Hamlet: Ophelia, Gertrude, and Female Agency
In today's episode, we are going to be discussing the female characters of Hamlet: Ophelia and Gertrude. We will be tackling some of the more difficult parts of the play for modern readers and theater-makers: the misogyny and seeming lack of female agency.
In the first half, Korey will help us grapple with the seemingly inherent misogyny of the text (is the play misogynist just because the title character is? Or is there another possible reading?).
Then, Elyse will lead us through what an Early Modern audience member would have understood about Ophelia's death and Gertrude's part in it. Specifically we will focus on a cultural knowledge that has largely been lost for the modern audience, and the agency granted to these characters through that understanding.
Content warning: we will be discussing abortion, reproductive health, misogyny, and include brief mentions of assault and violence. Please listen with care.
We do not recommend any early modern medical advice. We are not doctors now or in the early modern era.
Also, we may use women, feminine, and female interchangeably to discuss issues pertaining to non-cismale bodies. While we know that people of all genders can be affected by patriarchy as well as become pregnant and need to be able to make their own decisions about reproductive health, we are aligning our language for this episode with that of the early modern writers we are analyzing.
Elyse Sharp (ES): Hi, Korey.
Kourtney “Korey” Smith (KS): Hi, Elyse. How are you doing today?
ES: I'm doing really well. I am, as you know, very excited to talk about our topics today.
KS: Yes, and your research specifically. I loved getting a text message in the middle of the week being like, I can't wait to share with you what I read.
ES: Yeah. Spoiler alert, a lot of first-person documents from the 1500s and 1600s, as per usual.
KS: That is true.
ES: But these were exciting.
KS: And it's so worth it, because I love the contextualizing of the plays. So I can't wait for your research.
ES: Yeah. Speaking of that, though, I do have a few things for our listeners. We do have a content warning. Our discussion today is going to have mentions of abortion, reproductive health, and brief mentions of assault and violence. So please listen with care. And we also do not recommend any early modern medical advice that we may discuss in today's episode.
KS: Absolutely not.
ES: No. And last but not least, we may use the words women, feminine, and female interchangeably to discuss issues pertaining to non-cis male bodies. And while we know that people of all genders can be affected by patriarchy and misogyny, as well as become pregnant and need to be able to make their own decisions about reproductive health, we are aligning our language for this episode with that of the early modern writers we are analyzing. And they stick to a binary.
KS: Yeah, they definitely do. To the dismay of everybody trying to talk about and perform Shakespeare in 2022.
ES: Trying to talk about him.
KS: But thank you, Elyse. Yeah, so listeners, we are going to be talking about Ophelia, Gertrude and female agency in a few different lenses. This play is often associated with misogyny and misogynistic tropes.
ES: Mmhmm
KS: I'm going to look at what these tropes are and how they emerged from the early modern moralist's anxieties and how they were used in early modern satire. So attitudes that men have towards seemingly unfaithful women, as well as what in that period makes that woman unfaithful. And yeah, that's what I'm gonna be talking about.
ES: Ooh, okay.
KS: Before we begin, let's look at some telling scenes when analyzing Hamlet and misogyny, because as much as I love Hamlet, he is inherently a misogynist.
ES: The character. The character. Says some pretty horrible things that we have to reckon with.
KS: Yeah. At the core of the matter is Act Three, Scene One, where after denying that Hamlet had ever given Ophelia gifts, he assails Ophelia with repeated negations of any links between beauty and honesty or between women and chastity. That's the big thing that Ophelia is being attacked with.
ES: Mmhmm
KS: Then he claims that he never loved Ophelia and Hamlet urges her to enter a nunnery to be cloistered from corruption. Then, he gives her a plague as a dowry, and that is that no matter how pure she may be, she will not escape calumny, and the irony of this scene is that Hamlet is the one who acts as her chief slanderer. No one else has shown up to slander Ophelia yet.
ES: Right.
KS: The other men in the play are not particularly supportive of Ophelia in any meaningful way. However, well, most everything that he warns her about is coming from him. He's the one perpetuating all of this. And Hamlet showers insult upon insult into Ophelia and her entire sex for using makeup, dancing, behaving seductively, and nicknaming God's creatures. Hamlet then blames these vices, done by all women, as the cause for making him mad and calls for a moratorium on all future marriages. He repeats that Ophelia must go to a nunnery and exits, leaving Ophelia alone. I just want to make sure we have like these scenes specifically.
ES: We’re thinking specifically about “get thee to a nunnery” and–
KS: And the closet scene.
ES: –The scene with Gertrude–Hamlet and Gertrude.
KS: So in another pivotal scene, the closet scene, Act Three, Scene Four, Hamlet's fury towards his mother is so intense that not even Polonius' death can make him pause and reflect on or properly react to that accident. Hamlet is so fixated on his mother's second marriage, which he claims is not love because, quote, “at your age, the heyday in blood is tame. It's humble,” unquote.
Hamlet also charges that only the devil could allow Gertrude to live, linking Gertrude to the devil and sin. The closet scene contains some of the nastiest examples of what Brustein calls “sex nausea” in the language of the play. So there's images of mildew, blisters, ulcers, rankness, and contagion.
So this Hamlet that we've seen is sex-obsessed. But for Hamlet, sex no longer holds pleasure, love, or healthy human connection. And when Ophelia goes mad, she becomes sex-obsessed like Hamlet.
