[In the following essay, Dunn construes Ophelia's songs in Act IV, scene v as emblematic of resistance to—and estrangement from—the patriarchal order that links music with female sexuality and emotional excess. Dunn also comments on the way the onstage auditors of these songs attempt to impose their own meanings on them in order to allay the threat they represent.]

In one of the most famous readings of one Shakespearean character by another, Ophelia's brother Laertes calls her a “document in madness.”¹ The word “document” is usually glossed with its older etymological sense of “lesson” or “example.” In Renaissance terms, Laertes sees Ophelia as an emblem—an image for which he supplies the text, inscribing it with an apparently self-evident, unambiguous cultural meaning. Laertes is not alone in this tendency to emblematize Ophelia: Hamlet also is quick to construe her in terms of cultural stereotypes, as the “Woman” whose name is frailty. And, as Elaine Showalter has shown, the subsequent history of Ophelia's representation, not only on the stage but in the discourses of literary criticism, psychiatry, and the visual arts, has followed these first male readers in constructing her as an archetype of both woman and madness.²

In Shakespeare's dramatic construction of Ophelia as madwoman, the discourse of music has a privileged place: Ophelia's songs dominate her mad scene, not only in their profusion, but in their disruptive and invasive power. From her first entrance Ophelia uses singing to command attention and confuse response, frustrating Gertrude's attempts to contain her utterance within the bounds of polite conversation:

OPH[ELIA].
Where is the beauteous Majesty of Denmark?
QUEEN.
How now, Ophelia?
OPH.
(sings) How should I your true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff
And his sandal shoon.
QUEEN.
Alas, sweet lady, what imports this song?
OPH.
Say you? Nay, pray you mark.
(sings) He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone,
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.
O ho!
QUEEN.
Nay, but Ophelia—
OPH.
Pray you mark.
[sings] White his shroud as the mountain snow—

(4.5.21-36)

Claudius tries another strategy of containment, attempting to fix the singing's meaning by assigning it a cause: “Conceit upon her father” (4.5.45). But Ophelia again uses music as a means of resistance: “Pray let's have no words of this,” she answers, “but when they ask you what it means, say you this” (46-47). What she instructs Claudius to “say”—the St. Valentine's Day ballad—is something that cannot be said, both literally (because it is a song) and figuratively (because its sexual content makes it indecorous, inappropriate). Singing, then, functions as a highly theatrical sign of Ophelia's estrangement from “normal” social discourse, as well as from her “normal” self.

This essay explores the role of music, as embodied in a female singing voice, in forging what Showalter has called the “representational bonds” between gender, sexuality and madness in Hamlet.³ Generally speaking, Ophelia's singing has received short shrift in Hamlet criticism. Literary critics tend to stress the visual and verbal signs of her distraction—the loose hair, the flowers, the fragmented speech—while about singing they say little more than that it was “a frequent accompaniment of madness” on the Elizabethan stage; by implying that its meaning is obvious and conventional, they give it a Laertes-like emblematic reading.⁴ Others, emulating Claudius, reduce Ophelia's singing to a mere “symptom of her pathetic state.”⁵ The song texts, by contrast, have attracted considerable attention, much of it aimed at identifying to whom or what Ophelia's fragmentary ballad quotations refer, and thereby seeking to establish the causes of her madness.⁶ But such an approach, which focuses on the songs' words, assumes that their mode of performance is merely a carrier of meaning rather than a constituent. I wish to argue that Ophelia's singing is full of meaning—indeed, overfull—which is precisely what makes it such a potent signifier, not only of woman and of madness, but also of music itself.

