SOURCE: “‘Ower Swete Sokor’: The Role of Ophelia in Hamlet,” in Shakespeare's Play within Play: Medieval Imagery and Scenic Form in Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 1990, pp. 7-19.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1986, Guilfoyle traces Ophelia's character to the legend of Mary Magdalen as developed in medieval drama.]

The virtuous disguise of evil in woman is described most bitterly by Shakespeare in King Lear (IV.vi.120-29): “Behold yond simpering dame / Whose face between her forks presages snow … / But to the girdle do the gods inherit, / Beneath is all the fiends'.” If she can be separated from sexual considerations, for example in royalty or in comedy, woman can appear on a level with, if not equal to, man; but where his feelings are most deeply aroused, in love and veneration, or in lust and frustration, the writer finds her angel or devil, separately or interchangeably. In the opening cantos of The Faerie Queene,¹ Spenser presents the two pictures of woman which combine in a potent myth in the literature of all ages: the pure, young, innocent Una, characterized by her name, and her exact physical duplicate, who is, behind the façade, a filthy fiend. This sinister figure is later presented as Fidessa/Duessa, but in her first appearance she usurps the fair form of Una, the one truth. In one of the fragments of Euripidean tragedy, there is the saying “Woman brings to man the greatest possible succour, and the greatest possible harm.”² The words for “greatest possible succour” are ophelian … megistan.

Ophelia's name links her to the idea of succor; “ower swete sokor” was a phrase used of Mary Magdalen in the Digby Magdalen play. In different ways, Ophelia and Magdalen embody the “angel/devil” dichotomy of woman, and the figure of Magdalen appears in the imagery of Ophelia's scenes throughout Hamlet. Conventions in Shakespeare are often hidden, because in his hands they do not appear conventional, but if the strands of the Magdalen legends are examined, it can be seen that many of them are woven into Ophelia's words and actions. These images reflect Shakespeare's preoccupation, not with the horrific figure described by Lear, but with innocence or good faith mistaken—for example, Desdemona mistaken by Othello, Hermione by Leontes, Imogen by Posthumus, Cordelia by Lear—and Ophelia by Hamlet. The young woman in the Saxo and Belleforest versions of the Hamlet story was not virtuous (and not, of course, called Ophelia); Shakespeare changes this into the figure which seems to have haunted him. The tragic mistake is explicit in The Tragedy of Hoffman, a crude revenge play which borrows much from Hamlet and may have been commissioned on the heels of Hamlet's success. Mathias describes the innocent Lucibella thus: “Shee is as harlots, faire, like guilded tombs / Goodly without; within all rottenness … Angel in show, / Divell in heart.”³

In The Faerie Queene, angel and devil are presented in simple allegorical form, as two different figures that look the same. The Red Cross Knight abandons Una, because he assumes that the girl he finds in flagrante dilectu is his virgin fallen. In Hamlet, the duality is used differently, but basically the same thing happens. Hamlet abandons Ophelia, maligning her in the most brutal terms, because he assumes her to be corrupt or, at the least, on the first step downwards. Archimago creates the false Una; Hamlet, on this occasion as on others, combines the roles of hero and villain in creating for himself his false Ophelia. He, like the Red Cross Knight, is mistaken; but his mistake is not retrieved.

The presentation of the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia at first seems contradictory. In Act I.iii Polonius and Laertes warn Ophelia that Hamlet's wooing may not be honorable, and she is instructed to avoid his importunities. It should be noted that his wooing is of recent date: “He hath my Lord of late made many tenders / Of his affection to me.” But in Act III.i, she appears as the neglected mistress and reproaches Hamlet for his coldness. This may be an inconsistency, but it may alternatively reflect a major change in Hamlet. Between the picture of the ardent young lover given by Ophelia to her father, and Hamlet's bitter comments to her father (II.ii.181ff) and to herself (III.i.103ff), there is the key encounter of Hamlet and Ophelia in her closet.