Ophelia's elegies for her father alternate with bawdy songs riddled with sexual puns and phallic allusions. And they also speak of how premarital sex can invalidate marriage vows. I know that you're going to speak more on this scene, but in these songs, one of these songs, Ophelia also sings, quote, Quoth she, before you tumbled me, you promised me to wed. She would I had done by yonder sun, and thou hadst not come to my bed, unquote. So the maid of the song enters as a virgin at her lover's door and leaves as a castaway, similarly to Hamlet's rejection of Ophelia. Every scene between Hamlet and Ophelia makes me wonder how Hamlet can possibly claim that he loved Ophelia at her funeral ceremony.
So is Claudius correct to reject the spurn lover motive for Hamlet's madness? Claudius says, quote, love, his affections do not that way tend, unquote. After declaring his love for Ophelia at the funeral, Hamlet doesn't appear to give Ophelia another thought for the remainder of the play.
He is focused on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's fate, and the duel with Laertes, as well as the revenge plot. So that's what we see.
However, Hamlet's fury towards women has cultural context. Shakespeare was hardly alone in expressing misogynistic attitudes of real, imagined, or assumed infidelity. This was a cultural misogyny that was depicted on the stage by many early modern satirists. Male suspicion of female virtue, particularly towards ladies of the court, was almost pandemic in the last years of Elizabeth's rule and increased exponentially during James's rule.
Apart from the recurrent criticism of shrews who were unpleasant and ill-tempered, like Kate, an early Shakespeare female who's dated from like 1590 to 1592, one did not usually find attacks on women, either middle-class wives or on ladies of the court, to any noticeable extent in the drama until 1599. On June 1st, 1599, the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, and the Bishop of London, Richard Bancroft, issued to the master and wardens of the Stationers' Company, the publishers, a ban prohibiting the further publication of certain works, as well as the destruction of copies that already existed. The reasoning behind the Bishop's Ban on Satire is not clear, but it is clear that literary satire was now banned, and it found its way on stage. And so dramatists adapted this new subject and began to write not of love, but of lust. And I do want to acknowledge that I don't know much about this ban. I didn't excavate it very far, aside from some DuckDuckGo searches to kind of see the gist of it. Maybe we can put a pin in this for a censorship mini episode. I don't know.
ES: This is going to get into mine, but also around this time, there's just a proliferation of like other types of literature being printed. Like publishing's huge. So like a ban on one genre is both kind of a big deal, like why ban that one? And also like, oh, but there's also so much more to read.
KS: That's interesting,
ES: But
KS: Put a pin in it.
ES: Yeah. Let's put a pin in. Yeah.
KS: Okay. So prior to the ban on satire of 1599, Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote of evil women who were loathsome and unclean, like Tamora in Titus, which is like.
ES: That's exactly who I thought of
KS: That is? Yeah. Cool.
ES: Yeah, I was like, oh, you mean Tamora?
KS: And that's like 1588 to 1593. But after 1599, the indictment intensified as bait for adultery. So think, Gertrude. Because of this new and worse theatrical woman's lack of moral stamina and lascivious fashion, her male counterparts had two options: One, submit to her temptations and be damned. Or number two, reject and participate in sex hatred and sex nausea. To the moralists and the satirists, it is always vice versus virtue for women. And spoiler, more frequently than not, vice wins in these productions.
Therefore, women's lust is one of man's prime obstacles because the temptress woman urges the male to lose his as well. And I'm just thinking about how that hasn't changed because I'm having flashbacks to the Australian Macbeth with the sexy school witches.
And lust wasn't the only mode a woman had to tempt a man. The other was her beauty. To early modern moralists, there were two methods for man's falling passively at the hands of the temptress: One, arousing lust through her beauty. Or two, laying snares for his soul. As we discussed in our Macbeth series, women of this time period were thought to be linked with devils. In addition, women are linked to illness since women can be carriers of venereal diseases and, according to moralists, have the power to physically damn men through disease.
If women are such a threat, you might be wondering, how do you deal with these women? And the answer to an early modernist was by removing her completely from the source of corruption, like to the country or, as Hamlet suggests, to a nunnery.
ES: A nunnery!
KS: There was even a dilemma about regulating the sex lives of widows, like Gertrude. Saint Paul urged widows to remarry to avoid the risk of damnation. However, Elizabethan moralists disapproved of second marriages; taking multiple husbands was considered a form of legal adultery and a reflection of the widow's lustfulness. Duke Ferdinand of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi of 1613 states, quote, “Marry, they are most luxurious, will wed twice,” unquote. And Hamlet himself states that taking a second husband, quote, “makes marriage vows as false as dicers' oaths,” unquote. So those are the opinions of the moralists and the satirists. But that's not necessarily how the members of court viewed women and...
ES: Right. This is something that's like taking an idea to an extreme, like that's what satire does. I think what I'm hearing you get at is like, just because these playwrights are writing these misogynist things, it's about a discussion about misogyny. It's not necessarily promoting misogynist ideas, especially in a satire. It's perhaps skewering them and making the court think hard about maybe those who do have misogynist ideas.
KS: Yeah. So satirists could either be commenting on or reinforcing misogyny. Because the aristocrats in court were emphasizing the harmony between inner and outer beauty, which is not something that the middle-class satirists were expressing. The middle-class satirists were expressing skepticism about the ability of attractive women to remain chaste.
And that brings us back to Hamlet and Ophelia. In Act Three, Scene One, after Hamlet asks Ophelia if she is honest and then asks if she is fair, Ophelia says, Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce with honesty? And Hamlet says, For the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd, than the force of honesty can translate beauty into likeness.
This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. Ophelia is oblivious to the moralist paradox and upholds the aristocratic view of beauty as the handmaiden of virtuous spirit. But Hamlet, on the other hand, is disenchanted, like the satirists, by his mother's adultery. In the play, Hamlet compares himself to the most abject species of woman, a bawd, a drab, a scullion, a harlot, a strumpet, and a whore who unpacks herself with words.