I would like, then, to propose a new reading of Ophelia as a figure of song. My argument is that the representation of Ophelia's madness involves a mapping of her sexual and psychological difference onto the discursive “difference” of music. As female is opposed to male and madness to reason, so song in Hamlet is opposed to speech—particularly those modes of speech that serve to defend the patriarchal order from the threat represented by Ophelia's “importunate” (4.5.2) self-expression. Far from being a mere accompaniment of her madness, then, Ophelia's music actively participates in Hamlet's larger discourse on gender and sexuality. At the same time, this dramatic use of music reflects the broader discourse of music in early modern English culture, with its persistent associations between music, excess and the feminine.⁷

The discursive status of song in Hamlet is grounded in its differentiation from speech, the usual mode of oral communication in Western culture. What distinguishes them is the presence of something “extra”—music—which at once imitates and estranges spoken utterance, shaping it to a different set of rules. At the same time, the singing voice behaves differently from the speaking voice. The very process of vocalization is exaggerated or intensified; the voice seems to have a less mediated relationship to the body, perhaps because there is literally more body in the voice—more breath, more diaphragm muscles, a more open mouth.

Along with this greater materiality of language comes a greater indeterminacy of meaning. Kaja Silverman offers a psychoanalytic perspective on this aspect of vocality:

The voice is the site of perhaps the most radical of all subjective divisions—the division between meaning and materiality … The sounds the voice makes always exceed signification to some degree, both before the entry into language and after. The voice is never completely standardized, forever retaining an individual flavor or texture—what Barthes calls its “grain.”⁸

Silverman is referring here to Barthes' “The Grain of the Voice,” an essay in which he explores the dialectic of meaning and materiality in vocal production.⁹ Because his subject is song, however, Barthes locates the “grain” more specifically in the voice “when it is in a dual posture, a dual production—of language and of music.” He describes this voice-in-music as a space where the normative functionality of language is transcended, where signification gives way to signifiance:

[the “grain”] forms a signifying play having nothing to do with communication, representation (of feelings), expression; it is that apex (or depth) of production where the melody really works at the language—not at what it says, but the voluptuousness of its sounds-signifiers, of its letters—where melody explores how the language works and identifies with that work.

According to Barthes, it is this signifiance that enables the singing voice to “escape the tyranny of meaning.”¹⁰

As his metaphor suggests, Barthes sees this escape as positive, liberating a suppressed voluptuousness in both language and listener. Through its identification with music in song, the linguistic “body,” the materiality of its sound-signifiers, is released from semantic constraint. At the same time, the listener, through his/her identification with music, enters into a relationship with the performer's body that Barthes describes as “erotic.”¹¹ For Barthes, then, music's power lies in its capacity to produce jouissance, the intense, ego-fragmenting pleasure that originates in “an excess of the text.”¹² Significantly, he associates the excess of the musical text with madness:

The body passes into music without any relay but the signifier. This passage—this transgression—makes music a madness … In relation to the writer the composer is always mad (and the writer can never be so, for he is condemned to meaning).¹³

Barthes' concept of musical signifiance finds some suggestive parallels in poststructuralist theory, particularly in Kristeva's opposition between the semiotic and the symbolic in language. The semiotic is linked to the pre-Oedipal phase of development, when the child is bound up with the mother's body, communicating with her through gestures, rhythms and nonrepresentational sounds. The sounds of the maternal voice, in particular, are privileged sites of pleasure and identification.¹⁴ This semiotic bond with the mother is shattered with the acquisition of language, which, in Lacanian theory, marks the child's entry into the symbolic order. And just as the child must transfer its identification from mother to father, so the maternal semiotic must be suppressed under the paternal law of the logos. According to Kristeva, however, the semiotic survives in language as a “heterogeneousness to meaning and signification” which “produces ‘musical’ but also nonsense effects.”¹⁵ Since such effects are ultimately related to the primal “music” of the mother's voice, they represent the return of a repressed maternal realm of linguistic pleasure, a subversive semiotic potential within the symbolic order.¹⁶

