Becoming "Ofelia": Changing Perspectives in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Spanish Drama

The essay charts the changing perspectives of the character of Ophelia in Spanish drama from the first neoclassical versions of the Frenchman Jean-François Ducis’s adapted Hamlet to the ‘original’ compositions of the late nineteenth century. Still steeped in Enlightenment rationalism, the first translations, like Ducis’s original, eschew such unseemly spectacles as the display of female madness, while enabling the emergence of a strong and even defiant Ophelia. This version of Shakespeare’s character, which persists until the 1820s, will, in the light of women’s actual situation in nineteenth-century Spanish society as well as of their representation in contemporary male culture, be revised and rewritten in later iterations: first, in Pablo Avecilla’s Hamlet of 1856, an “imitation” of the original where, without succumbing to full-on “hysteria”, Ofelia’s agency is significantly reduced, to the extent that she becomes a political puppet in the hands of Polonio and Hamlet; last, the 1872 El príncipe Hamlet [Prince Hamlet] by Carlos Coello, “inspired” on Shakespeare, but also on recent Italian productions of the play, where, despite a momentary surge of female desire, the Ophelia as victim trope, so carefully cultivated by the Romantics, is fully installed. KEYWORDS: Ophelia; Spanish drama; representation; neoclassicism; Romanticism