Hamlet talks about painting one's face and the lies that come of painted faces. And that was a real conversation that was happening in early modern England at the time. The misogynists like Hamlet do not blame women for their natural beauty. Instead, it's the cosmetics and the fashion that was to blame. There was this notion reflected in plays like Middleton's Father Hubbard's Tales from 1604 and Hic Mulier that women, even gentlewomen, were vain and would enter sex work and sell their bodies just to pay for trinkets.
So if a woman wanted to look nice, that was a telltale sign that you would, you know, sell your body for new makeup and a new corset.
ES: Sexist is gonna sexist.
KS: Exactly. That's the thing. That's not in line with what was happening at the English courts, because the English court fashions of the time were quite extravagant. At the time of the queen's death, Elizabeth's wardrobe was said to number 2,000 beautiful gowns. The era was full of fashion. Are you thinking about 2,000 gowns?
ES: I'm thinking about 2,000 gowns. I'm thinking about, like, closet space.
KS: A walk-in castle.
ES: Castle closet. Like Hampton Court.
KS: Because, Those were also large garments.
ES: And also, like, the time that that would take to construct all of those gowns. And also, like, put them on during the day.
KS: Yeah.
ES: Yeah. Anyway.
KS: And an example of these extravagant fashions was there was a doublet that had been designed for single women that exposed the breasts almost entirely. And you mentioned in our Age and Aging episode in King Lear, this moment where Elizabeth appeared before a French diplomat with her breasts exposed.
ES: Pretty much almost out. Yeah.
KS: Yeah.
ES: Like, wearing that doublet.
KS: Anyway, there was so much decadence going on in the royal court during Elizabeth's reign. And in James's reign, too. But what grinded English moralists and satirists' gears more than the breast exposure of this doublet was the practice of painting or wearing makeup.
Writers like John Lyly, Samuel Kiechel, and Thomas Nashe all had negative opinions of the, as they called it, Italian fashion of cosmetic art. However, it did arrive in England over the course of Elizabeth's reign and was quite popular in the court. And in 1593, Nash wrote, quote, “Gorgeous ladies of the Court, never was I so admitted so near any of you, as to see how you torture poor old Time by spounging, pinning and punsing,” unquote. So it's that guy that's like, “you're too old to wear makeup. You shouldn't try to act young.”
ES: “You're too old to wear makeup. You should dress age-appropriate.”
KS: Yeah.
ES: Yeah.
KS: And Elizabeth, especially in her old age, was prone to painting her face.
By the time of James and his queen Anne of Denmark, the practice of painting was widespread in the court. So Puritan moralists and Elizabethan Jacobean satirists accused Elizabeth of tampering with the handiwork of God and so both parties linked cosmetic aids with immorality. Again, Thomas Nash said, quote, “If not to tempt and to be thought worthy to be tempted, why dye they and diet they their faces with so many drugs as they do, as it were to correct Gods workmanship?” unquote. So it is certainly similar to Hamlet's insult to Ophelia. He says to her, quote, “I have heard of your paintings too well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another” unquote. As a result of their loathing for paint, playwrights passed on a simile that compared women to a gilded tomb or temple: they're handsome without, within they're full of rottenness, corruption, and disease. Barnabe Barnes's The Devil's Charter of 1607 kills the vain heroine of the play by poisoning her with her own cosmetics. The Revenger's Tragedy of 1607's character Vindice remarks to his dead mistress, quote, “See Ladies, with false forms you deceive men, but cannot deceive worms,” unquote. And Hamlet links vanity and death to the skull Yorick, quote, “Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come,” unquote. So like, you painting your face, you're still gonna rot when you get to the end of your life and you're dead like these corpses. That is pretty much my reading.
ES: Yeah, obviously, especially in Hamlet, we have some very explicitly said misogyny. While these misogynist tropes are still recognizable to a modern audience, there's cultural context surrounding early modern women that I think is lost to today's audiences and readers. Things that were just understood by and obvious to Shakespeare's audience as acts of female agency are lost nowadays.
And one of the fundamentals of agency is the right to decide what happens to one's body. All that to say, let's talk about early modern abortion and how it shows up in Hamlet.
KS: Let's do it.
ES: Specifically, what I am going to be looking at is two passages from Ophelia and Gertrude, as well as thinking about the timeline of Hamlet. Okay. But first, before I get into Gertrude and Ophelia, and the two portions I'm specifically looking at in this play, let's have a little background, shall we?
KS: We shall.
ES: Korey, how much do you know about reproductive health in the early modern era?
KS: Um, I will say little to nothing about early modern reproductive health.
ES: Okay. What would your impressions be? Like, what would you think it would be?
KS: Well, as somebody who knows more from this podcast, I'm going to go with what I would have thought before I did scholarship. I'm going to go with general ideas.
ES: Yeah, yeah.
KS: I would say that I would think, I would assume that there was no form of birth control. I would assume that an abortion would be very painful and dangerous. And I would assume that there was a high chance of death during an abortion in that era. But I also might assume that one was less likely to get an abortion because there were fewer options for an early modern woman. And so you would be like, “okay, well, I'll keep the baby.” Again, these are just things that based on preconceived notions of the era, I would guess.
ES: Great. So I'm going to start with law, early modern English law. Do you think abortion would be legal?
KS: If I were to go back to a person who assumes that they don't know–
ES: Yeah, pre-, pre-
KS:--then I would say no. But knowing more, I would say it probably was legal.