Of course, Kristeva is here using “music” and “musical” metaphorically, to refer to the rhythms and sonorities of language. The metaphor itself is conventional in Western literary criticism, familiar from recurring allusions to the “music of poetry.” Kristeva's use of it is also conventional insofar as it articulates what has always been implicit in those allusions, namely the Western tendency to position music among signifying systems not only by analogy with, but also in opposition to language: melos vs. logos; sound vs. sense; “music” vs. “meaning.” Thus such apparently innocent, usually celebratory metaphors of “musical” language reveal how music, whether as discourse or in discourse, becomes implicated in the binarisms that organize patriarchal thinking, and thereby associated with the unconscious and the irrational as well as with the feminine. Kristeva's semiotic encompasses all three; its “music” surfaces in the language of poet and psychotic alike. Other French feminist writers, notably Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous, have pushed the Kristevan musical metaphor even further by claiming song as the archetypal feminine discourse, “the first music of the voice of love, which every woman keeps alive”:

The Voice sings from a time before law, before the Symbolic took one's breath away and reappropriated it into language under its authority of separation … Within each woman the first, nameless love is singing.¹⁷

They have further identified music with madness by linking that song to the hysteric's cry—another form of escape from the tyranny of patriarchal meaning.¹⁸

It is important to recognize that these theoretical identifications of music with a “mad” or “feminine” discourse, outside the structures of patriarchal signification, themselves remain firmly within those structures. In blurring the distinction between music and musical metaphor, they essentialize music itself; it becomes the discursive “other” through an act of linguistic appropriation. We must therefore be cautious in applying them to the interpretation of music within literary texts, lest our readings reproduce the same binary paradigms. Nonetheless, such theories remain useful in that they reveal how music has been constructed or, to use Susan McClary's term, “framed” in Western culture. McClary rightly insists that music is more like literature than some literary critics are willing to admit: it too is “condemned to” culturally constructed meanings. Yet she goes on to say that “to the very great extent that Western culture is logocentric, music itself always gives the impression of being in excess, of being mad.”¹⁹ In the same way, associations of music with the feminine are bound up with, and implicated in, ideologies of gender. The writings of Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous, and Clément testify to the power and persistence of these constructions of music, and suggest what can be at stake in maintaining them. As such they offer a point of departure for reading the music, both literal and figurative, in Ophelia's madness.

Though their intellectual context was that of Christian humanism rather than poststructuralist theory, early modern English writers also associated music with the body and its libidinal energies. Specifically, they were preoccupied with music's affective power, its capacity to arouse desire. Yet their attitude toward this power, unlike Barthes', was ambivalent, reflecting the conflicting ideologies of music inherited from Platonic and Christian thought.²⁰ On the one hand, Renaissance humanists saw music as the earthly embodiment of divine order, and believed that its expressive powers could be a positive ethical force, an agent in the formation of both the ideal courtier and the well-ordered state.²¹ In post-Reformation England, however, this humanist idealism was qualified by the longstanding Christian distrust of music's sensuousness, its unmediated appeal to the body and the emotions. If music was “so powerful a thing, that it ravisheth the soul, regina sensum, the Queene of the senses, by sweete pleasure,”²² then it could not only distract the mind from higher thoughts, but even unbalance it by arousing excessive and unruly passions. Defenders of music argued that “delight of the eares” might be the means through which “the weak soule may be stirred up into a feeling of godliness.”²³ But as Richard Mulcaster observed,

to some [music] seemes offensive, bycause it carrieth away the eare, with the sweetnesse of the melodie, and bewitcheth the mind with a syrens sound, pulling it from that delite, wherin of duetie it ought to dwell, unto harmonicall fantasies, and withdrawing it, from the best meditations, and most vertuous thoughtes to forreigne conceites and wandring devises.²⁴

The problem lay not only with music's sensuous immediacy but also with its semantic indeterminacy which, combined with the subjective nature of musical response, made music's meaning difficult either to define or to control.²⁵ The most extreme critics therefore condemned virtually all music as conducive to various forms of psychic, social, and moral excess. In The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), Phillip Stubbes warned parents:

if you wold haue your sonne, softe, womannish, vncleane, smoth mouthed, affected to bawdrie, scurrilitie, filthie rimes and vnsemely talking: brifly, if you wold haue him, as it were transnatured into a woman or worse, and inclyned to all kind of whordome and abhomination, let him to dauncing school, and to learn musicke, and than shall you not faile of your purpose. And if you would haue your daughter whorish, bawdie, and vncleane, and a filthie speaker, and such like, bring her up in musick and dauncing, and my life for youres, you haue wun the goale.²⁶

