ed] and wretched” of all ladies (III.i.169). Whether Ophelia’s madness arises from the death of her father or because of her rejection, both suggested reasons involve patriarchal pressure; both the pressure of Polonius in his role as Ophelia’s father and of Hamlet as a lover could be regarded as the instigators of Ophelia’s madness.
The public stage of the Renaissance instructed the audience about madness and its symptoms. Neely points out that through representation of “both madness and the process of reading madness”, audiences were taught “how to identity and respond to it” (49). Through the course of a play the audience would learn to distinguish those who faked madness, such as Hamlet, and those who were truly mad, such as is the case with Ophelia. In Shakespeare’s time the mad are thought to be “beside themselves; they are, like Ophelia, ‘divided from [themselves and their] fair judgement’ (Hamlet 4.5.86) so their discourse is not entirely their own. But the voices that speak through them are not … supernatural voices, but gendered human ones” (Neely 50). Before Ophelia starts singing her songs it is a gentleman who describes her state. He informs Queen Gertrude that Ophelia “is importunate, indeed distract: / Her mood will needs be pitied” (IV.v.3). Moreover, the Gentleman adds that Ophelia “speaks much of her father; says she hears / There’s tricks i’ the world; and hems, and beats her heart; / Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt, / That carry but half sense (IV.v.5-7). Ophelia’s speech as explained by the gentleman acts as the first sign of her madness. Neely points out that: “Ophelia’s alienated discourse invites a psychological, thematic, and gendered interpretation. Although it partly adapts spiritual formula to a secular, psychological context, there is no doubt that her madness is natural” (51). As I shall argue in
this chapter, Ophelia’s songs of madness provide her with a voice to express her inner thoughts, although at the same time, the content of the songs sexualise her character.
Act IV, scene v illustrates Ophelia’s madness in a number of ways. According to Frederick Sternfeld, the fact that Ophelia sings her songs in front of the Court of Denmark is peculiar behaviour and “contrary to all sense of propriety for an Elizabethan gentlewoman – or man” (54). In this way, Ophelia’s vocal performance is already in itself an indication of her madness. The audiences of Shakespeare’s time would have understood that “it is a symptom of Ophelia’s derangement that she sings before an assembly of the Court without being encouraged to do so” (Sternfeld 55). Johnson supports this, as he argues that “[w]hile musical skills were desirable, the unsolicited public singing of songs by the aristocracy was unbefitting persons of rank and likely to erode social distinctions” (262). Upper-class women were, however, allowed to perform in court masques, where an anomalous exception
regarding the rule of female performance. Furthermore, Johnson adds that the songs Ophelia sings are “mixtures of disparate genres and non-song. Laments are mixed with nonsense lines usually associated with light-hearted ‘may time’ popular songs” (262). In her state of
madness Ophelia “reverts to the songs a nurse may have taught her; not the aristocratic ayre, but crude songs of the common folk” (Sternfeld 65). The sixteenth and seventeenth century developed a fascination for abnormalities and especially lunacy or insanity. As it was a theme explored in both theatre and literature it grew in popularity and mad songs were composed and became a new and dynamic genre. Rebecca Lister suggests that: “mad songs have a definite poetic, dramatic, and musically common features, and in this way, could be considered a type of sub-genre in the English song repertoire” (5). In a way, Ophelia’s snatches of song powerfully contributed to this development.
Discussing particular moments from Shakespeare’s Hamlet is often to some extent complicated by the instability of the text, with its two different quartos and its Folio version.
After the publication of the play many cheap copies were made, which resulted in different versions of the play. Gertrude commands Horatio to bring Ophelia in, which he does. Notably, the Second Quatro of Hamlet only provides the stage direction ‘enter Ophelia’ which leaves room for interpretation. However, the first Quarto directs: “Enter Ofelia playing on a lute, and her hair down, singing” (Sternfeld 63). As a pirated copy, perhaps constructed from the memories of actors, stage directions are often fuller in a bad quarto, where the recalling of how things were actually staged is more likely to appear in the text itself. For this reason, most editors use the Second Quarto in combination with the Folio, whereas the First Quatro is sometimes relied on for detailed stage directions (Thompson).