ES: Being a listener to this podcast, you would be correct. So early modern English law from the middle ages, we're talking 1200s to 1300s here, defined pregnancy and abortion based on the timing of fetal movement, which is around four to six months. It varies on the pregnancy, but the first signs of fetal movement generally happen during that second trimester of pregnancy. And they call this time the quickening or the ensoulment. This is when they believed that a viable fetus was in there.
And most cases that came before English court of abortion, or what I'm going to call causing the death of a fetus with potential for life, are due to assaults that resulted in pregnancy termination. Chemical abortions early in pregnancy attempted by women were not indictable as crimes under English common law. So you could not be named a criminal. And there are no cases found prosecuting contraception as a crime.
However, we do have evidence dating back to ancient times of contraception. The medieval times specifically, they were very, like the early middle ages, very much about contraception. Loved it. As the early Christian church continued to gain power, the early Christian church was not about it.
So, English common law did not punish abortion as a felony at any time. It was punishable by ecclesiastical courts, which we talked about how, especially in England, there were ecclesiastical church courts and civil courts that presided over different things. So it was punishable by an ecclesiastical court until 1540. But if a case came before a civil court, it was a misdemeanor. At most in the early modern period, a high misdemeanor, which essentially was a fine. Again, no civil law criminal convictions for abortion. And really focused on if, for example, there's cases where a man hit a woman and her pregnancy terminated, and it was deemed to have been as a result of being assaulted. In that case, the man would be charged with that misdemeanor crime of causing an abortion.
KS: Okay. So this is more like it's about choice, and the man doesn't have a choice, a say in the matter, but the woman does.
ES: Before this time, and again, this is all about before the time of the quickening, the fetal movement. So after fetal movement, if anything is done to kind of harm the fetus, that's an abortion and can be tried by the civil court. But beforehand, women could take herbal remedies, and did, to support their reproductive health, in all directions.
So there were herbal recipes, plant decoctions, and syrups and things. I know we briefly talked about like Lady Grace Mildmay in our episodes on mental health and the humors. And there are recipes that could stay the menses, so they could try to stop themselves from having a period to promote pregnancy because they're trying to get pregnant, they're trying to get to that second trimester, or there were also recipes that were known to start and encourage and purge the woman of her menses, which in many cases was a first trimester abortion. So where did these recipes come from? You might be wondering.
KS: I am wondering.
ES: So there were these books called herbals. It was a genre really. And between 1525 and 1640, that genre boomed. There were more than 24 different herbals, which are like these, imagine like a dictionary, but just about plants.
KS: Okay.
ES: Or they're like medical texts, like Grey's Anatomy, but all about plants. And they are like catalogs of these medicinal plants, their uses, their qualities, and then recipes of, like, how you can combine them to make something to cure whatever ails you. Early modern lay people actively engaged with these texts. They would test the recipes inside them. They'd add notes. We have all kinds of marginalia in these first person documents, in the manuscript versions of these first person documents that we have.
However, in these texts, they don't often write about abortions explicitly, or when they do, they're specifically talking about that later term abortion. Instead, again, they talk about bringing about the menses. Additionally, early modern women were expected to be experts in medicinal herbs. We've talked about, like I said earlier, Lady Grace Mildmay–remember her? And that included abortion recipes.
Early modern women commonly read medical texts such as Gerard’s The Herbal. And herbals specifically were fairly common reading materials for early modern women. And then the early modern stage also drew on this, like, common knowledge and popularity of the herbals and the recipes contained therein.
We see lay healers in early modern plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and we see them explicitly use written materials to validate their own successful healing acts. Shakespeare specifically depicts medicine as something that can be practiced by empirics, lay people, or wise women, but not by physicians. There's also this debate in early modern society, like physicians are trying to assert that they have better accreditation.
And when we look across the early modern stage, there's plays that are very like pro physicians, like “the physicians know what they're doing.” Shakespeare specifically, in later plays, he has two lay practitioners actually succeed where physicians have previously failed.
KS: All’s Well That Ends Well
ES: In All’s Well That Ends Well. And then Shakespeare also depicts a permissibility towards self-medication. We don't see characters like go to a doctor and get something. Instead, we see, for example, Romeo and Laertes, who are both able to purchase poisons and have some knowledge of the use of them as just consumers.
KS: Lay people
ES: Yeah. And they go to lay people like Laertes goes to a mountebank. Romeo goes to an apothecary. And I have a quote here from Sarah Neville's Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade, English Stationers and the Commodification of Botany: “It appears that in Shakespeare's own medical ethos, so long as the medicament consumed is a simple or a plant, such self-medicating is common and acceptable. The simplicity of simples coupled with the reinforcement of such knowledge in print enabled early moderns to treat their own illnesses.”
KS: Wow.
ES: All that to say, knowledge of herbalism and plant properties and what they do medically is incredibly well known in Shakespeare's time. I think now I'm about ready to actually talk about Ophelia and Gertrude, and how this early modern knowledge of herbal remedies and the early modern concept of abortion, and what we explicitly say versus what we don't explicitly say because it is such common knowledge to our audience, all tie together in Ophelia's final scene and Gertrude's description of her death. Are you ready?
KS: I am so ready. I've been waiting for this for so long. I'm all ears. Okay.
ES: So there are lists of plants associated with Ophelia's mad scene and Gertrude's description of her death. You earlier talked about how Ophelia also talks about a woman who has lost her virginity to a man who promised to wed her and then doesn't. In this context, it's important to note the timing of Ophelia's death. This play is a play that takes place over many months. From the beginning of the play to the end of Act Four, we cover three months of time.
KS: Three months. Got it.
ES: That’s what’s generally agreed upon.
KS: Ophelia dies in Act Four.