Admittedly, Stubbes's attack is more hysterical than most, but it does reflect a widespread cultural anxiety about music, and reveals how that anxiety was rooted in patriarchal constructions of gender and sexuality. As Linda Austern has shown, Renaissance debates over the nature and uses of music bore striking similarities to contemporary debates over the nature and place of women.²⁷ Like woman, music was associated with the body and female generativity—“as pregnant as Libia alwaies breeding some new thing.”²⁸ Like woman, too, music was held to have an essentially changeable nature, unpredictable and sometimes irrational in its behavior. Behind such analogies between music and femininity lay the perception of parallel threats to masculine subjectivity. Music's sensuous beauty gave it power: its sounds could penetrate the ear and so “ravish” the mind. The fear was that masculine autonomy and virtue would be overwhelmed in an abandonment to “sweete pleasure”—that music, in other words, was a Siren.

Given this gendered construction of music, it is not surprising that some Renaissance writers associated musical performance with the transgression of culturally prescribed gender roles. According to Stubbes, men who make music are “transnatured,” made “softe” and “womannish,” presumably because music encourages them to indulge in “feminine” emotional excess. In women, music mirrors their own inherently excessive feminine nature; their musical pleasure thus generates monsters of unrestrained female desire, “whorish, bawdie, and vncleane.” In either case, music produces a breakdown in social order that is expressed, significantly, in unruly utterances: men become “smoth mouthed,” women “filthie speaker[s].”²⁹ Here is the same nexus of associations between music, feminine vocality, and semantic excess that we saw in French feminist theory, viewed from the perspective of male sexual anxiety.

This negative vision of music's power may seem to contradict the more familiar Renaissance image of Pythagorean universal harmony, the “music of the spheres” that epitomized the order of God's creation. But these contradictory images in fact belong to the same discourse; they are but the two poles of another opposition. Jacques Attali has argued that music, like other signifying systems, is founded upon difference: it is ordered sound that is separated from un-ordered sound, or noise, by both formal and cultural boundaries. As a result, definitions of music are always ideological:

music appears in myth as an affirmation that society is possible … Its order simulates the social order, and its dissonances express marginalities. The code of music simulates the accepted rules of society.³⁰

Applying this theory to the Renaissance discourse of music, we might say that Pythagorean harmony is music in its positive or “masculine” aspect: logos, reason, order. Its social analogues are those forms of musical practice that are sanctioned by Church and State, and serve the interests of hegemonic groups: the music played at weddings, for example, which symbolizes the containment of sexual desire within the hierarchical “concord” of marriage. Its negative or “feminine” aspect represents all the dis-orderly energies in soul or society, energies that are constantly threatening to escape from patriarchal control, even as musical signifiance threatens to escape from signification, or the semiotic to erupt into the symbolic. In this “feminine” aspect, music itself can become—to the ears of anxious male listeners, at least—a cultural dissonance, its “harmonicall fantasies” a kind of madness.

With Attali's opposition between music and noise we can return to Ophelia's mad singing and see how it functions as a discursive dissonance within the play. Paradoxically, Ophelia's music is noise in Attali's sense precisely because it is music. As discourse it is radically “other,” breaking the “accepted rules” of conversation and hence ambiguous in its meaning. Moreover, when Ophelia sings, she takes on a mask of performance: her personal voice is estranged, filtered through the anonymous voices of the ballads, multiplying and thereby rendering indeterminate the relationships between singer, personae, and audience. At the same time, these voices are doubly embodied in music's materiality—in the melody that “works” at the language, and in the “grain” of Ophelia's own voice—which causes a further surplus, and therefore slippage, of meaning. No wonder Gertrude can only reply to Ophelia's outburst with a bewildered question: “Alas, sweet lady, what imports this song?” (4.5.27).

