[In the following essay, Ronk examines the way in which Ophelia is represented first as a projection of other characters, and then the way she is represented by Gertrude, when the queen describes Ophelia's drowning.]

Ophelia has perhaps been drawn or painted more frequently than any of Shakespeare's heroines; yet her history of representation not only postdates the play's production, but also is embedded in the play itself. Ophelia seems to move towards the abstract or emblematic throughout as she is represented as dutiful daughter, beloved beauty, mad woman, drowned innocent. Early in the play she is represented as the projection of others—her father and brother and Hamlet who set aside her statements about herself and revise her into obedience. Polonius further instructs her in representing herself as what she is not, telling her to stifle her desires for and her faith in Hamlet and to present herself to him as indifferent and pious maid as he simultaneously represents her as the devil: "with devotion's visage/ And pious action we do sugar o'er/ The devil himself (III.i.47-49). Hamlet draws attention to Ophelia as a false picture by referring to the use of cosmetics as painting: "I have heard of your paintings, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another" (III.i.144 ff.) Hamlet most frequently juxtaposes miniatures of his father and Claudius, but he also gazes on Ophelia as if he meant to draw a picture of her. Ophelia gives a picture of his picturing her:

He took me by the wrist and held me hard.
Then goes he to the length of all his arm,
And with his other hand thus o'er his brow
He falls to such perusal of my face
As a would draw it.

(Il.i.87-91)'

Once she is mad, Claudius speaks of "poor Ophelia/ Divided from herself and her fair judgment,/ Without the which we are pictures or mere beasts" (IV.v.83-5, my emphasis). Once Ophelia has lost those who created her (Polonius is dead and Laertes is absent), she is undone.² Her representation as the conventional mad woman derives directly from patriarchal law, and her mad songs foreground the twisted manner in which she speaks her concerns with sexuality and death. In spite of its conventionality, however, her representation as madwoman does accomplish something other than pathos. For one, at the moment in which she is presented as most divided, she is also most aware of the exploitation of maids, and of the ways in which romantic myths of St. Valentine's day become crude losses. Moreover, without any physical contact, she has moved beyond maidenhood—not not virginal, but something else. She demonstrates her knowledge of the equivocal nature of things by puns—Hamlet's device as well—("by Cock"), and by singing her grotesqueries prettily. As Laertes says: "Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,/ She turns to favor and to prettiness" (IV.v. 186-87).

The most arresting and arrested picture of Ophelia occurs after she has disappeared from the play in Gertrude's description of her drowning in IV.vii. 166-83, and it is this representation which I take as the focus of my paper. This is a peculiar speech for at least two reasons. One, for what it is not. It is not a lamentation or disjointed outpouring of emotion as might be expected; rather it is a set piece, an arras, a speaking picture. It seems contrived and overblown. Gertrude's stylized speech is notably attentive, not to the human tragedy at its center, but to the decorative aspects of Ophelia's drowning—the embroidered flowers, the slanting willow, the billowing skirts. At the very least one might find it curious that the queen should give so aesthetically pleasing and detailed a description of the event:

Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

(IV.vii.174-183)

Secondly, the speech is peculiar, if not outrightly bizarre, because Gertrude appears to have been present as eyewitness. For if she had been present to watch Ophelia's sinking to "muddy death," the speech puts Gertrude again in the situation of being complicitous with someone's dying. Moreover, since it is so highly astute a representation of Ophelia—of her madness, sexual obsessions, confused motivations—one wonders how Gertrude knows so much and just how much Gertrude's Ophelia is a mirror of herself and a premonition of her own death. Since it is so visual a representation, one wonders what is it a visual representation of; what is it (to refer to the language of Othello) ocular proof of? How does the picture function in terms of representing "Ophelia" and what does the representation itself say about representing the unseeable? The question of who saw what and what such seeing means is, of course, central to the entire play.

In this paper I focus on Shakespeare's use of ekphrasis to signal a representation of the inexpressible, the speaking picture, the refiguration of what cannot be figured. That is, I focus on ekphrasis as a particular means of suggesting aspects of character not otherwise accessible. In Jakobson's terms the relationship between word and image is both metonymic and metaphoric—metonymic in that the two complete each other sequentially and as parts of a whole, metaphoric in that each translates into the other's medium. Each moves towards the other impossibly. By moving from one sign system to another the poet creates a gap to signal a gap and it is in this arena that I locate my discussion of Ophelia—not to argue that Shakespeare has miraculously been able to represent the unrepresentable, but that the technical shift from verbal to visual by means of a specific rhetorical device, ekphrasis, signals both the enormous gap between words and images (and between images and the world) and the suggestion that the missing sign system might indeed offer up some version of "presence." Moreover, since the picture of Ophelia is given by means of language, the speech conveys ocular absence in an especially potent manner—no paint, no body.

Such shifts into the ekphrastic occur in Shakespeare's plays in numerous places: Viola's Patience speech, Cleopatra on the barge, Desdemona's willow song, to name a few. In the case of Viola, the Patience speech functions in a variety of complex ways, but especially to assert—while simultaneously denying—her other gender by evoking the picture of her sister.³ The case of Ophelia is complicated since she does not present her own picture, but rather has it presented "for her" by Gertrude. Yet like the famous "speaking pictures" discussed at length by Renaissance rhetoricians, Ophelia's picture does assert something about an issue central to the play—acting and its relationship to volition. By setting the speech on Ophelia's drowning in the context of the visual—both in terms of rhetoric (ekphrasis and enargeia) and culture (popular sixteenth century emblem books, theatrical staging)—I will try to suggest what her representation represents. I choose this manner of examining Ophelia in order to use the methodology of the period, but I also think that the shifts into ekphrasis in Shakespeare's plays stand at significant junctures and demonstrate the successes and failures of representation. Further, I will follow the lead of Angus Fletcher's work on allegory in drawing together two critical methods which have traditionally been at odds with one another: the discussion of Elizabethan imagery and psychoanalytic interpretations of the plays.⁴

I don't wish to argue that there is a transhistorical self or transcendent essence of Ophelia, but that Shakespeare frequently devises an approach to such by means of technical devices. That is, he uses visual allegory, for example, to extend and expand representation of character. Rather than making a character less elastic, I would argue, such artificial devices work to deny one aspect of character in service of something else. Rather than flattening character, such devices fill in what we know more traditionally by means of plot and dialogue. If the subject is missing—and clearly a picture of someone absent and in the process of dying in her absence is about as far from subject as one can get—what appears in its place and to what ends?