ES: Ophelia dies at the end of Act Four. That is the scene where we get Gertrude's description of her death.
KS: Right.
ES: There's the suggestion that Hamlet and Ophelia have seen each other privately around or slightly before the beginning actions of the play, right? Until she is told, don't see him anymore.
KS: Yeah, that's true. Because it's in the first act, one of the first scenes that we see with Ophelia, she's talking to Laertes, and Laertes is warning her about Hamlet and his affections and her affections with him.
ES: And then Polonius says, “Why don't you ghost him?”
KS: Right.
ES: To see if it's really love or not.
KS: Right.
ES: And then we get Hamlet distraught after a few weeks to like a month and he is distraught and Claudius and Polonius are like, ha ha.
KS: It's love.
ES: Love. Let's test him. Then we get the nunnery scene where she decides to return his letters and then Polonius dies. Hamlet is sent away. More time passes, because Laertes has to get the news that his father has died–
KS: From France
ES: –And come back from France before Ophelia dies. So, just want to keep those things in mind when these scenes are talked about, especially Ophelia's flowers. They're talked about with the poetic representation and meaning of the flowers. And while the Elizabethans did have a language of flowers, it wasn't as codified as like
KS: Victorian era?
ES: a Victorian language of flowers. So I want to make sure. Yeah. So Ophelia says the flowers that she gives out, she gives out like this:
“There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts…There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for you; and here's some for me: we may call it herb-o-grace a' Sundays. You may wear your rue with a difference. There's a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died.”
The symbolic meanings that often are attributed to these flowers rosemary for Remembrance. Pansies for thoughts. Fennel for flattery. Columbines: infidelity associated with cuckoldry. RueL herb of grace, regret; daisy: unrequited love, unhappy love, dissembling love. And violets with fidelity and faithfulness.
So then Gertrude's flowers or the plants that Gertrude mentions when she comes to report on Ophelia's death are:
“There is a willow grows askant the brook,
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream,
Therewith fantastic garlands she did make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cull-cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
There, on the pendant boughs her crownet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. 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
That her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.”
So willow, crow-flowers, nettles, daisies again, and long purples. Willow is associated symbolically with grief and unhappy love. Crow-flowers, they are unknown exactly, but they are believed to be buttercups or ragged robins. Nettles are associated with pain, poison, and ugliness. Daisies again, unrequited love, unhappy love, dissembling love. And long purples, again, could be multiple different flowers, but specifically I'm going to be looking at the cuckoo-pint or wild arum, which are two out of the three that are generally agreed upon.
KS: Okay.
ES: And for crow-flowers, I'm going to be looking at a specific buttercup genus known as the crowfoot.
KS: Cute.
ES: All right. Out of 11 different flowers, herbs, plants, how many do you think have medicinal properties?
KS: Um, I'm going to guess probably, so you've got 11 total? I'm going to guess 10 out of 11.
ES: Very close. It's 11 out of 11.
KS: I was going to go with 11 out of 11, but I was like, that's too on the nose. Well, tell me, what is the medicinal purpose for these plants and herbs and flowers?
ES: It's pretty much abortion or pain relief.
KS: Oh, I wonder how that applies to Ophelia and her predicament over these X amount of months.
ES: And her predicament over Hamlet, the man who she definitely had private time with, who she then broke up with, he told her to get to a nunnery.
KS: Broke her heart.
ES: Was weird to her and then killed her father? Yeah.
KS: Yeah. And then, of course, that one song that she sang when she was going mad, I don't know. It's like we haven't studied madness. I don't think that that's what happens to Shakespeare's mad characters. They don't sing songs that relate to-
ES: Shakespeare's mad characters don't sing songs that relate to their situation at all, right? Huh. No, they do. They definitely do. Okay. So let me just go through them in order, shall I?
KS: Yes.
ES: Just say there's a combination of a few of those herbals, like what early moderns believed. And then there's also some modern testing that's been done on some of these plants that shows what exactly they do.
So rosemary, it's for remembrance, but it's also both a contraceptive and abortifacient. And it's shown in animal testing to induce the inhibition of gonadotropin or prolactin secretion and is sometimes called an anti-gonadotropic. I'm getting real science-y on this history podcast.
KS: I love it. Any of our science listeners are going to be like, this is my moment. This is my episode.
ES: Yeah. Prolactin specifically stimulates breast development and milk production in female bodies. Gonadotropin deficiency leads to infertility. There are two specific gonadotropins in mammals, follicle stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone. Both of those deal with egg production in a body with eggs and a uterus. Primates, specifically humans, also produce a gonadotropin called human chorionic gonadotropin, which is a hormone for the maternal recognition of pregnancy produced by trophoblast cells that are surrounding a growing embryo. And these cells eventually form the placenta after implementation. The presence of human chorionic gonadotropin, or HCG, is detected in some HCG pregnancy strip tests. This hormone also helps with ovulation. So rosemary inhibits the production of the hormone that recognizes a body as pregnant, helps with ovulation, and helps with egg production.
KS: Wow. I had no idea. I just thought rosemary for your remembrance.
ES: Yeah. Pansies, they're for thoughts. Culpepper, in 1652's The English Physician, which they're being written about like 50 years after Hamlet–it's a cataloging of existing information that's just out there in popular culture. Pansies, or heartsease, they're good for venereal complaints.
Now, what are violets good for? I'm just going to jump around a little bit. Fidelity and faithfulness, but also pain relief, cooling, reducing inflammation, purging the body of choleric humors, which would be lust. So both pansies and violets do that.