Images from the various Magdalen stories appear in all Ophelia's scenes except the “fatal mistake” scene in the closet, recounted in Act II.i. It is therefore entirely appropriate that this scene should be offstage, as an unseen key to the tragic role of Ophelia. For she is not the prostitute, the early Magdalen taunted by Hamlet in the nunnery scene; she is pure, as her name suggests and as her brother repeatedly describes her, “Whose worth … / Stood challenger on mount of all the age / For her perfections.” She is the figure not of the repentant sinner, but of the purity which can atone for the sins of others. She is to intercede, in her “orisons,” in the nunnery, as a ministering angel. Her prayers are all for others—“O help him, you sweet heavens!” “O heavenly powers, restore him!” “God dild you!” “God be at your table!” “God ha' mercy on his soul! And of all Christian souls I pray God,” “God bye you.” Her final utterance (reported) is “snatches of old lauds.”⁴ She opposes truth to Hamlet's feigning and feinting; he pretends to be mad, she is really mad; he meditates on death, she dies. Critics have noted that Ophelia never mentions her love for Hamlet. Her function goes far beyond that of a girl caught up in an unhappy love affair.

The Magdalen imagery serves to illumine on the one hand the succor which the pure Ophelia can offer through atonement; and on the other, the delusion of female wantonness from which Hamlet suffers and which is part of his tragedy.

“O my lord, my lord, I have been so affrighted!” introduces the description of Hamlet face to face with female depravity—depravity that exists only in his imagination, as the scene itself exists only in the imagination of the audience. Hamlet has seen something of the rottenness within in his mother's summary grief and incestuous marriage; he subsequently hears from the ghost the story of the murder, the stain of which, together with the stain of adultery, is added to the defaced image of his mother. Distracted, he runs to Ophelia, to gaze on the pure young face which between her forks presages snow. What he sees is presumably what Fradubio saw when he came upon Duessa bathing herself in origen and thyme, and saw her “in her proper hew.” Hamlet leaves Ophelia with his head over his shoulder in the gesture of the damned, that of the runner in Dante's seventh Circle of Hell, and of Trevisan fleeing Despair.⁵

Hamlet makes no reference to Ophelia in the play until after this encounter. We hear of Hamlet as an ardent young lover and as the author of the exaggerated and very youthful jingle beginning “Doubt thou the stars are fire.” But once he has rejected womankind, including Ophelia, he never (until the funeral scene) speaks or refers to her except with the imagery of sexual corruption. He calls Polonius a fishmonger (or brothel keeper) and after what seems to be a passing reference to the sun breeding maggots in a dead dog, he says of the “fishmonger's” daughter: “Let her not walk i' the sun; conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive—friend look to't.” Traditionally, the serpent's egg was hatched by the sun; Brutus, resolving on the death of Caesar, decides to “think him as a serpent's egg / Which hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous” (Julius Caesar II.i.32-33). Ophelia's “kind” is now, in Hamlet's thoughts, the progeny of the serpent; and possibly, if we go back to the maggots, the swarming brood of Error, “soon conceiv'd,” which will devour its mother.⁶ With Ophelia in the nunnery scene, Hamlet is still haunted by this image: “Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?”

From the time of his fatal mistake, Hamlet is without the support, the ophelia, that he needs. His mother is sunk in adultery, incest, and complicity in murder;⁷ he is forced to reject her, and with her he rejects all women, and Ophelia suffers the same fate as Una.

By Act IV, Ophelia's rejection is total, her brother gone, her father dead, her lover brutally estranged from her having killed her father and treated her as a prostitute. In her rejected state, she rejects reason. In this she is like Lear, and like Lear, she will die, the will to live being annihilated. In her mad scene she can only “play” the tragedy in which she is caught up, like Cassandra helplessly enacting what she can truly see but cannot intervene to prevent.

