“Her mood will needs be pitied”: Emotional Ideologies in the Afterlives of Ophelia

This essay discusses emotional ideologies in the afterlives of Ophelia in order to note the very different ways in which Shakespeare’s first audiences might have perceived her affective impact in the play. Rather than reading Ophelia and her madness through the lens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representations, which turned her into an aesthetic object of pity, I suggest that Shakespeare reintroduces her in the play’s penultimate act as a figure with a powerful affective impact on others and with the potential to overturn what the emotion historian William Reddy might call the “emotional regime” of the court of Elsinore. Ophelia’s madness ostensibly encourages politically subversive emotion, as we learn in the cryptic description of her effect on those who listen to her distracted speech – a description given by Horatio in the First Folio and by an unnamed Gentleman in the Second Quarto of Hamlet. In providing Ophelia with this effect on others, I suggest that Shakespeare demonstrates his characteristic engagement with classical literature and that early modern audiences too might have associated Ophelia with certain female forebears of classical literature whose madness is both affective – in the sense of provoking pity in others – and subversively connected with violence and revenge. I focus, in particular, on the classical figure of Cassandra who also appears in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, a play roughly contemporary with Hamlet, arguing that the Ophelia/Cassandra comparison helps the critic shed the debilitating emotional ideologies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representations. KEYWORDS: Hamlet; Ophelia; emotion; pity; representation; classical literature; Cassandra