Fennel, sure, you can say it's for flattery. But that Lorsch Manuscript, again, that theological text compiled in the scriptorium of a monastic library circa 800 after the Common Era, just flat out says it was used to cause an abortion. And then in Macer's Herbal, which is an herbal from 1070, it was listed as a menstrual purgative–De viribus herbarum, which became one of the most widely consulted texts on herbal medicines during the late medieval and early Renaissance periods, that's what Macer's Herbal is. Culpepper in The Complete Herbalist also says that fennel provokes the menses. One recipe actually contains fennel, rue seed, and alum. Culpepper advises that pregnant women should not take it as it provokes the menses, brings away both birth and afterbirth. Like if you take this after the quickening, it will still cause an abortion.
Columbines are often said to be associated with fidelity and infidelity. And while they are safe if consumed in small quantities, columbine poisoning can be fatal. And Nicholas Culpepper in The English Physician recommended that the seeds be taken in wine to speed the process of childbirth. So again, something that can kind of like speed along a women's process.
Here's the big one. There's really no other reason to have it included in a list.
Rue or Herb of Grace is used as an abortifacient. In fact, Hippocrates lists it in a recipe for a, quote, “potent uterine abortifacient.” Culpepper in The English Physician says about Garden Rue, “This is so well known, both by this name, and the Name Herb of Grace, that I shal not need to write you any further Description of it; But shall only shew you the Vertues of it as followeth…It provoketh Urine and Womens Courses, being taken either in Meat or Drink…frees women from suffocation of the mother.” In The Complete Herbalist, he says that combined with sagapenum, which is a, like, resin, it expels the dead child and afterbirth.
KS: Okay.
ES: Yeah.
KS: And this is something that pretty much everybody knows.
ES: Everybody knows.
KS: He doesn't have to explain.
ES: Doesn't have to explain We have in the 1100s a text that says it “brings about the menstrua and aborts an embryo.” Just flat out says that.
KS: Clear as day.
ES: There are hints in early modern texts that women regularly took a small amount of rue with food as birth control, and it was also thought at the time to stop the production of semen.
KS: Oh, okay. So it would be kind of like a plan B.
ES: Rue is kind of nasty. It's not as good as plan B.
KS: Okay. But I guess in theory of what it does.
ES: There's no other medicinal purpose for it. It is purely.
KS: Just to say..
ES: If you see rue listed, it is provoking the menses, shall we say.
KS: Okay.
ES: The daisy. Sure. Unrequited love associated with unhappy love or dissembling love. Culpepper says that it's also pain relief and can help temper the heat of choler. Again, cooling lust, reducing inflammation. And I already went over violets, but one more time. Also reducing inflammation. So some of these are like taking a Tylenol alongside your plan B or your chemical abortion.
KS: Right. Fascinating.
ES: So that is all of them that Ophelia has grouped together in a matter of a few lines. And I think the early modern audience would go, “Oh, I know what a combination of all of those things would do.”
KS: And of course, we in 2022 or really from, I don't know, maybe the Victorian period to now or some other period, it's lost on us because that's not a part of our medical culture.
ES: Right. So then getting to the flowers that Gertrude associates with Ophelia's death, or the flowers and plants, because we also have a willow tree there. Culpepper says that the willow, quote, “Both the leaves, bark, and the seed, are used to stanch bleeding of wounds, and at mouth and nose, spitting of blood, and other fluxes of blood in man or woman” and that it stays the heat of lust. It was also thought to stop the production of semen.
And modern testing has shown that willow produces a substance, trihydroxyoestrin, that mimics estriol, the hormone that interferes with ovulation and implementation of a fertilized egg. We have recipes as early as 360 after the Common Era that show that willow was used as birth control in ancient and medieval times.
And crowfoots are mentioned in Culpepper's English Physician. He says,“These are so common and there are so many that to describe them all would test the patience of even Socrates himself and because I have note yet attained to the Spirit of Socrates, I shall but describe the most usual”
KS: Okay, I like that. He's got a sense of humor about him.
ES: Yeah, he's like, “I don't have the time. There's no time in the day. Paper's expensive. You know what a buttercup looks like.” And they're not fit to be given inwardly, but the leaves and flowers can be used in a few different medicinal properties. But they pretty much seem to be like “draining a blister,” but they're definitely poisonous.
Nettles: in The English Physician, Nicholas Culpepper says that these “provoke Womens Courses, and settle the suffocation or strangling of the Mother, and all other Diseases thereof,” pretty straightforward.
She also mentions daisies, which again are pain relief.
And then we have long purples. Two of the generally agreed upon options are the cuckoo-pint or the wild arum, which are the same genus of flower. And Culpepper actually talks about them in The English Physician that “bringeth down Womens Courses, and purgeth them effectually after Child-bearing to bring away the After-birth.” They're also extremely toxic. Cuckoo-pint/wild arum is one of the most common causes of accidental plant poisoning based on attendance at hospital emergency departments today.
KS: Shoot.
ES: While Ophelia has a contraceptive, abortifacient, pain relief-slash-curing venereal complaints, and provoking the menses or bringing forth childbirth, and an abortifacient and again, pain relief, Gertrude has a birth control-slash-staying the heat of lust, a poison, something that provokes the courses, a pain relief, bringing down the women's courses, bringing down the women's courses and-slash-poison.
So all of that to say, especially when we consider that when we talked about the four humors and women being associated with cool, water…
KS: Wet
ES: …melancholy, wet, when we have these images for the early modern audience being associated with women and then Gertrude coming in and talking about how Ophelia was literally mixing and creating this metaphorical wreath like and trying to pin it all on a willow and through that fell into water, the women's element, and like returned to it, I think that we're very poetically talking about a failed abortion.