The mad scene is, at first glance, a jumble of songs, dialogue, and lament. However, characters who go mad in renaissance drama frequently speak more truth, and deeper truth than when sane, and this can be said of Ophelia (who is sadly confused when her wits are about her) as of Lear. It is the order of what she says that is disturbed. “Oh when degree is shak'd … the enterprise is sick”;⁸ conversely, in the Elizabethan world picture, when the mind is sick, the divine order by which man can live in harmony is shaken and in chaos. What happens to Ophelia is what she has described as having happened to Hamlet—the sweet bells are jangled, out of tune and harsh, as bells will be if rung out of order. The images of her mad scene show derangement in its literal sense, but they are nonetheless images of the truth—the truth in chaos because of the havoc in her mind. Laertes, who provides a commentary on her madness, sums this up when he says, “This nothing's more than matter.” It is “nothing” because evil derangement has taken over the order of a rational mind; but the disordered fragments are of something good and precious, which has been under attack ever since Hamlet's irruption “as if he had been loosed out of hell.”

The Magdalen legends bear strongly on the detail of Ophelia's mad scene, and it is therefore appropriate now to consider the outline of the legends. In these, the images of virtue and depravity in woman, as symbolic of the problem of good and evil, provide the emotive power. Little of this power can be gleaned from the New Testament. The legends grew firstly by the identification of various women mentioned in the Gospels as the one Magdalen—including the woman taken in adultery, the “Mary” who was the sister of Lazarus, and the woman of Samaria—and secondly by a process of polarization of her states of sin and repentance. She is made not merely a sinner, but a prostitute, not just a repentant disciple, but a saint. From a practitioner of the oldest profession, she rises to be no less than the “beata dilectrix” of Christ.⁹ In medieval literature she and Christ address each other as “love,” “true love,” and “lover.”¹⁰ She is the most important figure at the tomb of Christ (in the Coventry Resurrection play costumes were provided for Magdalen and for “two side Maries”),¹¹ and was the first witness of the Resurrection. Her tears were symbolic of the purifying waters of baptism. Her hold on dramatists, ballad writers, and artists can be well understood.

One other aspect of her legend bears on the parallel imagery of Ophelia, and that is the threefold interpretation of her relationship with God. God for Magdalen is father, lover, and brother—all as manifestations of the same divine love. In the ballad “The Maid and the Palmer” an old man—the figure of the Father—appears to the woman at the well, identified in medieval tradition as Magdalen. She hopes he is “the good old man / That all the world beleeves vpon.” In a Scandinavian version of the ballad, it is Jesus who appears in the pilgrim's robe.¹² Magdalen's Christ/brother is Lazarus, whose raising from the dead prefigured the Resurrection, and Ophelia's brother at one stage briefly enacts this. In the deeply symbolic graveyard scene in Hamlet, with a setting redolent of the Last Judgment plays in the mystery cycles, Laertes leaps into his sister's open grave and then emerges from it.

The young woman in the known sources of the Hamlet story has neither father nor brother; the provision of both in Shakespeare's play opens the way for the multiple imagery of the threefold relationship in Ophelia's mad scene.

Three religious plays—the Digby Mary Magdalene, Wager's morality play The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene, and the Benediktbeuern Passion play—are convenient texts from which to trace parallels with Shakespeare's heroine.¹³ Shakespeare may not have known the plays, but the legends were common knowledge, and the plays contain many of them. In the main, the following parallels are traced through the Digby play, which has been dated late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. The play begins with an affectionate family scene between Magdalen, her sister Martha, her father Cyrus, and her brother Lazarus. The family is about to be scattered, as Cyrus divides his estates between his children. It can be seen that although the topic of conversation is different from Hamlet I.iii, there is some similarity in the characters present and in the occasion. After leaving her home, Magdalen is led to an inn by Luxuria, and is seduced by Curiosity, who gets the better of her, so to speak. Curiosity's conversation with her, in a tone of mock gallantry mixed with indecency, is reminiscent of the cruel banter with which Hamlet assails Ophelia in the play scene. In Wager's play there is a similar conversation between Magdalen and Infidelitie, the Vice. It is interesting to see Hamlet so nearly assuming the role of vice, or villain, in this instance.