The representation of Ophelia has been almost entirely iconic; her wild hair depicts madness or the victim of rape; her blank white dress stands in contrast to Hamlet's inky and scholarly black; the emblematic flowers which she gives away and which surround her at death signal her participation in deflowering; her snatches of song suggest fragmentation of character. For Hamlet she is emblem of mother, bride, and finally grave. In her fine article, "Representing Ophelia: women, madness, and the responsibilities of feminist criticism," Elaine Showalter shows how historical depictions of Ophelia alter with changes in attitudes towards women and madness. I wish to argue, however, that her picture-like existence in the play raises epistemological questions as well. As Bridget Lyons suggests in her essay on the iconography of Ophelia as flower-giver, although Ophelia exhibits certain traditional props and gestures of the goddess Flora, she nonetheless remains difficult to read.⁵ Within the play itself her icongraphy is contradictory as she appears both as the goddess of nature and a debased version of the same. Significantly, Ophelia herself draws attention to the difficulties of signs and their meanings when she comments that the flowers she hands about can carry a variety of meanings:

There's rue for you; and here's some for me. We
may call it herb of grace a Sundays. O, you must
wear your rue with a difference.

(IV.V.178 ff.)

That is, in her language and in her person Ophelia most vividly raises questions of the ways by which we know things and of the confusion that may result from using different approaches or different sorts of language. Most pointedly, Ophelia provokes questions of character, questions also posed by the ghost which comes "in the same figure like the King that's dead."⁶ Both "figures" raise the questions: what is a theatrical representation of character; what is the relationship between a figurative and a dramatic character; what is the relationship of what one sees to what is; can a "piece" of a character ("a piece of him")—whether that piece is a bit of dialogue, a bit of ghostly shadow, a bit of mad talk—represent a full blown "character," and what does that mean? Interestingly, both Ophelia and the ghost are uncannily half-dead, seen and not seen (mad, ghostly) and are potent in their absence. The ghost who is there and not there sets Hamlet on his quest for revenge and Ophelia, more powerful in death than in life, propels Hamlet to declare his love, his "identity" ("This is I, Hamlet the Dane") and his willingness, finally, to fight. Both raise the question of what meaning is to be assigned to a figure (or figures of speech or emblematic figures) and what relationship exists between a so-called figure and any other sort of reality. The ghost appears "as Hamlet Sr." and from the outset of the play questions what it means to appear "as" something else, especially in a play in which one figure is constantly being substituted for another, one representation of father for another, one woman for another.⁷ Here Ophelia appears as an emblem of Ophelia, but not in order to be dismissed, but rather to mean differently from the ways she has meant before. Angus Fletcher points to these fundamental questions concerning what is usually called the lack of reality of allegorical characters in his book on Allegory: "allegorical agents are real enough, however ideal their referents may be, however'unlike ourselves'they may appear. They have what might be called an'adequate representational power.'Too many philosophic questions are raised: What constitutes reality? Is it accuracy of representation? Then what constitutes accuracy? Or representation?" (32).

In her final moments of the play Ophelia is caught in an allegorical picture, one that most readers and viewers cannot forget. If Hamlet threatens to become all language and eventually all story, Ophelia as his counterpart becomes all picture, displayed in her final moments by means of description, not so much even of her person but of the objects around her, as if they could speak her story:

There is a willow grows aslant the brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook.

(IV.vii.166-75)

The willow—here given (like Ophelia) not directly but by means of a representative reflection—is itself an emblem described by Thomas Fuller in his The History of the Worthies of England: "A sad Tree, whereof such who have lost their love make their mourning garlands" (144). The rest of the items in the description are emblematic as well. The nettles are associated with pain, poison or betrayal; the daisies with forsaken love. The crow-flowers perhaps symbolize dejection; the phallic purples signal the causal association between sexuality and death; the flowers are transformed to trophies.⁸

The scene is rendered even more allegorical by personification: the branch on which Ophelia climbs is "envious" and the brook into which she falls is "weeping." "Weeping" comes at the end of a chain of sounds that seems to build inevitably to this conclusion—"weeds," "weedy," "weeping." The court may be corrupt and the queen may be dry-eyed, but the pathetic fallacy is in place. Gertrude says that Ophelia is in harmony with nature (indued unto that element) and the sounds draw all the items of the scene, both human and inhuman, closer together so that weeping becomes a generalized event with many participants: Ophelia, brook, Gertrude, audience. Although the human figures are not described as actually weeping, the unrealized state of mourning for each is pictured in the weeping brook. As in other allegorical moments, emotion, often unconscious emotion, is spread out over the landscape. We know the centrality of mourning then through this scene. Since, as Lacan argues, there has been too little mourning heretofore, finally there is enough (39).

I would argue that in allegorical writing such as this, the unconscious is, to borrow Louis Aragon's phrase, "out there." Ophelia may be missing in the sense that we know little of her except as others describe her, but like the hoar leaves, she is reflected/captured piecemeal in the embroidery of the scene. The willow tells us of Ophelia's unrequited love and the fantastic garlands (circular garlands on a phallic bough) tell of her obsession with sexuality and death. Allegory heightens the pervasiveness of sorrow and makes the connection between world and character inescapable. In discussing Virgil's use of a night scene to describe Dido's sorrow, the Renaissance critic Peacham reiterates this argument, including the effect of pictorial description on the reader. As Rosemond Tuve observes: "[It] offers a way of magnifying the depth and importance of Dido's sorrow. Our participation in that passion, made thus more active, operates to give us'a more familiar insight into'all sorrow, for, as Sidney says, it is'so in [its] own naturall seate layd to the viewe, that wee seeme not to heare of [it], but cleerely to see through [it]'" (165-66).⁹ The mechanical operation set up by pictorial allegory leads to an assumption of depth and importance. That is, the technique of "seeing through" leads to an assumption of "seeing through and into and beyond." If there has been an enormous identification with Ophelia over the years since the first production of Hamlet, it may have to do not only with how much of her story is missing from the play (and therefore how many gaps there are for the imagination to fill), but also with a visual operation established by scenes such as this.