After Ophelia enters the scene, and before singing her first song, she questions: “Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?” (IV.v.26). Camden suggests that “she is not talking of her father here, since the words fit neither what we know of Polonius nor what a girl would say of a father who fails to understand her” (250). In this way, it is Hamlet who Ophelia addresses, which also indicates that the first song is about Hamlet. Ophelia sings:
How should I your true love know From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff,
And his sandal shoon. (IV.v.23-27)
It can be stated that a daughter would not call her father her true love. It is, therefore, apparent that Hamlet is the topic of the first stanza of Ophelia’s song. The first line can also be considered as a question to herself. In this way, Ophelia addresses herself as though she were another person. As such, Ophelia asks herself how she can distinguish real love from other types of love after Hamlet’s rejection. Sternfeld points out that the first stanza of Ophelia’s song “is a variant of the old Walsingham song” (57). According to Fiona Benson, “Shakespeare makes Ophelia a practitioner of the ballads as well as a ballad character, and in
doing so demonstrates a process of feminization, by which the ballad material available is modified to fit a female situation” (83). In other words, among other layers of meaning, Ophelia adapts an already existing song and makes it personal by referring to herself in the first-person in line 23. The next stanzas, however, are not part of this traditional verse and change the subject of her song from love to death:
He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf, At his heels a stone.
…
White his shroud as the mountain snow, …
Larded with sweet flowers Which bewept the grave did go With true-love showers. (IV.v.34-45)
Although Ophelia does offer any explanation for the lyrics, they could be linked to the sudden death of her father, Polonius. As such, she has shifted from evoking Hamlet to evoking her father who has been murdered by the very man with whom she is in love. Camden, however, suggests that the last stanzas could also be linked to Hamlet, as he “is “dead and gone” since he is dead and gone for her” (252). The fact that she is interrupted several times by Gertrude could add to her confusion of Polonius and Hamlet. Additionally, it could also be possible that Ophelia is simply too mad to distinguish the loss of her father and the loss of her lover, and as a result mixes the two men up in her song. Therefore, some Oedipal tension can be detected here. There has been much research into Freud’s Oedipal complex in relation to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, partly because Freud mentions the play in one
of his letters in which he communicated his theory. It suggests that Hamlet is divided
between the want for revenge and his guilt. Martin Bergmann points out that “Polonius … is the only father portrayed in Hamlet, and Shakespeare spares no effort to convince us that he is a ridiculous man giving his children pompous advice” (400). Consistently her father and her king dominate and coerce Ophelia. Moreover, Hamlet’s cruel treatment and her father’s death drive her mad. In fact, Ernest Jones who famously explored the Oedipus complex in relation to Hamlet in further detail, directly inspired Olivier’s Hamlet. This particular adaptation will be discussed later in this chapter. Peter Donaldson argues that the intimate scenes between Olivier as Hamlet and Eileen Herlie as Gertrude suggest an “Oedipal malaise” (22). Additionally, according to Jones, Hamlet’s course of action “can lead to no other end than to his own ruin and, incidentally, to that of his uncle” (88). Some have argued that Olivier’s athletic acting style derives from the influence of Jones’s theory of Hamlet’s self-destructive behaviour (Donaldson 24).
In addition to the fact that Ophelia’s vocal performance indicates her madness, the topic of her second song also suggests the questionable state of her mind. The lines of her song “are morally indecorous, especially in the mouth of a young woman of Ophelia’s rank, in that many of them deal with extramarital affairs” (Sternfeld 57). In the first stanza of Ophelia’s second song, she sings:
To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day, All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window, To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn’d his clothes, And dupp’d the chamber-door;
Never departed more. (IV.v.48-56)
These lyrics perhaps suggest that Ophelia and Hamlet had a sexual relationship or that they had wanted to have a more intimate relationship. Again, she uses a first-person pronoun in line 50, after which she describes herself as a maid. Moreover, an unnamed male enters her chamber, after which the maid does not leave as a virgin. The sexual relationship is
emphasised once more in the second stanza of the song, when Ophelia sings: “before you tumbled me, / You promised me to wed. / So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun, / An thou hadst not come to my bed” (IV.v.63-66). The play, however, does not clarify whether Hamlet and Ophelia had a sexual relationship. Thus, Patrick concludes that: “Shakespeare
deliberately left the moral character of Ophelia ambiguous in order to provide the interest that complexity and multi-possible answers give to a play” (Patrick in Seng 144). Sternfeld points out that Ophelia’s songs “are, indeed, ‘mad songs’, not only because their performance in itself is improper but also because their subject matter is unbecoming to a maiden” (58). The other characters in the scene, however, do not respond to the meaning of Ophelia’s songs. After Ophelia finishes her second song, king Claudius asks the other present characters: “How long hath she been thus?” (IV.v.67). Even the interruptions throughout the songs are merely exclamations of shock and wonder about Ophelia’s state; they do not question the lyrics. According to Sternfeld:
[t]he scene takes shape in a way that is significantly different from the musical scenes in other Elizabethan tragedies of the adult companies, for in Hamlet song … becomes an integral part of the tragic scene. Ophelia does not content herself with one song, and the proportion of song to spoken lines is truly exceptional. (64)
In spite of the significance of Ophelia’s performance, which Sternfeld remarks, the characters around Ophelia do not seem to pay proper attention to what her songs convey. As a woman, Ophelia is provided with the rare opportunity to perform songs on stage, but to the other
characters on stage her words mean nothing. She is given a voice, but because of her sorrow and madness this voice gets lost.