The seduction in Hamlet is described in Ophelia's “valentine” song. In the Digby play, Magdalen becomes a prostitute and is seen in her “erbyr” waiting for her “valentynys”—“A, God be wyth my valentynys, / My byrd swetyng, my lovys so dere!” (ll. 564-65). In the Wager play she decks herself in elaborate costumes and jewels, and is persuaded to buy cosmetics to paint her face. In the Benediktbeuern play, she visits a shop with her fellow prostitutes to buy cosmetics. Hamlet in the nunnery scene adopts the tone of a contemporary preacher rebuking the painted ladies of the town: “I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another; you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and you nickname God's creatures …” (III.i.145-48). The “sweet ladies” to whom Ophelia later bids goodnight, the coach for which she calls, are part of this life in gaudio.¹⁴

In the mad scene Ophelia is acting out, among other facets of the tragedy, the role of harlot which Hamlet has foisted on her. To the king she suddenly says, “They say the owl was a baker's daughter.” This is perhaps the only direct reference to a legend almost certainly linked with Magdalen. According to a country legend cited by Douce, Jesus asked for bread at a baker's shop; the girl in the shop cheated him, and he punished her by changing her into an owl.¹⁵ This is typical of many New Testament apocryphal stories, in which the character of Jesus is made stern and retributive to sinners. The outline of the story is similar to that of the ballad “The Maid and the Palmer.” There an old man asked for water at a well. The girl at the well refused him, and he punished her by changing her first to a stepping stone and then to a bell-clapper, and lastly by sending her to hell for seven years. The ballad tells one of the stories of Magdalen and Jesus which grew up after identification of Magdalen with the woman of Samaria. The owl and the baker's daughter may have derived from stories of St. Mary of Egypt, who was always depicted with loaves of bread, and was often confused with Magdalen.¹⁶

The Digby Magdalen described herself when a prostitute as “drynchyn” (drowned) “in synne” (l. 754). In her death Ophelia re-enacts this drowning in sin; the “long purples,” which some critics have found so incongruous in the Queen's speech describing the drowning, can be seen as the key to this re-enactment.¹⁷

The waters that meet over Magdalen's head are those of baptism, and she emerges repentant. In token of her changed condition, she sheds her jewels and dresses in black.¹⁸ Later she will assume the appearance of the Donatello Magdalen, her hair dishevelled, her face drawn, her clothing in rags. Early in the nunnery scene, Ophelia returns to Hamlet the “rich gifts,” “remembrances of yours,” which he had given her.¹⁹ There is no reference to her appearance in the mad scene, except for the Q.1 stage direction (“Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing”), but traditionally she assumes the disorder of the penitent's hair and dress, which is equally indicative of mental derangement. It is worth noting, because other similar instances will emerge, that the “nighted colour” of mourning which Hamlet wears is also the outward show of repentance; Hamlet is, in a sense, wearing Magdalen's color when he confronts Ophelia.

The central scene of the Magdalen story is the Resurrection. She first visits the sepulchre with the two “side” Maries, bearing herbs and spices to anoint the dead body of Jesus. They find the tomb empty and are told by an angel that Christ is risen. Left alone, Magdalen is the first person to see the risen Christ. This scene, described in the gospels with some variations, is also the subject of the first recognizably dramatic ceremony in the liturgy—“Quem quaeritis in sepulchro,” “whom seek ye in the sepulchre?” to which the angel adds, “He is risen, he is not here” (“non est hic, surrexit”).²⁰ This scene is linked in Magdalen legend with a passage from The Song of Solomon, for Magdalen, the beata dilectrix of Christ and sister of Lazarus the Christ-figure, was identified with the sister/spouse of the Old Testament: “I will … seke him that my soule loueth; I soght him, but I founde him not. / The watchemen that went about the citie founde me; to whome I said, Haue you sene him whome my soule loueth?”²¹