Though this particular scene is rich in allegorical detail, it is not an isolated example of Shakespeare's use of emblems in the play. The play's display of emblems is full, if not indeed extreme: Yorick's skull, the graveyard, the figure of the ghost, the mousetrap—all visual images in the service of abstraction. Moreover, the play belongs to an historical period in which the emblematic was a received mode of perceiving the world. Rosemary Freeman draws attention to an habitual cast of mind for Renaissance poets, a readiness to see a relation between simple, concrete, visible things and moral ideas (155); Steven Mullaney describes London, particularly the liminal space of the Liberties as highly emblematic: "Reading the city . . . was something every citizen was expected to do" (14). Masques were emblematic; Spenser's "Shepheardes Calender" was emblematic; designs for tapestry or for the queen's gowns were taken from emblem books; certain Shakespearean characters are seen as emblems—Falstaff as Vice or Actaeon. Critics have often thought that emblem books provide the closest model to these ekphrastic moments in Shakespeare's plays. First published in England in 1586, such books also present pictures in combination with text—set apart, interpreted, allegorized—each part necessary, each part not enough. Renaissance writers repeatedly express enthusiasm for emblem books and for vivid pictures. Sidney, for example, argues that a philosopher is not so accomplished as a poet since he can only create "a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth." Sidney also draws attention to the power of ut pictura poesis and enargeia (similar to ekphrasis) not so much to narrate as to exhibit. Like the figures in emblem books, many of which are classical women, Ophelia seems in her death to be held up as a statue or visual exhibit designed to be contemplated and interpreted.¹⁰

Although discussion of the pervasiveness of the pictorial in Renaissance literature is beyond the scope of my paper, I want to allude at least to the importance of the visual in the theater. The theater, of course, is always a focal point of the interplay between the visual and the verbal and Hamlet almost relentlessly replaces one with the other, most obviously in the mousetrap scenes, but also throughout. The play persistently replaces itself in the way it refigures its own progress, drawing self-conscious attention to the incompleteness of each figuring. Thus my understanding of the two representations of the murder is that one (the dumbshow) simply does not work: Claudius doesn't respond, not for some commonsensical reason as that he is engaged in conversation, but because the effect of representation (as Hamlet notes in his conversations with the players) is mysterious and uncertain in its effects. Likewise, the picture of Ophelia drowning localizes the point of connection between the verbal and the visual and draws attention to the inconclusiveness of both. Too much and too little are given. What does it mean? What are the allegorical implications? And what is there in this "passive" portrait and useless drowning which seems rather to suggest potency?

The nature of the speech is, as I have said, a set speech, a formal and artificial picture in part because of its numerous emblematic qualities. Moreover, to move from the speech itself to the speaker, it appears set because it is narrated in so flat and decorative a manner that one might assume a painting (traditionally commissioned to keep one's image alive after death) rather than a tragic event were being described. Gertrude describes the event as if it were a scene to be contemplated in careful detail rather than a scene to be reacted to; she doesn't lose control or break from her cool chronology of events. One might say that the speech no more belongs to Gertrude than to anyone; it is outside of character as if it stood at a remove and had its own integrity and purpose. It must occur when it does because it introduces the graveyard scene, but it could, one might argue, be projected from any voice or any character. Does it matter, then, that it is Gertrude who utters these words?

I think that it matters for several reasons. First, Gertrude is the other woman in the play subject to the decisions, the sexuality, the plotting of men; here she substitutes for Ophelia. By speaking of Ophelia, Gertrude speaks—as she rarely does in the play and here only by reflection—of herself. Like Ophelia who dutifully obeys father and brother, Gertrude is submissive to Claudius, behaving as a sort of projection. In their first encounter with Hamlet, Claudius asks "how the clouds still hang on you," and Gertrude echoes "good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off." Both women are reflected in the eyes of the men around them: Hamlet would draw Ophelia and would, as he says in the closet scene, set up a glass for Gertrude to see her "inmost part." Both women are attacked by Hamlet for their whorishness and both are torn by conflicting loyalties, slipping from one allegiance to another, and losing the ability to represent themselves. Ophelia's gathering of "long purples," for example, seems an enactment not so much of her own fantasies, but of Hamlet's. The dank image of "dead men's fingers" to describe these same flowers may reveal her ambivalence towards sexuality, but it seems equally evocative of Hamlet's injunction to Gertrude concerning Claudius'fingers. Equivocally, he tells her not to do what he bids her do, and specifically pictures the king "paddling in your neck with his damn'd fingers" (III.iv.187). In Shakespeare, visual descriptions seem not so much particular as pervasive, not so much belonging to a single character's unconscious as to an unconscious underlying the play as a whole. Yet for all of Hamlet's crazed objectifying of both Ophelia and Gertrude, it is Gertrude who gives the last description of Ophelia as an art object. This seems appropriate, not only because of their comparable positions, but also because Gertrude's dispassionate description forces an audience to attend to what is happening to them both. Just as she disappears from the play, Ophelia becomes emblem or icon in a process eerily similar to that of others of Shakespeare's women characters.¹¹ As Ophelia becomes icon, Gertrude as witness forces the self-conscious witnessing of her/their fetishization.