After Ophelia’s brother Laertes learns about his father’s death, Ophelia gets the chance to sing her final song before she drowns herself off-stage. Again, this last song consists of several traditional verses, such as ‘Bonny Sweet Robin’ which Ophelia mentions as she sings: “For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy” (IV.v.210). By using popular music of his own time, Shakespeare makes sure that the lyrics: “thus carry associations for the audience that would be essential in their contribution to meaning and affect, including proclaiming the full extent of Ophelia’s derangement” (Johnson 262). The fact that the audience recognises the madness associated with the songs is of great significance. Johnson emphasises this, as he points out that “[h]ad Shakespeare written or commissioned new songs which made no reference to pre-existing materials, it would have been necessary to compose lyrics which explicitly spoke of derangement” (262). Another familiar line that the audience would have recognised, is part of the following stanza that is presumably about Polonius’ death:
They bore him barefaced on the bier; Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny; And in his grave rain’d many a tear:-- Fare you well, my dove! (IV.v.188-191)
According to Seng, “[a]ll the folios have between these lines the burthen Hey non nony, nony,
hey nony. This line does not appear in Q2, nor is there any evidence that the pirate-auditor
responsible for Q1 knew it to be part of the song” (150). Sternfeld points out that “[t]he nonsense syllables … reminiscent of the famous lyric in As You Like It, relate more logically to lads, lasses and springtime than to lamentation and tears” (57). Seng adds to this that: “it should be noted that this burthen was frequently used in bawdy lyrics of Shakespeare’s day to
cover obvious obscenities” (150). In this way, the line bears significant meaning to the audience, as they would recognize it as a peculiar phrase for a lady. Ophelia finishes her final song with a prayer to God as she mourns for her father and realises “[h]e will not come again … He is gone” (IV.v.217-221). Similar to the previous songs, Ophelia is not heard during her performance of her final song. Instead of reacting to the content of Ophelia’s lyrics, Laertes asks the others: “Do you see this, O God?” (IV.v.225). Seng points out that “[h]er words mean nothing to Laertes … He is heedless of every thought except revenge” (155). However, if he had listened to the contents of Ophelia’s songs and had taken them for the truth, the fact that Hamlet has dishonoured Ophelia would have been additional grounds for revenge. It is Claudius who replies to him, but he does not speak of Ophelia’s behaviour as he states: “Laertes, I must commune with your grief” (IV.v.226). Although Ophelia is given a voice through her vocal performance, it is this very performance that emphasises her
“characterization as a helpless and powerless creature” (Sternfeld 65). Ophelia is driven to madness by men and eventually also ignored by men. She is falsely depicted as having a voice, as Act V of Scene IV ascribes a significant proportion of lines to her character, but the meaning of her words is not conveyed by any of the other characters. Ophelia’s sorrow and madness are not properly heard, and she eventually feels compelled to commit suicide.
In 1948 Laurence Olivier released the first version of Hamlet with full sound.
Although the duration of the film is over two hours, certain soliloquies, text, and even entire scenes are absent in the adaptation. Bernice Kliman explains that “the relationship between stage and film was somewhat more complicated; the film is a hybrid form … a film-infused play or a play-infused film, a form Olivier conceived as being the best possible for presenting the heightened language of Shakespeare” (23). The act of cutting certain scenes from Hamlet was not new to Olivier’s time. Elaine Showalter points out that “[d]uring the first part of the eighteenth century, much of Ophelia’s text was officially censored, and singers, rather than
actresses, were cast in the part” (92). In Scene V of Act IV of Olivier’s Hamlet, audiences who are familiar with Shakespeare’s version of Hamlet will instantly recognise that Olivier has been inspired by his eighteenth-century predecessors. Olivier choose to cast Jean Simmons for the role of Ophelia, a young woman who was then often cast in eroticised, or even femme fatale roles: most notably, she played young Estella in David Lean’s Great
Expectations (1946) and a seductive adolescent girl in Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947).