As social behavior, too, Ophelia's singing is “noisy.” It is disruptive, indecorous, defying expectations—particularly the expectation of appropriate feminine behavior implicit in the epithet with which Claudius attempts to stop her: “Pretty Ophelia” (4.5.56). But Ophelia in her madness refuses to be pretty, as she refuses to be silenced. The ballad that she sings to Claudius tells of a girl's sexual initiation; by the end of the second strophe her lover has “Let in the maid that out a maid / Never departed more” (4.5.54-55). Claudius's discomfiture is obvious from his interruption, but Ophelia is unfazed; she interrupts him and finishes her song:

By Gis and by Saint Charity,
          Alack and fie for shame,
Young men will do't if they come to't—
          By Cock, they are to blame.
Quoth she, “Before you tumbled me,
          You promis'd me to wed.”

He answers,

“So would I a done, by yonder sun,
          And thou hadst not come to my bed.”

(4.5.58-66)

For Ophelia to sing such a lyric, especially in front of her lover's parents, is shocking. My point, however, is that the fact that Ophelia sings is just as indecorous as what she sings, and in some ways even more disturbing, because of the surplus of meaning that inheres in her singing voice, and the power that voice-in-music gives her.

We are now in a position to understand the cultural resonance that Ophelia's singing might have had for Renaissance audiences. If music arouses excessive “feminine” passions, then it is also an ideal vehicle for representing feminine excess. If its meaning cannot be controlled, then it can signify a loss of control that is perceived as threatening, yet erotically exciting. Music is like the “madwoman” in language, releasing subversive powers of self-expression by embodying them in the expressive powers of the voice. As such it is an apt marker of the mad Ophelia: a frightening figure of female openness, of uncontrolled generativity, whose free-flowing and formless utterance threatens to “strew / Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds” (4.5.14-15).

In singing, then, Ophelia becomes both the literal and the figurative “dissonance” that “expresses marginalities.” The question remains: what has been marginalized in Denmark, besides Ophelia herself? The St. Valentine's Day ballad suggests that it is sexuality, particularly female sexuality, and the rest of the play bears this out. At its center is Hamlet, whose tormented awareness of his mother's desire turns him against all women. Laertes, too, is preoccupied with the unruly female body. When Ophelia tells him of Hamlet's love, he warns her to repress her own desires, using a musical image which, in light of Ophelia's fate, seems doubly charged: “Then weigh what loss your honor may sustain / If with too credent ear you list his songs” (1.3.29-30). Peter Seng has argued that Ophelia, in her madness, offers the male characters a dark mirror of their own sexual anxiety: “the heroine of the [St. Valentine's Day Ballad] is not the Ophelia that Hamlet knew, but rather the Ophelia that Polonius and Laertes, without real cause, had feared their daughter and sister might become.”³¹ I would add that it is not only the ballad's heroine who represents those fears; it is also Ophelia herself, who, in singing, embodies the cultural fantasy of the Siren, woman as eroticized voice-object.³²

In this respect Shakespeare's representation of Ophelia draws on gender stereotypes of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, where the sexually ambiguous eroticism of boy actors was exploited in scenes of feminine musical seduction. When Ophelia sings “For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy” (4.5.184), the phallic pun recalls other women characters, many of them Siren figures in the moralized Renaissance sense—seductresses, if not courtesans or bawds—who use song to proclaim their own desires and assert their sexual power over men.³³ But Ophelia's performance dislocates this stereotype: she sings not as a seducer but about one, reminding us that it was she who “suck'd the honey” of Hamlet's “music vows” and not the other way around (3.1.158). In doing so, she also forces the audience to confront the disjunction between her subjectivity and the “voices” assigned to women in her culture.

These cultural voices are rendered still more problematic by Ophelia's frequent shifts between voices. Not all of her songs are erotic; in fact most of them are laments, expressions of loss and grief:

And will a not come again?
And will a not come again?
          No, no, he is dead,
          Go to thy death-bed,
He never will come again.