Gertrude's description is thus striking because of her decided aesthetic objectification of Ophelia. For Gertrude, Ophelia is a site of fascination and obsessive staring; there is no intimacy between them, as there is, for example, between Rosalind and Celia; and nothing, moreover, that draws Gertrude towards maternal intimacy or concern. Although later she does say that she had hoped to deck her marriage bed with flowers, a comment that indicates some connection to the girl who might have married her son, here she simply describes Ophelia as if she were invitingly framed to be stared at. It seems to me, then, that one of the reasons this moment is so unsettling is that vis à vis Ophelia, Gertrude stands in what is so frequently in these plays a male position, or at least one that renders her a distant and voyeuristic observer.

Yet, unbeknownst to her, Gertrude's delivery of this speech also binds her inextricably with Ophelia—calling attention to how they have each been made. Moreover, it binds her to Ophelia by so fully capturing the way in which both Ophelia and Gertrude decide by not deciding, intend by not intending. Gertrude seems not to know of Hamlet Sr.'s murder, yet she does suffer guilt for some reason as she indicates by an aside just before Ophelia enters singing her mad songs:

To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is,
Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.
So full of artless jealousy is guilt,
It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.

(IV.v.17-20)

Her comment about the player queen—"The lady doth protest too much"—seems also to give some indication if not of guilt, then of her subtle knowledge of how to represent oneself in a complex, shady world.

What then does this knowledge indicate that she knows about the man she marries and about his murdering of Hamlet Sr.? Ophelia also seems "to act" in some shadowy realm of knowing and not knowing. She seems to crawl out the limb merely to hang her garland of flowers for some nonchalant, aesthetic reason, yet she is already mad, already obsessed with the death of her father. Is she out of control or not, and what does control mean at this juncture in the play? Is she, like Hamlet, acting a part or acting, and what is the difference between them, a question the play and the players reiterate time and again. This is the sort of serious quibble which the clowns turn comic in the graveyard: if Ophelia went to the water she drowned herself purposely; but if the water came to her, then she drowned herself in her own defense.¹²

I am leading here to the question of whether or not Gertrude is complicitous in the murder of Hamlet Sr., not that I think that the play offers a direct answer, but rather that the play so insistently raises the question of what it means not to know what is going on. Ophelia, as many have argued, does not deserve the maimed rites which she receives because she did not intend to commit suicide; rather she crawled out on a weak limb to hang her trophy of flowers and the branch broke.¹³ Yet, although she is cleared of suicide, she still receives maimed rites. Although the moment at which Gertrude chooses to marry Claudius is missing from the play, the scene in which Ophelia agrees to stand as bait for Hamlet is not. I have often puzzled over this scene wondering if it were a moment of change in which she gives up even the few worried questions she poses for her father early in the play, questions which signal her fullness as character, to become a pure iconic image of devotion. In this moment does the representation of Ophelia shift so that she is no longer allied with life but with a kind of stasis, life-indeath? In describing Ophelia's inadvertent death does Gertrude in some way describe the inadvertency at the center of her own actions; in her description of another does she acknowledge her complicitous choices even as Ophelia seems to choose suicide? By this speech does Gertrude portend her own death in which "the drink" also pulls her down. Does she, like Hamlet, sense what is to come or does she speak more wisely than she knows when she says to Laertes just before her description of Ophelia's drowning, "One woe doth tread upon another's heel,/ So fast they follow" (IV.vii. 162-63)?

In the play as a whole happenstance looms large and when accident occurs it seems to signal the operation at least of fate if not, as Hamlet suggests, of providence. Gertrude accidentally drinks from the wrong cup; Ophelia dies by the accidental breaking of a branch; and Hamlet's ship encounters the pirates by chance. Behind these events there seems to be some hidden meaning which the picture of the breaking branch contains. In visual terms such a picture appears analogous to Hamlet's: "There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come." That is, the picture of the breaking branch contains the past, present and future, as Gertrude pictures Ophelia making a garland, crawling out on the branch, and falling to her death; and it focuses on volition and on fate—on being ready or even eager to die and on leaving it, simultaneously, to fate. It seems as if Ophelia must hang up the garland—must, even to the point of drowning. Her compulsion to hang out this garland, this circular O of flowers on the limb seems to engage with Hamlet's copulatory imagery throughout the play and also to be an enactment of a ritual of mourning. As she says in her mad song about her father: "Larded with sweet flowers / Which bewept to the grave did not go" (IV.v.38-9). Thus Ophelia out on a limb is emblematic of an intertwining of choice and fate that tragically can only be represented in numerous ways, never untangled. It is an emblem of the equivocation—acting and not acting—which stands at the center of the play, and of the equivocal nature of representation.

In more psychological terms, it is emblematic of Ophelia's absolute control of her actions and simultaneously of her total submission to an obsessive idea which possesses her. Ophelia is driven compulsively to hang out the garland or to hand out flowers in a proper and ordered fashion. Ophelia's allegorical behavior becomes analogous, as Fletcher argues, to compulsive behavior: "The commonest experience of the compulsive neurotic is that he is suddenly disturbed by impulses that have no apparent rational meaning, and thence are seen as arbitrary and external'commands'" (287). And yet, Ophelia's action is powerful for all its seeming strangeness (or, as Fletcher puts it, "foreignness"), in part I think because that which is missing from view is enacted in the visual emblem as she, like Hamlet in his final scene, enacts both sexes in one: she is both bough and garland as he is both sword and wound. Also, it is a moment in which art dominates and asserts its power: the random flowers of the mad scene have been braided into a garland which outlines the O of Ophelia's name. Copulation has become entirely symbolic.