It takes little imagination to see that from this line one could continue directly with the first line of Ophelia's song—“How should I your true love know?”—which like Raleigh's “As you came from the Holy Land,” seems to start from an old ballad about a pilgrimage to Walsingham, but finishes in the poet's own idiom.²² Since Magdalen traditionally calls Jesus her love, the song which (with interruptions) runs through the mad scene can be seen as the negative Quem quaeritis of an evil, disordered world. Parts of the song, including the opening lines, are missing; it is jumbled and broken up, and spoken by various persons who are not identified. But the answer to the seeker's question is clear: the true love, or Father, or brother, is dead, not risen; “he will not come again.” The lines beginning “And will a not come again?” are full of negative-resounding doom—not, not, no, no, never—and give the counsel of despair, “Go to thy death-bed.”

The true love is to be recognized “by his cockle hat and staff / And his sandal shoon”—the pilgrim's dress worn by the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus, and by the man at the well in “The Maid and the Palmer.” The pilgrim is buried, “At his heels a stone”—an indication that he is not in a grave, where the stone would be at the head, but in a sepulchre sealed by a stone. The “O, ho!” which follows this line is the mourner's cry of grief, as Magdalen wept over her brother Lazarus and at the sepulchre of Christ. The white shroud of the martyr is “Larded all with sweet flowers,” the equivalent of the herbs and spices that Magdalen brought to the tomb. The faulty rhythm of “Which bewept to the grave did not go” points the intrusive not; this body was not destined for the grave. The “true love showers” are the tears of the mourner (cf. Richard II, V.i.20: “And wash him fresh again with true-love tears”); Magdalen's tears are among the most famous ever shed. But Shakespeare is always alive to a double meaning, and “showers” are also pangs, the bitter pains felt by the “true love.” In the Digby play Lazarus exclaims, “A! A, now brystyt myn hartt! þis is a sharp showyr!” (l. 822), and the word was in use in this meaning as late as 1637. The first part of the song ends, and Ophelia, after greeting the king, says, “they say the owl was a baker's daughter.”

The lament over the dead love begins again with “They bore him barefaced on the bier.” The “hey non nonny” line which follows is not in Q.2 and looks like an interpolation.²³ The many tears again recall the copious water which flowed from Magdalen's eyes. The figure in the last verse is that of the father—indeed, of the Ancient of Days: “His beard was as white as snow, / All flaxen was his poll” (cf. Daniel 7.9: “the Ancient of daies did sit, whose garment was white as snowe, and the heere of his head like the pure woll”). The earthly father dead, and the earthly brother who has gone away, are mourned by Ophelia in her visionary state as Magdalen mourned Jesus, who was at once the heavenly Father and her “true love,” and also Lazarus, her brother who was a type of Christ. Thus it is not, in this strangely haunting scene, a particular death and absence which is lamented; it is the death of Ophelia's whole world, and she symbolizes this also with the flowers which she scatters among the assembled company. They are funeral flowers, handed to those who will shortly die—the King, the Queen, Laertes, and herself.

The legends of Magdalen's later life describe her as a preacher, converting the heathen, and as a hermit in the wilderness, where she is fed by angels until her death and ascent to heaven. In a long poem published at Lyon in 1668,²⁴ Magdalen is described as preaching to her former fellow-prostitutes and exhorting them to enter nunneries. With no earlier reference, this cannot be directly related to Hamlet's repeated exhortations to Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery,” but it is at least likely that the Magdalen of legend would do this, as the patron saint of reformed prostitutes and as a preacher.²⁵ If so, Hamlet in the nunnery scene is opposing the repentant Magdalen to the figure of her former self which he sees in Ophelia. He not only wears Magdalen's “nighted colour” but also speaks her words.

