the dramaturg’s notebook: in regards to “i was the more deceived” & my personal interpretation of the nunnery scene.
firstly –– some performances i like of this scene: tennant & gale, scott & findlay.
to be perfectly blunt, i comply with the understanding that hamlet and ophelia shared mutual affection, a deep seated love for one another which at one time might have been on a steady pace towards marriage. it would have faced its own obstacles, naturally, but i believe the two of them under normal circumstances would likely have been married in a matter of years.
ophelia’s obsession with marriage is a beast in and of itself and technically was developed completely separately from her feelings for hamlet, though understandably the two have become conflated over time, and so it becomes impossible to talk of one without the other. ophelia’s aspirations could be summed up entirely by her usefulness as a wife, for a variety of reasons ––
to begin with, though she was given education from a young age, she was only ever treated, in practice, like a doll made of porcelain by her father and brother both. she had no individual freedoms, remained under the guardianship of her father even after she’d come of age, and was discouraged at every angle from actualizing her own autonomy. the prospect of marriage, funnily, offered a new sort of captivity that seemed less restraining than her childhood. partnership in an official capacity with another would mean others would be forced to recognize her as outside of their jurisdiction, though she was well aware it only meant a new keeper of sorts.
another motivation for desiring marriage so fully was that it seemed a good lady’s fate. above all, it’s natural and expected of her, and it would be fulfilling a responsibility that was one of the very few she was entrusted with. ophelia’s utility hinges on her relation to those around her and how she serves them best; the ultimate dedication of service would be to her husband, and she had been raised to believe this. she largely only had her father and brother to insist on the particulars of this role, as her mother passed when she was quite young. with her father, he spoke of the rules young ladies ought follow in order to maintain virtue and marriageability. with her brother, she learned that it was only men who had freedom before marriage. men were not on a clock, either, which was a funny lesson –– while he galavanted in paris, ophelia wondered at the years she had left, made rampant calculations of when she needed to settle. he hadn’t even spared it a thought. but he did speak of marriage, sometimes –– and she would note how he spoke of women he most decidedly wouldn’t marry, and how it reflected their character. a loose woman, a woman much too argumentative, a woman who nagged, a woman who lazed. there was no honor in being a woman on her own, there was only fulfillment and worthiness is being the type a man would take as a wife.
and finally, ophelia was quite simply a romantic. she grew up reading fairytales, often morbid kinds like the little mermaid and cinderella, but still, romances all the same. thumbelina was her favorite romance, and she daydreamed about it often –– it encapsulated exactly how she felt about marriage; to be granted wings by your holy binding to another.
WITH THIS CONTEXT, CONTINUE . . . throughout this scene, act iii scene i, we see at first a private conversation made public as hamlet discovers he and ophelia are being spied on by her father and his uncle. what begins as an intimate display of the complicated nature of their relationship becomes a mad show of rage and betrayal which has a bit more to do with the anger he feels towards his uncle than any actual ill will towards ophelia, but it sears her all the same and he becomes cruel with her and lashes out.
i don’t believe that, prior to the line “ where’s your father? ” that anything hamlet says is meant to be mean. it is meant to cut himself off from her, and in my own interpretation, the speech he first gives (below) is actually alluding in part to that obsession mentioned above that ophelia holds with marriage and family:
Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a
breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest;
but yet I could accuse me of such things that it
were better my mother had not borne me: I am very
proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at
my beck than I have thoughts to put them in,
imagination to give them shape, or time to act them
in. What should such fellows as I do crawling
between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves,
all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery.
it is all to say: forget me, but more than this, forget any man who asks for your hand or offers you what you so long for, because we are wretched sinners all of us. bear not any children for they’ll be sinners by nature, because it is human to be such. love no one because you cannot trust any of them: your own spouse might kill you dead, your own brother might, everyone in the world is a liar.
it’s very much a warning rather than a admonishment, which is why i personally like adaptations that have hamlet speak it softly and almost near-apologetically, again because i believe that just at first, just in this moment of time, he believes this to be a wholly private conversation. the tone shifts and the nunnery comment takes on a completely separate meaning once he gains an understanding of ophelia’s betrayal of his trust, in that the two of them are being actively spied on.
If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for
thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as
snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a
nunnery, go: farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs
marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough
what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go,
and quickly too. Farewell.
these words are meant to be cutting –– directly and specifically so.
róisín, you’re wondering, but what about the way he speaks at the beginning! that’s a bit mean! right-o, i think though the conversation is private and there’s that moment of sincerity when he gives the first nunnery speech, i think he starts off the interaction as if trying to push her away. this is why i love tennant’s performance so much, because i think he showcased these beats perfectly.
it also shows this genuine madness that hamlet is fighting, which is to say sincere grief and confusion –– it makes sense even in private for him to doubt ophelia’s honesty and loyalty, because he has been betrayed by his uncle, by his mother, and he feels utterly alone in his current predicament. the way i see this scene, the reaction given by ophelia to his beginning statements and insults and claims of never having loved her, but also having loved her once, etc., her reaction to all of this is something which grounds him in speaking candidly if only for a moment.
to end the scene, ophelia then speaks alone, and i think it’s a speech that mostly goes without saying. she laments “ WOE IS ME / TO HAVE SEEN WHAT I HAVE SEEN, SEE WHAT I SEE ” which i think is the true tragedy of it all, that she has experienced in so short a period of time the greatest love she’d ever known and the cruelest. by one who she’d never been made to feel uncomfortable with, as i believe hamlet to be one of the few people ophelia felt like a real, actual person besides, to be used now as a proxy for his anger. to be used by others as a pawn against him. she is forced into this situation of being thought of completely differently now by the only man she had come close to marrying.
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