The description of Ophelia's drowning adds momentously to her representation just as she is permanently removed from the play. Just as the play seems to stall just before the rush of events leading to Hamlet's death, so here it stops as Gertrude leisurely relates the drowning. Indeed, the ekphrastic moment is a moment of stop time, as Murray Krieger has so well described, a moment when stillness reigns; this is particularly obvious here since it comes at the end of the scene in which Laertes and Claudius are plotting Hamlet's death and in which Laertes expresses all eagerness for action. Ekphrasis and enargeia run counter to narrative time and seem to move into space as an escape from time and its effects as in the famous example of the Grecian Urn. Ekphrasis allows for a kind of spacing out, a shift into another mode. In Hamlet Ophelia is clearly affronted by the rapid passage of time—by the early loss of young love, by the unexpected murder of her father, by the loss of her own sanity, and finally by death. Moreover, Ophelia is effaced not only by the rapid pace of time, but also by the language of nothingness, the nothing, as Hamlet remarks, between maids'legs (III.ii.115-19). In this instance the nothingness becomes so overwhelmingly sexual as to blot out any other aspects of character. The play's counter-movement to this rapid effacement of Ophelia is the presentation of her as abstract allegorical figure, most particularly in the moment of her drowning in which she paradoxically becomes one with the earth (dragged "to muddy death"). She is now the obvious representation of "Ophelia," or to put it another way, that she was a representation all along is made clear. The picture disrupts any notion of "self by turning "self into pure figuration. Uncannily, Ophelia seems to participate in this movement, answering Hamlet's version of her nothingness with her own, and replacing her earlier frenzied madness with another sort: still, calm, deliberate. Her movement out on the limb is as Murray Krieger describes it in his essay on ekphrasis, "a forever-now" motion (118). It has often seemed to me appropriate in a comic way that the foolish Polonius is killed behind an arras. As a character he is marked by mechanical behavior, two-dimensional as a tapestry. Ophelia also is defined in the play by mechanical operations foisted on her largely by her father, and her death scene is also tapestry-like. Yet, I would argue that the effect on the reader of this move from drama to the still ekphrastic moment is to elicit contemplation—in particular concerning the successes and failures of representation, the losses and triumphs of becoming picture or story. Both Renaissance and contemporary literary critics are sensitive to the peculiar effect of allegorical representation. Peacham says that the figure of allegory "engraves" the image of things "under deep shadowes to the contemplation of the mind." Angus Fletcher suggests that emblems and allegory present codes to be deciphered which elicit, therefore, an interpretive response from the audience: "the silences in allegory mean as much as the filled-in spaces, because by bridging the silent gaps between oddly unrelated images we reach the sunken understructure of thought" (107).¹⁴ Thus one's experience of this madness, if it is that, is quite different from one's experience of Ophelia's earlier mad scene. Quieted by emblem, one's experience is of something beyond.

This movement into eternal icon thus renders Ophelia paradoxically outside of or beyond the very mutability which death usually entails. Such a technical maneuver places her in a new arena as amplified figure: an artificial representation larger than life. Michel Beau-jour argues persuasively that ekphrasis is disruptive of the forward movement of narrative time and that it operates towards the ideal:

Such rhetorical ornaments as enargia, ekphrasis, the whole complex array of evidentia, lie athwart the thread of narrative time, and jeopardize its integrity. Like the imagines agentes of Memoria, descriptive figures derive their energy from idealization, excess, hyperbole, cosmic order. Reaching for optimum effectiveness, descriptive ornaments rise toward an Empyrean inhabited by quasi-Platonic ideas and, as such, they become strangers to mutability, and to the red dust of cause and effect. (42)

As Gertrude slowly details the drowning, Ophelia moves out of narrative and into some "cosmic order," as fantastical as the fantastic garlands she weaves. She becomes part of a pastoral world removed from the corruption of the court; even the liberal shepherds' "grosser name" for the long purples seems merely frank compared to the sexual license and incest at court. She belongs to the artificial realm of pastoral poems:

Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name.

(IV.vii.167-69)

Another way in which the picture of Ophelia specifically argues for Ophelia as an inhabitant now of another realm is in the peculiar imagery used to describe her clothes: "her clothes spread wide,/ And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up." The image "mermaid-like" for Ophelia's skirts is so far-fetched as to force one to ask why such an image occurs. Like mermaids her clothes bear her up, bear her away. Indeed she seems metamorphosed into a water creature of sorts: "like a creature native and indued/ Unto that element," she seems therefore oblivious of drowning. She is, like the mermaids, a momentary inhabitant of two realms, air and water. Some part of her, alien and otherworldly, has split off in the form of skirts, to buoy her up. Paradoxically, at the moment of her death in the play, she is on her way to becoming legendary, the stuff that does not change.

By association, I would argue, Ophelia herself comes to be represented by mermaids.¹⁵ Like the mermaid, Ophelia is split in nature by those who describe her in the play; in Gertrude's speech that split is displayed in the vivid picture of creatures half-women and half-fish buoying Ophelia in the water. As emblems mermaids were readily available to the culture and had been part of the pageants given to entertain Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth in 1591 and at Elvetham in 1595, creating a sort of Ovidian myth for the Elizabethan age.¹⁶ In Midsummer Night's Dream Oberon tells about such a mythical realm in which mermaids calm the seas and sing heavenly music:

I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea maid's music.

(II.i. 150-56)

In Hamlet Shakespeare's imagery of mermaids mythologizes Ophelia, pulling her into an iconic realm of the idealized and transcendent.

The figure of Ophelia behaves allegorically then in pointing insistently beyond itself as a key to something hidden, mysterious, unexpressable, a realm—to use Walter Benjamin's terms—"of hidden knowledge." In allegory, he argues, "all of the things which are used to signify derive, from the very fact of their pointing to something else, a power which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane things, which raises them onto a higher plane, and which can, indeed sanctify them" (175). The shift into ekphrasis may not be able fully to render that realm, but it is a potent technical device which can suggest the larger and inexpressible shift. That is, ekphrasis becomes a poetic device to render a presence which cannot be rendered or to represent that which cannot be represented. If the word is the sign for symbolic and arbitrary mediation, the image becomes a sign for the unmediated. As W. J. T. Mitchell suggests in Iconology:

We imagine the gulf between words and images to be as wide as the one between words and things, between (in the largest sense) culture and nature. The image is the sign that pretends not to be a sign, masquerading as (or, for the believer, actually achieving) natural immediacy and presence. The word is its "other," the artificial, arbitrary production of human will that disrupts natural presence by introducing unnatural elements into the world—time, consciousness, history, and the alienating intervention of symbolic mediation.

(43)¹⁷.