(4.5.187-91)

Here again Ophelia's singing could be construed as reinforcing a gender stereotype, since grief, or indeed any strong emotion, is another form of excess identified as “feminine” in Hamlet. We saw how Stubbes feared that an abandonment to music would render men “softe” and “womannish.” The male characters in Hamlet express a similar fear of abandoning themselves to the figurative “music” of their emotions. After hearing the Player King describe the grief of Hecuba for her slain husband, Hamlet wonders, “What would he do / Had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have?” (2.2.554-55). Yet, when he does express that passion, he feels effeminized:

This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must like a whore unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
A scullion!

(2.2.578-83)

Similarly, when Laertes learns of Ophelia's death, he tries but fails to “forbid” his tears (4.7.185), then rationalizes them as a purging of what Claudius, early in the play, calls “unmanly grief” (1.2.94): “When these are gone, / The woman will be out” (4.7.187-88).

Ophelia's songs might be said to perform a similar function, on both the personal and the cultural level. As Charles Segal and Elizabeth Tolbert observe elsewhere in this volume, the lament is a form of song traditionally associated with women. In mourning the loss of both father and “true love” (4.5.23), Ophelia aligns herself with this tradition, not only through her own singing, but also through her implicit identification with Niobe and Hecuba, the legendary women evoked by Hamlet as icons of mourning. It is as if she is taking on the burden of all the unexpressed grief in the play, becoming the real thing of which the Player King's performance—and, according to Hamlet, Gertrude's—were but imitations, “fiction[s] … of passion” (2.2.546).

At the same time, however, the particularities of Ophelia's own performance disrupt this identification. As with her bawdy songs, what is foregrounded is not congruity with conventions but incongruity, not obviousness of meaning but ambiguity. In their fragmentary form, their fictive voices, and their shifts from first to third person, Ophelia's ballads are discursively disjoint; in their inappropriateness to their immediate context, their interruptions of conversation with song, they are both discursively and socially displaced. Moreover, compared to actual lamenting, Ophelia's ballads are emphatically not the real thing. As in the St. Valentine's Day ballad, she does not lament so much as sing about lamenting: “They bore him bare-fac'd on the bier, / And in his grave rain'd many a tear” (4.5.164-65). Her songs thus become ghostly echoes of rituals that never took place, griefs that were never articulated. Even in her madness she cannot attain the utter abandonment of Niobe's “all tears” (1.2.149) or Hecuba's “instant burst of clamour” (2.2.511). Far from being an excessive expression of feminine emotion, Ophelia's “broken voice” (2.2.550) is an implicit reproach to the society that has denied her full expression.

If Ophelia's singing lets “the woman” out, then, it does so in such a way as to problematize cultural constructions of women's song, even while containing her within their re-presentation. Her songs are like an inversion of patriarchal speech, a release of repressed psychic energies and unmet emotional needs. But according to the logic of patriarchal narrative, that release can be only temporary: Ophelia's disruptive feminine energy must be reabsorbed into both the social and the discursive orders of the play. The price that Ophelia herself pays is high; her moment of self-expression is, in Showalter's words, “quickly followed, as if in retribution, by her death.”³⁴ Catherine Clément has argued that this narrative pattern is typical of opera, in which heroines are “undone” by a plot that climaxes in “their glorious moment: a sung death.”³⁵ Indeed, Ophelia in her madness resembles another “noisy” heroine, Lucia di Lammermoor, whose mad scene is similarly framed by the reactions of an audience.³⁶

Ophelia is unlike those operatic heroines, however, in that her death is not the play's climax. In fact it is not even represented on stage, but rather reported by Gertrude, in one of the play's most lyrical speeches:

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.

(4.7.174-82)

This speech marks a crucial moment in the play's response to the threats of excess and disorder embodied in Ophelia's music. It recapitulates the earlier mad scene in its references to singing and flowers. This time, however, we get only a description of Ophelia's song, rendered in someone else's speech; the “grain” of Ophelia's own voice is inaudible. Moreover, Gertrude now defines her songs as “old lauds” (hymns), a lyric genre the cultural connotations of which are very different from those of her earlier ballads and laments. This narrative reframing renders the image of Ophelia singing less immediate, less dangerous: “she chanted snatches of old lauds” is a faint echo of “By Gis and by Saint Charity.”

