Remembering Ophelia: suicide in Shakespeare’s England
The act of suicide was considered a devilish sin in Shakespeare’s time — but what does this mean for Ophelia and her reception as a character in one of the Bard’s greatest works?
Last week Amy Lidster explored the influence of St Paul’s on Shakespeare’s work ahead of an upcoming research-sharing event at Shakespeare’s Globe.
Joining Amy for these discussions on 23 November is Dr Shanyn Altman — Teaching Fellow in English Literature at the University of Sussex. Shanyn wants to investigate how the act of suicide was represented in early modern literature…
To a modern audience, Ophelia is a sympathetic character made all the more tragic by her supposed suicide. But an early modern audience might have had a much more ambivalent response to this aspect of Hamlet: the play features a heated debate about how she should be remembered, with some characters even condemning her to damnation.
Because Ophelia is thought to have taken her own life, the gravedigger and the priest argue — rather firmly — that she should be denied a Christian burial. Appalled by the accusation of suicide, however, Laertes passionately defends his sister and her funeral rites:
Lay her i’th’ earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring. I tell thee, churlish priest,
A ministering angel shall my sister be
When thou liest howling.
(5.1.227–31)
Laertes doesn’t, however, actually refute the accusation that his sister took her own life. But why would it be such a big deal if she did commit suicide?
The answer is one that might surprise us.
In early modern England, a person who committed suicide was considered a criminal and would be put on trial posthumously for murder. The penalty for a guilty verdict being returned was so severe that it often resulted in the state confiscating all of the suicide’s goods, leaving the family of the deceased in poverty. And if the punishment was grim, the lengths that families would go to in order to save their own reputations could be even more extreme, sometimes beating the corpse of their loved one to make the death look like a homicide.
The law against suicide was based on Christian teachings that held any form of self-killing to violate the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’. This argument for suicide as heresy also found precedence in the New Testament: the disciple Matthew relates how Satan tried to tempt Christ to jump from the highest point of the temple to prove he was the Son of God. Based on this story, the act of suicide came to be considered as a devilish sin of temptation that ought to be resisted.
Many early modern writers incorporated this Christian view into their works. In Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. 1589), the demon Mephistopheles provides Faustus with a dagger so that he can put an end to his despair. Tempted to submit to the forces of evil, Faustus eventually relents and steps back from self-slaughter — although he doesn’t live much longer, as he is dragged off to hell in any case.
Such an unforgiving attitude towards suicide might be the reason why Shakespeare never confirms exactly how Ophelia dies. We know that she drowns, but since her death takes place offstage it is unclear whether her final actions are accidental or intentional. In Shakespeare’s England, drowning was one of the most common forms of accidental death, particularly for women; despite the ambiguity surrounding such deaths, however, it was common for a guilty verdict to be returned since the state stood to make money from the family of the deceased.
Within a ruthless culture that sought guilty verdicts and condemned suicides as heretics, it seems that if Shakespeare had confirmed that Ophelia committed suicide, very few members of an early modern audience would have sympathised with her plight. But why exactly does Shakespeare seem to defend Ophelia? Where do his ideas on suicide fit into historical debates on the matter, and how do these ideas vary from play to play? I will be exploring these questions, and more, at the event on 23 November 2017.
Words: Dr Shanyn Altman