What interests me at this point is what to make of the emblem which is "Ophelia." Although it seems true that Shakespeare's women cannot survive their transformations into art objects, it seems also true that some potency remains in this portrait of Ophelia in part because of some specific aspects of this particular scene such as the witty enactment of copulation which it is tempting to see as some form of transcendent sexuality, insistently beyond the forms offered by the culture of the play. Even the reference to the mermaids seems to draw attention to two sexes in one; if the scene is a scene of symbolic copulation, it is one in which gentle, diffuse, and spread out (like the skirts) seem the operative terms. I also would postulate at least tentatively that when we approach the women of Shakespeare's plays as art objects or as objects of the gaze, we come at them in part, and particularly in the second example, from a modern perspective. Although I do not deny the frequent obliteration of women in the plays, it would be more useful to imagine what sort of potency resides with an icon from the perspective of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation which repressed icons, particularly icons of the central female figure of the Catholic Church. From this vantage, the emblem of Ophelia appears more subversive and potent; as the figure who represents the return of the repressed, she is eerily insistent and tropic.

Moreover, Ophelia seems to participate in her own emblematization. She moves beyond the play at this point to stand in a realm apart like the mimes or the silent ghost. In this tragedy, Hamlet's and Ophelia's refusal to participate in the world as it presents itself results in death. Yet Ophelia's death also has a sort of insistent calm about it, constructed by the technical devices of narration and ekphrasis. I do not mean to overly romanticize silence, but I do mean to draw attention to the potency of refusal.

Further, the emblem, again like the ghost, has a potency associated with the arousing of fear. As many critics have pointed out, this play is very much one of questions concerning where one comes from and where one goes and the fear attendant on such questions. Significantly, then, Ophelia may be said to arouse fear first as an image of the other, that is, woman (for Hamlet, an image of the debased sexuality of his mother), and here imaged as half-woman, half-fish; and secondly as emblem of where one comes from and where one is going (to muddy death). More importantly, perhaps, the ekphrastic portrait of Ophelia arouses fear as the form of emblem itself. This is a version of Freud's "uncanny" in which one feels an eerie fear when one "doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not in fact be animate."¹⁸ W. T. J. Mitchell explains the fear of ekphrastic moments in a manner in keeping with Freud as stemming from a sense of the visual image as a sort of idol or fetish: "the fear stems from the recognition that these signs, and the'others'who believe in them, may be in the process of taking power, appropriating voice" (151). Such fear could arise from a dead person speaking as the ghost speaks to Hamlet or as Ophelia "speaks" from beyond the grave.

She makes herself known ekphrastically by putting forth emblematic flowers—at least so Laertes imagines:

Lay her I'th'earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring.

(V.i.233-34)

The grotesque nature of this image becomes even more evident when it is set next to Shakespeare's source in Persius: "e tumulo fortunataque favilla/ nascentur violae?"¹⁹ The violets in Shakespeare's play grow not out of the ground, but out of Ophelia's very flesh, and are emblems here of the realm beyond the human: fair and unpolluted.

As a sort of decomposing emblem which passes in and out of the iconic, Ophelia forces a recognition of all that such alternation back and forth signifies, including the realms beyond the senses, realms located in absence and death; and, more importantly, of the uncanny and affecting nature of that which will not hold still even in its stillest (most iconic) form. As Ophelia shifts in and out of the iconic, her shifts represent the mysterious absences and gaps which are contained in the "not this" of "that" or the "not that" of "this." She remains unseen. Indeed how could Gertrude have seen her, many critics of the play have asked, the sort of naive question like "how many children had Lady Macbeth?" that leads us to central perceptions concerning male potency (a central issue in Macbeth) or concerning unrepresentativity, to my mind, the central issue in Hamlet. That is, the Gertrude who has been represented in the play could not have witnessed and then narrated Ophelia's drowning; that she appears "other" at this point further underscores the instability of representation. That Gertrude describes Ophelia as "incapable of her own distress" signals not only Ophelia's removal from self (by madness perhaps), but also her incapability, as in sonnet 113: "Incapable of more, replete with you./ My most true mind thus maketh mine m'eyen untrue." As Stephen Booth has it in his notes to the sonnets, "the capsulation of everything in the poem has logically distinguished in the course of reporting a fanciful collapse in distinctions of function." Vision undoes vision.²⁰ In discussing Shakespeare, many critics have described his use of doubles and substitutes and replays; here is another sort of doubling: the use of ekphrasis to represent and underscore the O which is missing. One is blocked from seeing, thwarted in one's efforts to pierce the narrative to see the picture which itself blocks "Ophelia." Neil Hertz associates "blockage" with the sublime, describing the activity of a mind attempting to match the extent of an object: "but when its capacity matches the extent of the object, the sense of containing the object, but also (with a hint of the theological paradox) of being filled by it, possessed by it, blocks the mind's further movment and'composes it into a solemn sedateness,' 'strikes it with deep silent wonder.'"²¹ Ophelia's ekphrastic presence in the play, particularly given the historical moment, suggests the impossibility of more than seeing what the viewer "could not have seen" (as Hamlet can never see his own conception and his own death) to an audience intent on viewing what is not there—the sheer impossible effort of which may also help to create a sense of the transcendent or of the frustration which lapses into it.

Notes

¹ William Shakespeare, Hamlet. ed. Harold Jenkins, Arden ed. (New York: Routledge, 1982).

² Irigaray: "How could she be anything but suggestible and hysterical when her sexual instincts have been castrated, her sexual feelings, representatives, and representations forbidden" (Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill, [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985], 59-60).

³ Martha Ronk, "Viola's [lack of] Patience," Centennial Review 37 (1993): 384-99.

⁴ Angus Fletcher, Allegory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), chapter 6.

⁵ Elaine Showalter, "Representing Ophelia: women, madness, and the responsibilities of feminist criticism," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, (New York: Methuen, 1985), 77-94. Bridget Lyons, "The Iconography of Ophelia," ELH 44 (1977): 60-74. Maurice Charney and Hanna Charney, "The language of Madwomen in Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists," Signs 3 (1977): 451-60. Jacques Lacan, "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet," in Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1977).

