Chesney Christner
Kristyn Leuner
Shakespeare for Non-Majors
ENGL 3000-200, Summer B-term
July 21, 2010
FLORES Draft
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious silver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. (IV.vii 170-173)
These lines spoken by Queen Gertrude in Hamlet, are describing how the fair Ophelia died. It is one of the most memorable images of death in all of Shakespeare’s works. In our minds we see a beautiful, young woman floating in a brook with a crown of flowers atop her head drifting off to death. Ophelia in this play is always talking about flowers she mentions them at least seven times. Other characters also talk about flowers and for some reason they are never used in the way that we would think; blooming and signifying life. In Hamlet, flowers represent not life, but death and specifically with Ophelia the death of innocence.
Polonius, Ophelia’s father is talking to her about her virtue in regards to Hamlet, “Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes./ The canker galls the infants of the spring/Too oft before their buttons be disclosed, (I.iii 37-39) Polonius uses a metaphor of a flower to signify Ophelia’s virtue and how her innocence is threatened by the “canker”: Hamlet. He uses the language of a gardener because he has been the protector of her “garden” for years and here he is worried of Hamlets intentions. The hard sounds of “canker” and “calumnious” seem to attack, while “the infants of the spring” are much softer, further showing how Polonius is worried for her fragile virtue. This quote is foreshadowing Ophelia’s loss of innocence, although not in the way Polonius thinks.
Shakespeare contrasts Ophelia’s protected and intact virtue with that of Queen Gertrude’s defiled virtue. While the ghost of the king is talking to Hamlet about how he was killed he says “Leave her to heaven/ And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge/ To prick and sting her. (1.v 86-88). Here Hamlet senior tells Hamlet not to mess with the Queen because in Heaven she will be punished and to her own conscious. He uses a metaphor of thorns that represent her incestuous deeds that still haunt her. Instead of the full rose, as Ophelia’s virtue was, Gertrude only gets the bad parts of the rose, the thorns. “prick” and “sting” are again harsh sounding words foreshadowing her death. In this passage, innocence has long been dead with the queen.
During the play that Hamlet orchestrates, there is a dumb show which depicts the actions that the King and Gertrude did. In it the king, “He lies upon a bank of flowers.”(III.ii) The queen then leaves and a different person comes in and while the King is sleeping, slips a poison into his ear. Here the fact that this all happens with a backdrop of flowers is important. When we think of a couple lying embraced on a bed of flowers, we think of love and romance, but here behind the disguise of love there is deceit and ultimately death. In this dumb show, we once again see flowers as the antithesis of what we have always thought them to be.
Another instance of Gertrude’s dead virtue is when Hamlet is yelling at her in her bed chamber, just after killing Polonius. He says
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And sets a blister there, makes marriage vows
As false as dicer’ oaths (III.iv 42-45)
Hamlet is talking about how Gertrude so soon after her husbands death married his brother. He uses such rich and intense language here to depict his disgust and rage at her actions. We see the image of a rose and then it is replaced with a blister. These are so different and evoke such different emotions. Rose here again represents her virtue and then the blister represents the loss of that virtue.
After the death of Polonius and the refusal from Hamlet and Laertes’s departure, Ophelia is left alone and with out all the men in her life and she goes mad. Her last speech, that isn’t a song, is where she distributes flowers and herbs to her brother, the Queen, the King, her dead father and herself. Each flower represents something, pansies and rosemary she gives to Laertes which both mean remembrance and thoughts. Perhaps she is telling him to think before he acts, because at this time him and Claudius are plotting to kill Hamlet. She gives fennel and columbines to Gertrude. Fennel means flattery or deceit and columbines mean infidelity, which both make sense. She gives rue to Claudius which means regret. Regret for killing his own brother. She also gives rue to herself, perhaps for what she is about to do.
Lastly she says, “I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. They say a made a good end. (112) Violets mean faithfulness, but they are all dead as is everyone’s faithfulness here in this scene. In this scene she doesn’t give out any happy flowers to anyone they are all reflecting the emotions of the people around her. Her words here are extremely somber and full of maddening remorse. It’s almost shocking to think that these people didn’t know she was off to kill herself. She is extolling these secret meanings to all of the people in the form of flowers. They’re all dark, personal meanings. Ophelia has shaken off her budding rose of virtue and is now dealing with regret and her foreboding death. Here the flowers mark a change in her character. She has seen cruel things that have killed the innocent little girl that she once was.
Not long after this speech, her body is found in a brook. The Queen goes into detail about her “muddy death”: “Therewith fantastic garlands did she make/ Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples”(IV.vii 166-167). Ophelia sees her untimely death wreathed in flowers and many artists have depicted this scene with flowers all around the brook and on her clothes. Here death and flowers go hand in hand. It is a really romanticized image of death. It seem that she got dressed up in flowers and went singing into the water and slowly submerged and drifted into the river Styx. Her innocent look at life is shattered and she brings those signifiers of death with her in this beautiful scene. My favorite line is, “Or like a creature native and indued/Unto that element.”(IV. vii 177-178). The Queen is saying that she willingly returns to the earth. This is fitting since her life was rifled with imagery of flowers and the earth in which they grow.
When they are burying her body, Laertes says “Lay her i’ th’ earth, / And from her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring!” (V.i 228-230) Even in her death, that was pretty obviously a suicide, people are extolling her virtues and comparing her to flowers. The Queen even says, “Sweets to the sweet! Farewell.” (V.i 234) and lays flowers on her grave. The flowers here are tellers of the death of sweet Ophelia. Even when her body is long rot and her name is forgotten there will still bloom flowers from her grave, signifying the death of something, anything. She will become meaningless but the flowers will become eternal.