In the death of Ophelia, borne down the weeping brook, the main image is of another suffering innocent, the Fair Maid of Astolat, who floated down the Thames. This story from Malory may also have influenced the funeral scene, for it is the King (Arthur) who commands arrangements for the funeral, and the ceremony is attended by the Fair Maid's “true love” (Lancelot) and brother (Lavaine).²⁶ These images may testify to the “embryology” (to use T.S. Eliot's word²⁷) of the episodes of the drowning and of the funeral rather than to their meaning; but it may be worth noting that Claudius's “arrangements” for Ophelia's funeral are the reverse of what they seem. According to the Clowns, Ophelia killed herself, and only by “great command” was she allowed Christian burial; even so, only “maimed rites” were permitted. Yet it is clear from the Queen's description that Ophelia did not deliberately throw herself into the water; it appears that although the Queen knew well enough what happened, different information was given to the “crowner,” which deprived her of the benefit of the full funeral service. It is Claudius who has “maimed” the rites, not for the first time, as Polonius her father was interred “hugger-mugger”; and his action aligns Ophelia's funeral with the hasty burial of Christ, leading in turn to Magdalen's visit to the tomb with herbs and spices.

The stage properties which accompany Ophelia are, significantly, specified in the text. The traditional symbol of Magdalen's contempt of the world, the skull, is thrown from Ophelia's grave early in the funeral scene, and lies nearby as her body is prepared for burial. Earlier, in the nunnery scene, she carried a book, the symbol of Magdalen the contemplative. The flowers in the mad scene may be taken to stand for the funeral herbs and spices which Magdalen carries in her traditional ointment jar. The rue, which she probably hands to the King since it must be worn “with a difference” (that is, with a sign that he is not in the main line of succession),²⁸ is also the “herb of grace,” a phrase as relevant in this context as the “long purples” are to the drowning.

In tracing religious imagery in Hamlet, it is instructive to compare it with Der Bestrafte Brudermord, a corrupt German version of Shakespeare's play in which all religious reference is omitted. Thus in Ophelia's part, there is no scene with her father and brother; no account of her confrontation by Hamlet in her closet; no book or skull; no drowning (she commits suicide by throwing herself from the top of a hill); her mad scenes are utterly secular nonsense, and there is no graveyard scene.²⁹ The Magdalen imagery changes all this. As has been noted above, the drowning is parallel to the “drowning in sin” of the early Magdalen, and the water to which Ophelia is as “native and indued” is reminiscent both of the tears shed over the feet of Christ and of the redemptive waters of baptism; water is as much part of Ophelia's story as it is of Magdalen's. Laertes, Ophelia's commentator in this as in the mad scene, evokes the saint-like figure that she is to be, the fair and unpolluted flesh in earth, the “minist'ring angel” in heaven. The idea of ophelia, succor, is implicit in “minist'ring.”³⁰

Like Cassandra, like Iphigenia, Ophelia suffers for the sins of the house. Johnson's famous comment can therefore be seen in an unusual light: “the gratification which would arise from the destruction of an usurper and a murderer is abated by the untimely death of Ophelia, the young, the beautiful, the harmless, and the pious.” The devout Johnson would undoubtedly have been shocked at the suggestion that the untimely death of Christ robs us of any gratification arising from the defeat of Satan; but without the idea of atonement, the power of Ophelia's tragedy cannot be fully grasped. In her mad scene she mourns the loss and absence which has doomed the court of Denmark, polluted by lust and murder. “Where,” she asks, “is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?” Where, indeed? Her words echo the transferred epithet of Horatio's lines in the first scene of the play, “What art thou, that usurp'st this time of night, / Together with that fair and warlike form / In which the majesty of buried Denmark / Did sometimes march?” Ophelia's death is the signal for the retributive action which at last is taken when her beloved brother unwittingly provides the poisoned weapon for Hamlet's hand.