⁶ The definitions for figure in the OED are too numerous to include in full here. I give some of the ones relevant to my argument: "5a. An embodied (human) form; a person considered with regard to visible form or appearance. 9a. The image, likeness, or representation of something material or immaterial. 1531 Elyot Gov. I. xxvi, There is nat a more playne figure of idlenesse, than playinge at dise. 10. esp. An artificial representation of the human form. b. In painting, drawing, etc. H.a. Represented character; part enacted; hence, position, capacity. 1610 Shakes. Temp. III.ii i 83 Brauely the figure of this Harpie, hast thou Perform'd. 12. An emblem, type."

⁷ I am grateful to my colleague Michael Near of Occidental College for these perceptions.

⁸ Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (London: F.G.W.L. and W.G., 1662). See also the Longer Notes in Jenkins, 544-47. Alciatus pictures a willow in plate 201 in a way that associates the willow not with unrequited love, but with sexuality, if not assault: "A willow tree near a stream. . . . At the left a nude supine woman with a burning torch at her side. Behind the woman a kneeling bearded man reaching between the legs of a second nude woman who leans back on her knees" (Emblemata [Padua, 1621]).

⁹Elizabethean and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 112.

¹⁰ Rosemary Freeman, ed., A Collection of Emblems, Ancient and Moderne by George Wither, (reprint, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press 1975); Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

In contemporary literary criticism the word ekphrasis (defined in the OED as "a plain declaration or interpretation of a thing," 1715) has been used to refer to these verbal images and to connect them to one of the earliest and the most famous examples of such rhetorical practice, the shield of Achilles. W. T. J. Mitchell, Iconography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) and an unpublished essay "On Poems On Pictures: Ekphrasis and the Other." Murray Krieger, "The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoon Revisited," in The Play and the Place of Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967). John Hollander, "The Gazer's Spirit," in The Romantics and Us, ed. Gene W. Roff, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). Michel Beaujour, "Some Paradoxes of Description," Yale French Studies 61 (1981): 27-59.

Concerning terminology, Jean Hagstrum provides important information about current use of the term: "I use the noun ecphrasis and the adjective ecphrastic in a more limited sense to refer to that special quality of giving voice and language to the otherwise mute art object. My usage is etymologically sound since the Greek noun and adjective come from ekphrazein which means "to speak out," "to tell in full" (The Sister Arts [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958], 18 note 34). Yet in Renaissance books of rhetoric the word which most frequently occurs for vivid pictures in language is enargeia (also translated as illustratio and evidentia and closely related to ut pictura poesis) to show enthusiasm for vivid pictures in language. In praising Homer's use of pictures, Erasmus refers to evidentia: "We use this whenever, for the sake of amplifying, adorning, or pleasing, we do not state a thing simply, but set it forth to be viewed as though portrayed in color on a tablet, so that it may seem that we have painted, not narrated, and that the reader has seen, not read" (On Copia of Words and Ideas, trans. Donald B. King and H. David Rix [Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1982], 47). Cf. Sister Miriam Joseph, Rhetoric in Shakespeare's Time (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962).

"The'Enargia, or cleereness of representation, requird in absolute Poems is not the perspicuous delivery of a lowe invention; but high, and harty invention exprest in most significant, and unaffected phrase; it serves not a skillful Painters turne, to draw the figure of a face onely to make knowne who it represents; but hee must lymn, give luster, shaddow, and heightening; which though ignorants will esteeme spic'd, and too curious, yet such as have the judiciall perspective, will see it hath, motion, spirit, and life,'George Chapman, prefatory letter, Ovid's Banquet of Sense, 1595)," quoted in Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947); cf. Sidney, "The Defense of Poesy (1595)," The Renaissance in England, ed. Hyder Rollins and Herschel Baker (Boston: D. C. Heath and Co., 1954), 610.

I examined numerous primary sources, some in reprint, many at the Huntington Library. Henry Green, Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers (London: Trubner & Co., 1870); Whitney's "Choice of Emblemes," ed. Henry Green (London: Lovell Reeve & Co., 1866); A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne by George Wither, intro. Rosemary Freeman (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1975); Peacham's Compleat Gentleman, intro. G. S. Gordon (London: Clarendon Press, 1906); Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna 1612, English Emblem books No. 5, ed. John Horden (Scolar Press, 1973); Caesar Ripa, Iconologia: or, Moral Emblems, (London: Benj. Motte, 1709); Alciatus, Emblemata (Padua, 1621); Francis Quarles, Emblems, divine and moral (London: Alkexr Hogg, 1778); Cesare Ripa, Baroque and Rococo pictorial imagery. The 1758-60 Hertel edition of "Iconologia" (New York: Dover Publications, 1971); Speaking Pictures: a gallery of pictorial poetry from the sixteenth century to the present (New York: Harmony Books, 1975); Richard Sherry, A Treatise of schemes and tropes (1550): and his translation of the education of children by Desiderius Erasmus (Gainsville: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints, 1964).

Several more recent publications suggest the pervasiveness of the pictorial in Renaissance literature and culture. Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (New York: Octagon Books, 1966); John Steadman, "Falstaff as Acteon: A Dramatic Emblem," SQ 14 (1963): 230-44; David Bergeron, Pageantry in the Shakespeare Theater (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1985); Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut pictura poesis (New York: Norton, 1967); Hagstrum, The Sister Arts; Mario Praz, Mnemosyne: the parallel between literature and the visual arts (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970) and Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (London: The Warburg Institute, 1939); Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1954); Richard Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Peter M. Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); Marjorie Donker and George M. Muldrow, Dictionary of Literary-Rhetorical Conventions of the English Renaissance (West-port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 239; David Rosand, "Ekphrasis and the Generation of Images," Arion 1 (Winter, 1990): 61-105. William S. Heckscher, "Shakespeare in His Relationship to the Visual Arts: A study in Paradox," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, ed. S. Schoenbaum, The Report of the MLA Seminar, XIII-XIV (1970-71): 5-71; John Doebler, Shakespeare's Speaking Pictures (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974).