The scene begins with an image of Ophelia running down the hills to enter the castle Elsinore. The décor represents a “black-and-white Elsinore – a prisonlike Elsinore eerily empty of people” (Rutter “Snatched Bodies” 303) The conversation between Gertrude and Horatio before Ophelia enters the room does not take place in Olivier’s adaptation. Instead, Ophelia immediately inquires: “Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?” When she speaks, the camera is focused on her middle rather than her face, showing a worried Gertrude behind her. Ophelia wears an “innocent Victorian dress” (Olivier 198). However, Rutter argues that “[h]er dress could never have been worn in any Victorian public space, belonging rather to the Victorian boudoir, chaise longue, or nursery” (Rutter “Snatched Bodies” 302). In deciding that Simmons should wear this dress Olivier projects his male gaze on her and Ophelia becomes an object for the pleasure of men, rather than a woman who turns mad. The camera is focused on Ophelia’s breasts, instead of on her face. Consequently, the scene sets Ophelia out as “a pretty diversion within the play, not to be taken seriously in the overall structure of the work or given screen time beyond what is absolutely necessary” (Leonard 9). This image that Olivier creates becomes more strikingly apparent when Ophelia starts singing her songs.
Simmons as Ophelia does not get to sing “How should I your true love know”. Instead she immediately turns to “He is dead and gone”, leaving no possibility for any confusion
about whether she is singing about Hamlet or her father. There is no mention of love; only the sorrow for her dead father is recognisable in her song. When she finishes, she throws herself on the floor crying loudly. The camera focuses on her body and bare thigh, which again indicates the Olivier’s male-gaze as he portrays Ophelia as a sexual object. By omitting Ophelia’s song about true love while at the same time focussing on Ophelia’s body in a sexualised manner, Olivier creates a peculiar juxtaposition between her character and her appearance. Rutter supports this view, as she points out that: “Jean Simmons’s Ophelia is a sensual child in a mock-Tudor Elsinore of eerily empty corridors, blond plaits framing her face, artlessly unaware of her erotic appeal but also ambiguously sexualised” (“Women on Film” 256). In addition to omitting Ophelia’s first song, Olivier also excluded “To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day” in his adaptation. Similar to “How should I your true love know”, this song includes suggestive language. As a result, Olivier clarifies that Ophelia is not thinking about Hamlet, but about her father. Simmons’s Ophelia is here illustrated as an innocent virgin, mourning her father’s death. This contrasts with the way the camera depicts her. Although her lines are innocent and virtuous, the camera nevertheless focuses on her body rather than on her facial expressions. In this way, it is rather than Simmons’s acting skills, it is Olivier’s framing of her through the camera that causes the contradiction.
In the scene with her brother Laertes, Ophelia enters the room again wearing the same dress and carrying flowers in her hands. The flowers in her hands and hair associate her with nature and innocence. Rutter argues that: “she is visually conceived as a child of nature … her room, painted with flowers, has windows onto a pastoral landscape … By these visual allusions Ophelia’s sexuality is suggestively inscribed within the natural” (“Snatched Bodies” 303). She does not sing “They bore him barefaced on the bier”, which includes the ‘hey non nonny’ that was used to cover up obscenities. This relates to the ways in which Olivier desires to depict his Ophelia, as the innocent girl would probably never use offensive
language – even as the film nevertheless eroticises her. Clearly, the other characters do not hear her and are not concerned with the meaning of her words: her female voice is
overpowered by the voices of men. Although Gertrude is present in this scene, she neither comforts Ophelia nor interrupts the men talking.
After Ophelia gives her flowers to the other characters in the room, she starts her last song, “Will he not come again”. Although she is only interrupted by Laertes once during this song, the camera focuses on Ophelia’s back as she slowly walks out of the room which means the camera still does not pay full attention to her. Furthermore, she merely sings the first five lines of the song, after which she immediately turns to the very last line: “I pray God. God be wi’ ye” (IV.v.223). Leonard points out that: “Ophelia is a sad but minor inconvenience to the court, not a voice of sometimes bawdy truth in recounting her
experiences with Hamlet and her observation of the goings-on at Elsinore” (10). Simmons’s Ophelia does not have any voice in Olivier’s adaptation. On the contrary, she has fallen victim to the director’s male-gaze, as Olivier portrays her as an object instead of a woman who is driven to madness because of the loss of her lover and her father.