As Ophelia is not the double character of the legendary Magdalen, but only the purer half, the other half being painted in by false accusation, why should Shakespeare choose the image of Magdalen to illumine the role of Ophelia? The popular appeal of Magdalen is that she epitomizes hope. She sins, she repents; she is forgiven, and by grace she is made pure. She is therefore the hope of every sinner. For Hamlet, “all is not well,” “how ill all's here about my heart”; but Ophelia says “I hope all will be well.” The Magdalen raised from prostitution to sainthood provides a resolution of the Una/Fidessa riddle. The sin in Magdalen could be atoned for, sinner and penitent made one and purified. Ophelia acts this atonement through the scenes of Magdalen's life. Hamlet speaks of the ghost as a hellish resurrection, out of the “ponderous and marble jaws” of his father's sepulchre, “making night hideous”; Ophelia evokes the heavenly resurrection in the search for her “true love.”

The idea of atonement (adunamentum) brings us back to Spenser's Una, who like Ophelia is the face of true purity. With his “Una,” Hamlet might have reached the Castle of Holiness; he rejects the woman who could have been his “swete sokor”—the phrase used of Magdalen by her grateful disciples in the Digby play (l. 1963). Laertes gives the key lines on his sister: “O Rose of May, / Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia.” The rose of May is probably the white rose, the symbol of both the Virgin and Magdalen, whose tears were supposed to have washed it white. The “dear maid” is a virgin, pure in spite of all Hamlet's suspicions; the “kind sister” is in contrast to the incestuous and therefore unnatural (unkind) sister-in-law of Claudius; and “sweet Ophelia” is a version of “swete sokor.”

To go back to woman's nature as described by Euripides, Ophelia could have given to Hamlet the means of salvation, ophelian megistan;³¹ but he is fatally convinced that she brings him only the greatest harm. Nothing could be more decisive than his rejection; he first abuses her, and then forgets her. Her living image is only fleetingly recalled in the funeral scene, and the last reference to her in the play is Hamlet's half-mocking challenge which brings his rejection of her to its conclusion: “Be buried quick with her, and so will I.”³²

Notes

1. Book I.vii.1; note also Book IV.i.17 (the theme runs through much of The Faerie Queene). Citations are to The Works of Edmund Spenser: Variorum Edition.

2. August Nauck, ed., Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964), p. 384 (Stob. Flor. LXIX.7). This Stobaic fragment is taken from a lost play by Euripides on Alcmaeon. Editions of the fragments of ancient Greek collected by Stobaeus were published, in Greek and in Latin, at various times through the sixteenth century, and it is possible that Shakespeare had some knowledge of them, as F.P. Wilson suggested (in Shakespeare's Reading, quoted by Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977], p. 91). For discussion of the possible link between Hamlet and the story of Alcmaeon, see my chap. IV, in Shakespeare’s Play within Play: Medieval Imagery and Scenic Form in Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 1990. J. P. Collier lists a play on Alcmaeon (now lost) given in the court revels before Elizabeth (The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare [London, 1831], III, 24). See also ibid., I, 207. Either at second hand from this play or directly from Stobaeus, Shakespeare might have come across the word which named his heroine.

3. Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman, or A Revenge for a Father, Malone Soc. Reprints (Oxford, 1950), II.823ff.

4. Q2. The emphasis is changed in F1—“snatches of old tunes.”

5. Faerie Queene I.ii.40, I.ix.21.

6. Julius Caesar V.iii.69; cf. Faerie Queene I.i.25.

7. In his own eyes, at least; vide “As kill a king and marry with his brother” (III.iv.29).

8. Troilus and Cressida I.iii.101-03.

9. Louis Réau, Iconographie de l'art chrétien, III, Pt. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958), 848.

10. See the Digby Mary Magdalen play, in The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and e Museo 160, ed. Donald Baker, John L. Murphy, and Louis B. Hall, Jr., EETS, 283 (1982): l. 1068 (“I his lover”), l. 1588 (“mary my lover”); and the version of Noli me tangere in the York Winedrawers' play: “negh me not, my loue, latte be” (l. 82). For the York plays, see the edition of Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982).