KS: Sounds like it.
ES: For me, this also explains why Gertrude has knowledge of how she died but is unable to help because like Ophelia, Gertrude would also have knowledge of these plants and their uses. Because I know that one thing that people talk about a lot is, like, Gertrude's guilt and Gertrude's culpability and if she can describe Ophelia's death in this way and it was a true drowning, why didn't she help save her?
KS: Right.
ES: I think there's also a case here for if Gertrude saw all those flowers, as an early modern gentlewoman, noble woman with the knowledge that she and Ophelia share, it being an accident and Gertrude being there and being unable to do anything, I think gives us the answer of why can't she help with the drowning? What if it's not actually drowning? I guess what I'm saying is what if instead of the plants being the metaphors, the plants are very real tools and the water and the drowning is the poetry?
KS: I see what you're saying and that changes everything.
ES: I think it's something that can help inform theater makers into making better choices for Ophelia, for Gertrude, and also for Hamlet.
KS: Right.
ES: And considering this as early modern fact would answer–
KS: A lot of those questions
ES: –all those types of questions.
KS: Right. I have a question. I don't know if you know this, but in the gravedigger scene, the gravedigger cheekily implies that Ophelia should not be buried in a Christian cemetery.
ES: Right
KS: But because she's a gentlewoman, she's got some courtesy because of the relationship to the king and the church and what they will do, like a blind eye that they'll turn. If Ophelia, in fact, did die of a botched abortion, does that make a difference in terms of it being a suicide or not? Is that something you know?
ES: So I think there we still have Gertrude's the only one witnessing this and she's the one telling the story and she's telling the facts of the story to men and men's knowledge of the time were kind of like, “women take herbs to do, like, things with their body”.
KS: Right.
ES: I'm looking at that scene right now. They talk about did she drown herself on purpose or not? Drowning was this method of death by suicide that kind of like gave this like could be accidental, could be not. And that sort of equivocation of guilt in it allowed for the early modern audience to be like, “ah, well, she does get a Christian burial then because we can't know if it was an accident or not.”
KS: Right. So all of this, all of this to say
ES: Yeah
KS: –that essentially because Gertrude is the one witness who is presenting the story to the men making the decisions, she knows the truth and she could spin it so that it's not the same as another kind of self-inflicted death.
ES: Correct. And again, it's a difference between like ecclesiastical court and civil court. And they think that like it's literally because she is a gentlewoman that she is getting a Christian burial when she drowned herself because they believe that like what she did was self-inflicted. But they don't seem to have, like, a whole lot of facts about her death.
KS: Not much insight.
ES: The coroner says she drowned. Then we do get like that the ceremony itself is very sparse
KS: Right
ES: And the doctor of divinity, so the priest, is like, we've done as much and her death was doubtful. Like she should not have gotten a Christian burial.
KS: Yeah, yeah. There was too much that was suspect about the circumstances, but he's doing them a favor.
ES: She is given, allowed her, virgin crants. So she's being allowed to be buried like a virgin in a Christian burial. And if we do any more, we would profane the service of the dead. Laertes tells the doctor that like she'll be an angel when you're in hell.
KS: And he’s gonna be in hell. Yeah. But I, reflecting on this information, I really like the depth that that provides to people discussing, but also producing Hamlet because it adds an element to Hamlet and Ophelia. Like you were saying, it adds an element to Hamlet and Ophelia's relationship. It better justifies Ophelia going mad compared to Hamlet broke her heart, and she lost her father, and she went mad. It gives her fate much more motive, I suppose, compared to just, well, let's try to logic away madness, something that we don't really fully understand and is represented a certain way on the stage.
ES: Yeah. And it also gives us an answer of like, why does Gertrude seem to not want to see Ophelia? And then all of a sudden it's like, I wish she would have been my Hamlet's wife.
KS: Right.
ES: There's more reason for her to say that if she's aware that like, if they had just been able to get married.
KS: This would have been prevented.
ES: This would have. Mm-hmm.
KS: Yeah. And that gives Gertrude more reasonable remorse because like you were saying, if it was truly just drowning and she saw everything that happened, why would she not go into the water and save Ophelia? Why would she not call for someone to go save Ophelia?
ES: If we take it literally, at face value: Gertrude is close enough to Ophelia, when Ophelia tries to hang a garland on a willow branch, to tell what the flowers are. How far away can you be to tell that and be far enough away that you can't help–
KS: A drowning person.
ES: –Save someone from drowning.
KS: Right. But if it's this other option.
ES: But if it's this other option.
KS: What could Gertrude even do?
ES: Right.
KS: So this is the unsaid stuff that goes over the heads of the modern person because we don't know this stuff until Elyse brings it to the podcast and says, I found this stuff.
ES: I mean, I gotta give credit where credit is due. This rabbit hole started many years ago when I played Ophelia, and we entertained this possibility based on just looking at the idea of “Why is rue the one flower that Ophelia takes for herself?” And then, you know, there are people who do have this knowledge still. And one of them said to me afterwards, “Oh honey, if Ophelia could only wait a few more years, plan B would be invented.”
KS: That's a tragedy. Where do theater makers go about with this information? You know, like we mentioned this plenty of times. What do you do with this information? How do you, especially for people like us, not us personally, but audience members who don't study the medicinal uses of plants and herbs and flowers in the early modern era—
ES: Right
KS: —before attending a performance of Hamlet at their local community theater.
ES: Sure.
KS: You know, the question then for theater makers is when you take this, how do you telegraph it?