In contrast to Olivier’s significantly short film adaptation, Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour adaptation of Hamlet can be described as an uncut version of Shakespeare’s play. Branagh is not only the director and writer of the screenplay, but he also plays the role of Hamlet. The, then twenty years old, Kate Winslet plays Ophelia. Like Olivier, Branagh has chosen a young actress to play the role of Ophelia. In spite of the fact that Branagh desired to deliver an adaption of Hamlet that was true to the original, he also added several scenes and characters. Rutter points out that the film “delivers … especially more for Ophelia: she gets back all her “original lines” … And her performance text is greatly expanded by a dozen or so invented scenes” (“Snatched Bodies” 315). To illustrate this difference more profoundly Rutter states in another essay that “Ophelia in Shakespeare’s playtext has six scenes; in
Branagh’s film, fourteen” (“Women on Film” 263). The invented scenes consist for a great part of flashbacks “devised, said Branagh, to “explain” the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia” (“Snatched Bodies” 316). However, as discussed by Hutcheon, the quality of an adaptation should not be measured by its fidelity to the original source. Even more so, in spite of the fact that the film was not a box office success, Branagh’s Hamlet is described as one of the best adaptations of Shakespeare’s play.
Before the vocal performance, the first image of Ophelia is that of her lying on the ground, surrounded by Gertrude and Horatio who are looking down upon her. This, already, chimes significantly with the way that Simmons’s Ophelia enters the scene as she is running down the hills into the castle. Since Ophelia is dressed in a straitjacket, her hands are strapped underneath her body. Ophelia’s costume is the first indication of her madness. Additionally, the straitjacket prevents Ophelia from communication in any other way but using her voice. Gulsen Teker points out that: “[t]he straitjacket into which [Ophelia’s] body is forced is the visual manifestation of the woman’s imprisonment by the patriarchal/phallic/symbolic order” (117). There is no music in the background to accompany her song. Moreover, the first verse, in which Ophelia asks herself how she could recognise true love, is recited rather than sung. The camera is focused on Gertrude and Ophelia, which creates more intimacy between the two women. Only after Gertrude frees Ophelia’s hands and Claudius enters the scene, the camera zooms back out and the male characters become visible again. This image makes it possible for the audience to perceive that all the characters in the room are looking at Ophelia, which emphasises the importance of her character at that very moment. This phenomenon is also commonly seen on stage, when characters focus on a particularly important character to indicate that the audience should pay close attention to them as well.
After Claudius remarks that Ophelia “conceit[s] upon her father” (IV.v.50), Ophelia’s breakdown becomes truly visible. Ophelia screams and turns away from the other people in
the room, while at the same time the camera turns to show the back of Claudius and Gertrude. The turn of the camera simultaneously highlights the distance between Ophelia and the other characters. When she starts singing “To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s Day” the camera zooms in on her, showing a dancing and singing Ophelia who loses all sense of appropriate
behaviour for a lady of her class. This worsens when she continues with the second stanza of the song, grabbing Claudius as she sings “by cock they are to blame” (IV.v.66). Thrusting herself on the floor and moving suggestively, Ophelia continues her song and the audience is shown flashbacks of Hamlet and Ophelia in bed alternated with the mad Ophelia. Rutter points out that in these flashbacks: “Ophelia does not remember from a first-person point of view. The camera does not recall the scene of lovemaking from her eyes, from her memory; rather, it voyeuristically watcher her having sex” (“Snatched Bodies” 316). Additionally, Rutter argues that: “Kate Winslet is a dumbed-down Ophelia-for-our-times, disastrously disabled by flashbacks that make nonsense of her narrative by inventing an extra-text that presents her as the obligatory tits-and-bum in a mass market ‘erotic thriller’” (“Women on Film” 257). Through his decision of adding the bedroom flashbacks, Branagh turns Ophelia’s innocent character to “sexually practised, and a practiced liar, who post mortem, makes a credulous ninny of her brother who buries her as a virgin” (“Women on Film” 257). In spite of the fact that Winslet’s Ophelia is a strong character with a loud voice, the sense of
sexuality, which the flashbacks add to her character, can be felt to undermine her female role. Teker points out that: “[a]t the outset Branagh seems to attribute Ophelia’s madness to
erotomania and he treats her with nineteenth-century methods: straitjackets … however … Branagh associates woman’s madness with her confinement within the patriarchal order” (117). This is what Winslet characterises through Ophelia.