¹¹ The discussion of women as art objects is widespread. See, for example: Jacqueline Rose, "Sexuality in the reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure," in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis, (New York: Routledge, 1985); Stanley Cavell, "Othello and the Stake of the Other," in Disowning Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1977); Seduction and Theory, readings of Gender, Representation, and Rhetoric, ed. Dianne Hunter, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (1975): 6-18; E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film (New York: Methuen, 1983).

¹² T. W. Baldwin, Shakespeare's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 121:

The'point'was whether Ophelia's cause was'Voluntaria, quae Consilio.'The test is'Nam iacere telurn, voluntatis est.'Did Ophelia wittingly commit the act of drowning? If she went to the water she did. But'ferire quem nolueris, fortunae.'If the water came to her, she did not; then she drowned herself in her own defence,'se offendendo'in fact, as the first Clown rather aptly twists the proper phrase—in spite of the fact that Shakspere knew no Latin! The First Clown is thoroughly correct in his fundamental procedure, however ludicrously he may have expressed it. Shakespeare should have procured this knowledge . . . from Topica in Stratford Grammar School.

¹³ Roland Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 299: "Over the centuries prior to 1600, both church practice and doctrine consistently held that a person so patently mad as Ophelia should receive the full rites of Christian burial. Her death, however apparently suicide, was not'by her fault'in the sense of rational and responsible choice, but was brought on by her madness, either directly or by the loss of a sense of consequences. Contemporary attitudes in 1600, buttressed by over a thousand years of church history, attest to the Tightness of Laertes'claims for his sister." Cf. Michael MacDonald, "Ophelia's Maimed Rites," Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 309-17.

¹⁴ "Peacham says justly that this figure [allegoria] serves to engrave the lively images of things,'and to present them under deep shadowes to the contemplation of the mind, wherein wit and iudgement take pleasure, and the remembrance receiveth a longlasting impression'(p. 27 [1593])" (Tuve, 108).

¹⁵Harvard Concordance: ERR 3.02.45; MND 2.01.150; 3H6 3.02.186; ANT 2.02.209; LUC 1411; ERR 3.02.164; VEN 429; VEN 777; ANT 2. .02.207. In Shakespeare's plays the image of mermaids is usually a reference to sirens—to those who are seductive, and one might think this reference an appropriate association with Hamlet's representation of Ophelia. Roland Frye refers to an emblem from 1567, intriguing for its similarity to aspects of the plot of Hamlet; it points to Mary's public involvement with the assassination of her husband: "A mermaid (traditional symbol for prostitution and adultery) was shown crowned, and labeled with'M R'for Maria Regina. Below, a hare represented Bothwell's heraldic crest; it was labeled with the initials I.H. for his name, James Hepburn, and surrounded by a corona of daggers to signify assassination. As the days passed, it became increasingly clear that the suspected adultery would soon be transformed into marriage" (104). The final emblem printed in Green's Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers is one I have not been able to locate myself: a mermaid is pictured circled by a snake biting its tail: "Colophon. 'Ex literarum studiis immortalitatem acquiri,'Alciat, ed. 1534, 45." Given my argument concerning Ophelia, what interests me especially is the association of the mermaid with immortality and eternity. Cf. also Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975).

¹⁶ See the introduction to the Arden edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream (ed. Harold F. Brooks [London: Methuen, 1979]): "the very fact that what Oberon describes is comparable up to a point with each of the two entertainments confirms the conclusion that it has for antecedent not one occasion, but the kind of courtly diversion they both exemplify. It was a kind in which the pageantry frequently drew (as with Arion) from Ovid's mythology, or still better, created new myth in the Ovidian style" (lxviii). Cf. Ashley Montagu's quotation from Peacham's Minerva Britanna 1612: "The friendly Dolphin, while within the maine, / At libertie delightes, to sport and play,/ Himselfe is fresh, and doth no whit retaine/ The brinish saltnes of the boundless Sea/ Wherein he lives" (The Dolphin in History [Los Angeles: UCLA Clark Memorial Library, 1963], title page). Antony and Cleopatra: "his delights/ Were dolphin-like, they show'd his back above/ The element they lived in: in his livery / Walk'd crowns and crownets" (V.ii.88-91).

¹⁷ In his essay on Quarles's emblem books, Ernest B. Gilman emphasizes the mystery behind both the picture and the language: "On the other side of the ut pictura poesis equation, language might be conceived as intrinsically pictorial, distinguished at its best by the enargeia and colors of the liveliest painter. In the Augustinian tradition the verbum of scripture, although accommodated to the halting human intellect, shadows the nontemporal, luminous res of divine truth. The goal of interpretation—formed in part by the neo-Platonists'sense of our intuitive, unmediated perception of the intelligible as a mode of visionary experience—was to see through language to the realities themselves, from the temporal realities to the eternal realities, from talk to silence, and from discourse to vision. Indeed the technical language of Biblical exegesis (typos, schema, figura, paradigma) is insistently visual ("Word and Image in Quarles'Emblemes," in The Language of Images. ed. W. J. T. Mitchell [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974], 62-63). Perhaps indeed one of the reasons Renaissance writers were so endlessly interested in rhetorical figures is that the desire to hint at this Platonic realm was both culturally strong and also in question. Perhaps emblem books had such enormous popularity as replacements for Catholic icons—pictures of virtues, replacing statues of the Virgin, or as in Hamlet, the picture of Ophelia replacing all that is missing not only for the hero but also, as he himself suggests, in the culture itself.

¹⁸ Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," in On Creativity and the Unconscious, ed. Benjamin Nelson, (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 132. Kenneth Reinhard and Julia Lupton, "Shapes of Grief: Freud, Hamlet, and Mourning," Genders 4 (1989): 50-67.

¹⁹ Baldwin, 543.

²⁰ Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 375.

²¹ Neil Hertz, "The notion of Blockage in literature of the sublime," in The End of the Line (N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1985), 48.