So, before Hamlet escapes into madness, he's in a difficult spot.
It could have happened to anyone hanging out on a river bank wearing lots of layers, but pretty much everyone else accepts Ophelia's death as a deliberate suicide caused by her madness, so that raises the question: what kind of agency did she have since she clearly had some, and how did she use it, and also, what caused her madness? Gertrude's description makes Ophelia's death sound like an accident: a branch broke and she plunged helplessly into the water. And if she did, why didn't she try to save Ophelia instead of coming up with a lovely simile about how much she looks like a mermaid while she drowns? Did Gertrude actually see this? Probably not. So in painting there's a tradition of depicting Ophelia as a tragic, romantic, completely powerless heroine, following the mythology created by Gertrude when she describes Ophelia's death in extensive detail - how she fell in the weeping brook, her clothes spread wide and mermaid like, awhile they bore her up till that her garments, heavy with their drink, pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death. So a basic reading of Hamlet would look like this: Claudius has and uses power, Hamlet has power but mostly chooses not to use it, Polonius has less power than he imagines himself to have, and Ophelia and Gertrude have no power.
It's not the only one, it's not the only one that we do here, but it is one that matters. Now there's been some backlash to us discussing gender dynamics in literature, but this is a really important contemporary approach to the study of literature. He orders Ophelia for instance to "get thee to a nunnery" and he tells his mother Gertrude, "frailty, thy name is woman" even though Hamlet isn't terribly robust, as you may have noticed. So Hamlet's pretty vicious to the women in this play. I'll give you this though Me From the Past, whether or not Hamlet wants to sleep with his mother, he definitely has girl troubles.
And while you can read Hamlet as being entirely about sex sex sex sex sex sex, you don't have to. No, no, no, no, no, Me From the Past, as we've already learned, not even Oedipus had an Oedipus complex, although your fascination with it is starting to freak me out a little. Hamlet has an Oedipus complex, that explains everything." Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course Literature, and today we continue our discussion of Hamlet.
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