The deconstruction of Ophelia’s character is finalised in the last scenes in which she sings her last song of madness. In contrast with the illustration of Ophelia as a sexually active
character, before the performance of the last song she enters the room in a white dress and loose hair. Ophelia sings her last song as she sits down next to a mirror with her brother Laertes opposite her. Both Laertes and Ophelia as well as their reflections in the mirror are visible during the performance of the first two stanzas of Ophelia’s song. The screen alternates between a double vision of the brother and sister in close-up. Blenheim Palace’s grand hall-of-mirrors court offers Branagh excellent mise-en-scène to refer metaphorically to Jacques Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage. According to Lacan, the mirror stage represents the point at which “the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other” (2). Additionally, as in noir and melodramas of the period, mirrors are also used in film to sign that someone is double. In showing both the reflections of Laertes and Ophelia in the same mirror they form a unity: they share the loss of their father, Polonius. When Ophelia starts the last stanza of her song, in which she realises that her father “never will come again” (IV.v.217), the camera slowly zooms in on her face. Interestingly, neither the reflection of Laertes, nor that of Ophelia is visible in the mirror during the performance of this last stanza (Fig. 1).
Either their unity has vanished, as Ophelia’s madness takes over completely and separates her from the other characters once and for all, or Ophelia has now found her true self back. As I argued earlier in this chapter, the lyrics of her song indicate that she dislocated herself from her own identity as she sings: “How should I your true love know” (IV.v.23). However, during the last song she has found her true self back again and is no longer doubled; the two versions of Ophelia merge back into one. With a last “God be wi’ ye” (IV.v.223), Ophelia leaves the room and the audience is left with the vision of her back. Instead of a reaction on her state, Laertes and Claudius discuss revenge strategies. Similar to how Shakespeare illustrates Ophelia in his script, Ophelia remains unheard.
In this chapter we have seen how Ophelia’s songs of madness are an opportunity for her character to make herself heard. However, as madness becomes associated with carnal lust, her character is also sexualised through her state of insanity, especially when she sings “To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s Day”. Both Olivier and Branagh have taken advantage of this eroticisation of madness, as they have both portrayed their Ophelia’s in a sexualised way by focussing on her body or implementing flashbacks of an intimate moment between
Ophelia and Hamlet. Most of Simmons’s Ophelia’s songs are omitted from Olivier’s adaptation, so that this Ophelia dwindles to a silenced character right before her suicide. Although Winslet’s Ophelia is allowed to perform the songs as written by Shakespeare, Branagh has added bedroom scenes which never truly happen in the original and which exploit Winslet’s body. However, Branagh has paid significant attention to the doubled state of Ophelia’s mind and has captured this magnificently in his staging of Ophelia’s last song.
Chapter III - “That Song Tonight will not go from My Mind”:
Desdemona’s Song of Sadness in Othello
A few years after Shakespeare composed Hamlet, he wrote another tragedy, The Tragedy of
Othello, the Moor of Venice (1604), in which once again a female character performs a song.
The fact that there are only a few years between the two plays raises the question whether Ophelia and Desdemona “were played by the same boy … [however,] the ability to sing would be the rule rather than the exception among boy actors” (Davies in Seng 192). In spite of the fact that Othello and Desdemona appear to have a good marriage, the cunning Iago tricks Othello into believing that his wife has an affair with his lieutenant Cassio. On the night Othello murders Desdemona, she performs the “Willow Song” in her bedchamber. In this chapter, I will analyse Desdemona’s performance of the “Willow Song” in Act IV, Scene III of of the play. First, I shall examine the “Willow Song” in Shakespeare’s written work,
Othello. After this analysis, I shall then compare and contrast the ways in which Orson
Welles (1951), Stuart Burge and John Dexter (1965), and Oliver Parker (1995) depict Desdemona while she sings her song.