But this is only one aspect of the speech's larger project of restoring Ophelia to her original iconic role of modest and delicate virgin. Gertrude's description of Ophelia's drowning aestheticizes her madness, makes it “pretty,” and in so doing makes it safe for the easier, distancing responses of pity and compassion; the Siren has become merely “mermaid-like.” On the discursive level, too, Gertrude's verbal lyricism performs a crucial function: it re-appropriates Ophelia's music by inscribing it in the containing verbal structures, the metaphorical “music” of poetry. Instead of Ophelia's disjunct fragments of popular song, Gertrude gives us the blank verse of high court culture. Instead of Ophelia's laments, she gives us elegy.

It is fitting, too, that this task is given to Gertrude, who was herself the embodiment of unruly female sexuality earlier in the play. Here, she is merely completing a process that was initiated by Claudius's and Laertes's earlier readings of Ophelia, summed up in Laertes's comment that “Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself / She turns to favour and to prettiness” (4.5.185-86). In telling her “pretty” story of Ophelia's death, Gertrude is implicitly submitting it to patriarchal authority, representing Ophelia the way the men want to see her. This submission is further confirmed at Ophelia's burial, where Gertrude performs a female role that even Hamlet would regard as entirely appropriate. The threateningly eroticized mother-bride is replaced by a mother-lamenter who symbolically places herself outside the sexual arena: “I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife: / I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid, / And not have strew'd thy grave” (5.1.237-39). In such mourning, not only Ophelia's “noisy” singing, but also the “music” of Gertrude's own maternal voice are reabsorbed into the symbolic order of speech, even as they are recuperated by the social order.

This final image of Ophelia silenced brings me back to my opening remarks about the tendency to emblematize her, to turn her into a “speaking picture” which, being visual rather than aural, can more easily be read. My own reading views this picturing process as a response to Ophelia's singing, which is perceived by the other characters as dangerous, not only because of the uncontrollable meanings it may suggest to others, but also because of the unruly emotions it provokes in them. Their anxiety is aroused not only because Ophelia is mad, but also because she is a woman, who becomes even more “Woman” when she sings. To draw another analogy from feminist theory, the excess of Ophelia's music intensifies the already excessive femininity of her voice—makes it, in Irigaray's term, even more “fluid.”³⁷ It is as if Ophelia's singing plunges her auditors into the flowing current of a river, and they are desperately afraid of drowning. All their interventions are attempts to “freeze” that flow by containing it within some stable relationship between signifier and signified. Yet it is only when Ophelia herself has drowned that they can at last climb out and dry themselves off, making speeches over her voiceless body.

My own response to Ophelia's songs is to insist that her singing matters, and attend to her music's materiality—the more so because the discourses of criticism have too often written it out of hearing. In those dismissals of singing as a conventional sign of madness I detect a response not unlike those of Claudius and Laertes—an uneasiness when confronted with an alien discursive medium, a resistance to that which is perceived as textual “overflow.” Yet I believe it is possible to resist that tendency. We may not be able to avoid converting Ophelia's “noisy” singing into the “music” of our own speech or writing, but by making her singing our subject, we can at least acknowledge its significance. In doing so, we will move toward a critical language that can not only put singing back into the “picture” of Ophelia's madness, but also the voice back into the singing, and the body back into the voice.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, The Arden Shakespeare (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), 4.5.176. Subsequent citations will appear in parentheses in the text.

2. Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 77-94.

3. Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” p. 80.

4. Maurice and Hannah Charney, “The Language of Madwomen in Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3, 2 (Winter 1977), 453; see also Bridget Gellert Lyons, “The Iconography of Ophelia,” English Literary History 44 (1977), 60-74. On Ophelia's mad speech, see Sandra K. Fischer, “Hearing Ophelia: Gender and Tragic Discourse in Hamlet,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Reforme 26 (1990), 1-11, and David Leverenz, “The Woman in Hamlet: An Interpersonal View,” in Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn, eds., Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 119-21.