11. Thomas Sharp, A Dissertation on the Mysteries or Dramatic Pageants Anciently Performed at Coventry (Coventry, 1825), p. 47; Coventry, ed. R.W. Ingram, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1981), pp. 240-41.

12. Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882; rpt. New York, 1957), I, 228.

13. Late Medieval Religious Plays, ed. Baker et al., pp. 24-95; Lewis Wager, The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene, ed. F.I. Carpenter (Chicago, 1902); Ludus de Passione, in Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), I, 518-33.

14. See E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1903), II, 90.

15. Horace Howard Furness, ed., Hamlet, New Variorum Edition (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1877), I, 332.

16. See Edith C. Batho, “The Life of Christ in the Ballads,” Essays and Studies, 9 (1924), 81; Réau, Iconographie, III, Pt. 2, 847.

17. The connotation of “long purples” is most explicit in Q2 (IV.vii.170), for which most editors substitute the F1 version: “But our cull-cold maydes doe dead mens fingers call them.”

18. See Robert Potter, The English Morality Play (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 48; Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, II, 75-76.

19. Cf. Dover Wilson's stage direction: “she takes jewels from her bosom and places them on the table before him” (p. 61).

20. Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, II, 9-10.

21. The Song of Solomon 4.9, 3.2-4; cf. the sub-title Soror mea sponsa of Raymond Léopold Bruckberger's Marie Madeleine (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1952).

22. Cf. Sir Walter Ralegh, The Poems, ed. Agnes M.C. Latham (London: Constable, 1929), pp. 100, 184.

23. “Hey nonny nonny” and, later, “down-a-down,” both common phrases in ballad refrains, may indicate the disorder and parody of her song. Cf. Wager's opening lines, spoken by Infidelitie: “With heigh down down and downe a downe a, / Saluator mundi Domine, Kyrieleyson, / Ite, Missa est, With pipe vp Alleluya.”

24. Pierre de S. Louys, La Madeleine au désert de la Sainte Baume en Provence, Book IV; cited by Françoise Bardon, “Le thème de la Madeleine Pénitent au XVII^ème siècle en France,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 31 (1968), 293.

25. The Order for reformed prostitutes (Pénitent de Sainte Marie-Madeleine), known as Dames blanches or Weissfrauen because they were dressed in white, was first set up in the early thirteenth century; see Victor Saxer, Le Culte de Marie Madeleine en Occident (Auxerre: Société des fouilles archéologiques et des monuments historiques d'Yonne, 1959), pp. 222-23.

26. Caxton's Malory, ed. James W. Spisak (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1983), I, 531.

27. In “The Music of Poetry,” in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1975), p. 111.

28. Cf. Much Ado about Nothing I.i.69: “If he have wit enough to keep himself warm, let him bear it for a difference between himself and his horse.” Of course, the real “difference” between Ophelia and the King is between the pure and impure.

29. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), VII, 146-56.

30. Cf. John Ruskin, Munera Pulveris, quoted in Furness, ed., Hamlet, II, 241; see also Matthew 27.55-56.

31. Cf. Richard Helgerson, “What Hamlet Remembers,” Shakespeare Studies, 10 (1977), 91: “his [Hamlet's] misogynism keeps him from discovering the grace that might redeem both him and the natural world.”

32. Cf. Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (1930; rpt. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1958), I, 244: “he, at heart, is as dead as she. This is, indeed, the last pang he is to suffer.”

Quotations from Hamlet … are from the New Shakespeare Edition, ed. John Dover Wilson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936). Quotations from the Bible are taken from The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969).