The scene starts with Othello who instructs Desdemona to go to bed. At this point of the play Othello suspects his wife of having an affair with Cassio, and in the final scene, which takes place on the same night, he will kill her. Some scholars believe that Desdemona does not have any idea of what will happen to her, whereas others argue that the “Willow Song” is performed because Desdemona intuits that she will die soon. Thomas Bowman points out that “[h]er reply, “I will, my lord!” (10) is uttered with joyful surprise. The intense shock of her happy acquiescence creates audience awareness of her complete ignorance of Othello’s intentions” (115). Edward Pechter points out that “the critical tradition has been remarkably consistent for two centuries in describing Desdemona as silent, submissive, and in a sense even complicit in her own murder” in spite of the fact that Desdemona expresses
understandable shock when Othello does indeed set out to kill her (124). Desdemona’s reply to Othello’s demand illustrates, indeed, her own submissiveness. In contrast to Bowman’s belief that Desdemona is unaware of her fate, Ernest Brennecke argues that Desdemona sings her song “with a sense of imminent doom” (37). Although Othello deliberately asks her to “[d]ismiss [her] attendant there”, Desdemona’s servant Emilia does not leave her
immediately (IV.iii.8). In contrast to Hamlet’s Ophelia, who performs her songs for a group of aristocracy, Desdemona sings her song in the intimacy of her bedroom and is therefore only heard by her servant, Emilia. In spite of the fact that Bowman considers Desdemona to be unaware of her fate, he points out that “Emilia vaguely suspects things are not what they should be. She cannot reconcile herself entirely to Desdemona’s assurances of amorous intention” (116). Bowman’s argument is supported by the fact that Emilia tells Desdemona that “[she] would [Desdemona] had never seen him” (IV.iii.19). Desdemona, however, waves this comment aside and asks her servant to unpin her, while she defends her husband: “My love doth so approve him / That even his stubbornness, his checks, his frowns … have grace and favour in them” (IV.iii.20-22). Eamon Grennan explains that: “[Desdemona’s] speech is simple and direct: her acceptance is particular and realistic, as casually unrhetorical as the parenthetical request calling attention to her body” (277).
The act of Emilia unpinning Desdemona is a physical action that emphasises the vulnerability of the “Willow Song”. Denise Walen points out that:
While the song alludes to themes of infidelity, madness, melancholy, and death, it also functions practically to cover the rather complicated business of unpinning and
unlacing various articles of clothing that constituted the dress of an aristocratic Englishwoman. The undressing itself symbolizes Desdemona’s vulnerability and innocence (490).
There is, however, no original stage direction for what should be unpinned. Therefore, “[i]n modern productions, it is often Desdemona’s hair that is unpinned” (Walen 490). Alan C. Dessen underscores that it is important to regard “what the original playgoers saw or might have seen” (3). Walen adds that in order to understand this scene of Othello properly, it is important to “pay attention to the stage action – in this case, to the undressing” (491). “Moreover, as Desdemona undresses, the undoing of her public self is amplified by the undoing of her female disguise. No matter what one actually ‘sees’, the act itself self-consciously dramatizes her undoing” (Ronk 70). This is not to say that if Desdemona’s clothes were removed, she would not be a female anymore, but rather that she wears her dresses as a disguise to hide her true insecurities and worries from the public. During this intimate action of undressing, Desdemona introduces the “Willow Song” to Emilia:
My mother had a maid called Barbary.
She was in love, and he she loved proved mad And did forsake her. She had a song of willow, An old thing ‘twas, but it expressed her fortune, And she died singing it. That song tonight Will not go from my mind. I have much to do But to go hang my head all at one side
And sing it like poor Barbary (IV.iii.28-35).
Grennan argues that “although this speech deals with facts, the facts persist in an atmosphere of feeling. Doing injury to neither, Desdemona’s speech has the power to identify implicitly facts and feelings” (277). In other words, this speech and the song that follows allow
Desdemona to have a voice within the play. Martha Ronk underscores the importance of this scene, as she points out that “Desdemona becomes more obviously a subject than ever before” (65). This allows Desdemona to define herself “not dependent on father or husband,
but on mother, maid, and attendant, a world evoked in Shakespeare’s plays when women define themselves in contradistinction to masculine authority” (Ronk 66). The intimate scene in which Emilia unpins Desdemona enables these female characters to distance themselves from the patriarchy that is part of their lives, although this is more accurate for Desdemona than for Emilia as Emilia remains a servant.