5. F. W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Dover, 1963), p. 57.

6. See, for example, Carroll Camden, “On Ophelia's Madness,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964), 247-55. In a recent article, Carol Thomas Neely has critiqued such attempts to pin down the meaning of Ophelia's songs, arguing that her mad discourse has a “‘quoted,’ fragmentary, ritualized quality” that is both personal and communal; “‘Documents in Madness’: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Early Modern Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991), 323-36. For a survey of commentary on the songs, see Peter Seng, The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 131-56.

7. See Linda Phyllis Austern, “‘Sing Againe Syren’: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature,” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989), 420-48, and “‘Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie’: Music and the Idea of the Feminine in Early Modern England,” Music and Letters 74.3 (1993), 343-54.

8. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 44.

9. Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press/Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1977), pp. 179-89.

10. Ibid., pp. 181, 182, 185.

11. Ibid., p. 188.

12. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Noonday Press, 1975), p. 19. Although Barthes' notion of jouissance originated in his analysis of literary pleasure, “The Grain of the Voice” specifically associates it with musical pleasure, speculating that the threat of loss entailed by jouissance is the source of “the old Platonic idea” that “music is dangerous” (“Grain,” 179).

13. Roland Barthes, “Rasch,” in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), p. 308.

14. On the privileging of the maternal voice in Kristeva and other feminist theorists, see Claire Kahane, “Questioning the Maternal Voice,” Genders 3 (1988), 82-91, and Domna C. Stanton, “Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva,” in Nancy K. Miller, ed., The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 157-82.

15. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 133.

16. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 63.

17. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 93.

18. On music and hysteria, see Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, pp. 19-22, 107; and Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 32-38.

19. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 102.

20. For an overview of English Renaissance attitudes toward music, see Walter L. Woodfill, Musicians in English Society from Elizabeth to Charles I (Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 201-46.

21. On Renaissance musical humanism, see D. P. Walker, “Musical Humanism in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” The Music Review 2 (1941), 1-13, 111-21, 220-27, 288-308, and 3 (1942), 55-71; James Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of Relations between Poetry and Music (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 163-79; Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 3-30.

22. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 4th edn. (Oxford, 1632), p. 297.

23. John Case, The Praise of Musicke (Oxford, 1586), pp. 70-71.

24. Richard Mulcaster, Positions wherein those primitive circumstances be examined, which are necessary for the training up of children (London, 1581), fol. 29v.

25. On this point, see Elise Jorgens, “The Singer's Voice in Elizabethan Drama,” in Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Anne J. Cruz, and Wendy A. Furman, eds., Renaissance Rereadings: Intertext and Context (University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 35.

26. Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583), sig. D5-D5v.

27. Austern, “‘Sing Againe Syren,’” 420-27.

28. Case, The Praise of Musicke, p. 4.

29. On the sexualization of the mouth in Renaissance discourses about women, and excessive speech as a sign of sexual transgression, see Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 12.

30. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 29.

31. Seng, The Vocal Songs, p. 148.

32. The Lacanian term “voice-object” is borrowed from Michel Poizat, The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

33. For example, Franceschina in Marston's The Dutch Courtesan (1605) seduces a customer with a song in the voice of the nightingale, a bird traditionally associated with both women and lust: “My body is but little, / So is the nightingale's. / I love to sleep ‘gainst prickle, / So doth the nightingale” (1.2.150-53). For further discussion of musical seduction in English Renaissance drama, see Linda Austern's essay in this volume.

34. Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” 81.

35. Clement, Opera, p. 45.

36. My reading of Ophelia's mad scene is indebted to Susan McClary's analysis of the musical representation of madwomen in Feminine Endings, pp. 80-111.

37. Luce Irigaray, “The ‘Mechanics’ of Fluids,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 106-118. For a fuller discussion of voice, fluidity, and madness, see Janet Beizer's essay in this volume.