ES: I think that, you know, giving your actors the knowledge and letting it inform the choices that you make in that nunnery scene. Like we can't change what he is saying. What he is saying is misogynist, right? But what if there's at least part of that scene where he is not just outright yelling and screaming at her (which I’ve seen before)? What if he's not physically abusive to her (which I’ve seen before)? What if there is just a change in him over the course of that scene? And if she's keeping this a secret from him the whole time, right? Because we also don't have language where she's like, “Hey, guess what?” Also probably too early for her to know. Then, you know, it allows our Gertrude to have answers. It allows our Gertrude to maybe have more reasons for not wanting Ophelia to be seen, not wanting Ophelia to come in when the king's around, more urgency. You know, there's subtle things of like touching her stomach when Hamlet says something like, “Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” If she's thinking, “Oh, right, I've missed a period.”
KS: Right. That could be an indicator.
ES: And I think it's just allowing ourselves to take the text at less face value as theatermakers. This has more depth to it. And if it adds something to the production to help make Ophelia and Gertrude a little bit more 3D and less victims of Hamlet and Claudius.
KS: Right.
ES: I think that has power, even if we're not sitting our audience down and being like, so let me tell you about rosemary, okay?
KS: Right. Let's literally list out all of the ways it was used during this time period. What do you think about this?
ES: We can go look at like the choices. Ophelia and Gertrude aren't agency-less. Dramaturgs exist. Dramaturgy exists for a reason.
KS: Right.
ES: Our actors and our production, our director can make more informed decisions about how can we show that these two characters are not just “weak-willed women,” but in fact that they are doing what they can–
KS: Right
ES: –to control their situation. And they succeed when they make choices.
KS: Yeah, whether that's for the better or for the worse, they do succeed at their choice. And I would also have a hard time believing that they don't have agency because Hamlet speaks about Gertrude and Ophelia in a way that's based on the time period's desire for women to not have agency, to take a step back and not participate in certain activities as people who have sex or people who express themselves in certain ways. And if actively participating in something that was…
ES: Objectionable to...
KS: Objectionable...
ES: For Hamlet.
KS: Yeah, to the moralists of the time or Hamlet, the moralist Hamlet, he wouldn't be speaking to them in the ways that he does.
ES: Right.
KS: So clearly they have agency because otherwise they would be sitting on their hands
ES: He wouldn’t be trying to control them
KS: –and Hamlet would have... Yeah, yeah, exactly. Hamlet is trying to control them because they have agency and he knows it and he doesn't want them to participate in agency.
ES: Right. Yeah. I think what we can do with this information and acknowledging that they have agency is like as theater makers, we can make productions where Hamlet says misogynist things, says sexist things, but the production is not inherently misogynist or sexist.
KS: Correct. Because you cannot avoid the language and you cannot avoid how Hamlet treats Ophelia and Gertrude, but that does not mean that you as the theater maker have to be sexist.
ES: That doesn't have to be the statement you are making by producing Hamlet. You can make it a commentary on what happens when misogyny and sexism are put center–
KS: Rears its ugly head.
ES: Rears its ugly head.
KS: Yeah.
ES:Yeah. And on that note...
KS: Yeah, on that note...
ES: Thank you for listening.
Quote of the Episode:
From Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 3, spoken by Montague:
But I can give thee more,
For I will raise her statue in pure gold,
That whilst Verona, by that name is known,
There shall no figure at such rate be set
As that of true and faithful Juliet.
Shakespeare Anyone? is created and produced by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.
Note: When this episode was recorded, Kourtney Smith was using the stage name "Korey Leigh Smith".
Music is "Neverending Minute" by Sounds Like Sander.
Follow us on Instagram at @shakespeareanyonepod for updates or visit our website at shakespeareanyone.com
You can support the podcast at patreon.com/shakespeareanyone
Works referenced:
Brustein, Robert. “Misogyny: THE HAMLET OBSESSION.” The Tainted Muse: Prejudice and Presumption in Shakespeare and His Time, Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 13–52. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vktzf.4. Accessed 17 Aug. 2022.
Culpeper, Nicholas. The Complete Herbal: To Which Is Now Added, Upwards of One Hundred Additional Herbs, with a Display of Their Medicinal and Occult Qualities ; Physically Applied to the Cure of All Disorders Incident to Mankind ; to Which Are Now First Annexed, the English Physician Enlarged, and Key to Physic, with Rules for Compounding Medicine According to the True System of Nature Forming a Complete Family Dispensatory, and Natural System of Physic. Edited by Thomas Kelly, Thomas Kelly, 17, Paternoster Row, 1843.
Culpeper, Nicholas. The English Physitian, or, an Astrologo-Physical Discourse of the Vulgar Herbs of This Nation: Being a Compleat Method of Physick, Whereby a Man May Preserve His Body in Health ; or Cure Himself, Being Sick, for Three Pence Charge, with Such Things Only as Grow in England, They Being Most Fit for English Bodies ... Edited by Thomas Cross, Peter Cole, at the Sign of the Printing-Press in Cornhil, near the Royal Exchange, 1652, Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A35365.0001.001, Accessed 16 Aug. 2022.
Leong, Elaine. “‘Herbals She Peruseth’: Reading Medicine in Early Modern England.” Renaissance Studies, vol. 28, no. 4, 5 Sept. 2014, pp. 556–578., https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12079.
Neville, Sarah.“Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade: English Stationers and the Commodification of Botany”. Cambridge University Press, 6 Jan. 2022. Online. Internet. 26 Jul. 2022. Available: https://books.openmonographs.org/articles/book/Early_Modern_Herbals_and_the_Book_Trade_English_Stationers_and_the_Commodification_of_Botany/19189484/1
Riddle, John M. Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Harvard University Press, 1999.