In the introduction to the “Willow Song”, Desdemona tells Emilia about her mother’s maid Barbary; like Emilia, Barbary was a servant. From the sixteenth until the nineteenth century, the name Barbary was used in Britain to indicate the North-African area which is now home to, among other countries, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Draper points out that although “[n]one of Shakespeare’s plays is set in Barbary … many of them have
allusions to it”, most notably the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice (1605) (307). The reference to Desdemona’s maid who is called Barbary draws on such allusions. Her name implies that she was from African descent. Karen Newman argues that Barbary’s name is associated with blackness and because Desdemona identifies with Barbary she also can be felt to identify here with Othello: “The union of Desdemona and Othello represents a
sympathetic identification between femininity and the monstrous which offers a potentially subversive recognition of sexual and racial difference” (152). Ronk points out that
“Desdemona’s calling up her absent mother and Barbary establishes a point of reference counter to Othello’s mother who has introduced the handkerchief that taints all who handle it with erotic madness” (66). In the first act of the play, Iago tells Brabantio that he will “have [his] daughter cover’d with a Barbary horse”, implying bestial male sexuality (I.i.109-10). As Desdemona calls her mother’s maid Barbary too, “she rescues and redefines the term” (Ronk 66). Comparable to Hamlet’s Ophelia, Desdemona sings, in a sense, her song as though she were another person.
The “Willow Song” is not Shakespeare’s own work. Brennecke points out that “[t]he words, and undoubtedly the tune, may be dated at least as far back as the reign of Henry VIII” (35). However, Shakespeare has changed some of the lyrics. Richmond Noble explains that “the changes and arrangement were directed, not only to an improvement in form, but also to making the subject matter appropriate to Desdemona’s sex and miserable distress” (124). As such, Desdemona’s song is not only quoted from Barbary, but also misquoted. However, in making these changes, Shakespeare has consciously given Desdemona the opportunity to have a voice. Although the “Willow Song” is “omitted in the Quarto” it does “occur … in the Folio” (Sternfeld 48). The first part of Desdemona’s song consists of the following lines:
The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree, Sing all a green willow.
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee, Sing willow, willow, willow.
The fresh streams ran by her and murmured her moans, Sing willow, willow, willow;
Her salt tears fell from her, and softened the stones (IV.iii.51).
After these lines Desdemona starts to interrupt her own singing to make certain remarks to Emilia about her garments. Grennan points out that the audience would sympathise with Emilia and Desdemona, and “[t]o prevent … such sympathy becoming ethereal or
sentimental or abstract, Shakespeare has her interrupt the song at a number of points ... thus keeping in touch with the deictic ground of the scene and its many meanings” (280). In addition to her passing remarks to Emilia, Desdemona also stops singing when she makes a mistake in the lyrics after the lines: “Sing all a green willow must be garland / Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve” (IV.iii.55-56). Brennecke argues that because of her sense of
impending disaster, “she twists the words of the ancient song so as to apply them to her own tragic situation. She is still sufficiently alert, however, to sense that she has made a mistake” (37). Desdemona stops singing and exclaims: “Nay, that’s not next” (IV.iii.57). According to Brennecke, “overcome with foreboding, she imagines that she hears someone at the door” (37). In other words, her exclamation may be an indication that she is aware of the
catastrophe that will happen on the same night. Seng supports Brennecke’s argument as he describes Desdemona as being “emotionally distraught” (194). However, it should not be ignored that before this scene Desdemona is already abused in private and struck in public by her husband; a catastrophe in her marriage is already in progress, which would sufficiently explain her distraught feelings. After Emilia reassures her that “[i]t’s the wind” (IV.iii.58), she is able to end her song with the following lines:
I called my love false love, but what said he then? Sing willow, willow, willow
If I court more women, you’ll couch with more men (IV.iii.59-61).
Ironically, this last stanza, and especially the last line, “reflects the acid reproach of
promiscuity which Othello has levelled against Desdemona, which rankles in her mind, and which colours the entire scene” (Sternfeld 51). The song pictures male betrayal and infidelity, just as Desdemona is being accused of a specifically feminine unfaithfulness. This could be to emphasize the inequality of the situation. The song and the conversation that follows between the women is then used to throw accusations of promiscuity back onto men.
The symbol of the willow tree emphasises Desdemona’s feelings. The tree has long been considered to be “an emblem of dejection and unhappy love” (Sternfeld 49). Alisoun Gardner-Medwin points out that:
[t]he willow motif itself would be recognized by the seventeenth century audience, for to wear the green willow seems to have symbolized mourning for a lost lover … and
