‘My first introduction to her was to do with her death, which is a strange way to meet a character’: Our obsession with Ophelia

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‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’ muses Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But who answers? If not the eponymous tragic hero, is it his rejected lover Ophelia? If you read her death as a suicide, then surely she has decided ‘not to be’, choosing to act where Hamlet is paralysed. Her death is about the only agency she has as one of two women in a play written by, named after, and ruled by, men. Although she has just 58 speeches in the play compared to Hamlet’s 358, it is often her silence that poses the most poignant questions.

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She is famed for her death, yet there is no limit to how many times Ophelia has been reborn on stage and in film. From Dame Judi Dench’s professional debut and Dame Harriet Walters’ notable turn opposite Jonathan Pryce at the Royal Court in 1980, to film portrayals by Helena Bonham Carter, Kate Winslet and, this year, Morfydd Clark opposite Riz Ahmed.

It is Taylor Swift’s ‘Fate of Ophelia’ from her album The Life of A Showgirl, however, that has thrown the tragic heroine into the limelight for a younger generation. PinkPantheress’s 2023 song ‘Ophelia’ and the Lumineers’ 2016 hit of the same name also pay homage. A perfumer has even released a scent in her honour.

Our cultural obsession with Shakespeare’s elusive character continues to grow and, this month, Sadler’s Wells in London will see the heroine resurrected again through dance as she tells her story in the acclaimed South African choreographer Dada Masilo’s Hamlet. But why is it that this tragic female continues to obsess audiences?

Immortalised in paint by John Everett Millais in 1851–52, Ophelia’s ‘mermaid-like’ drowning is a moment of serene and macabre beauty — and one where life almost imitated art. Millais had his 19-year-old model, Elizabeth Siddal, lie fully clothed in a bathtub for the painting. During one sitting she developed severe hypothermia, nearly dying for his art. Was Millais aware of the cruel irony of almost losing another Ophelia to the indifference of a man? Or is the part characterised by madness, driving those who try to capture it insane.

‘She has a frail heart and is very fragile and sensitive,’ says Lehlohonolo Madise, known as Nolo, who dances the role of Ophelia in Masilo’s Hamlet. ‘Dance is the perfect way to tell her story.’ Why the enduring fascination? ‘I feel as if we all know that Ophelia is a normal woman whose life is destroyed by the men surrounding her, and in the play, yes, Ophelia goes mad, but they never really tell us what made her go mad,’ Nolo says.

Intrigue and doubt, then, is key to our fascination. Georgia-Mae Myers played Ophelia in the Royal Shakespeare Company's recent touring production of Hamlet. ‘My first introduction to her was to do with her death, which is a strange way to meet a character,’ the actor says. ‘She was kind of an ethereal creature rather than a human being before I met her, but through playing her I realised how much she opposes the patriarchy and the system she’s in when she’s in her madness.’ Perhaps our renewed interest in Ophelia is a response to the rise of misogynistic online influencers and the wider ‘manosphere’ that haunts women today.

‘It's a world full of men,’ Georgia says of Hamlet. ‘During the play, her brother leaves, her father is killed and Hamlet breaks her heart, and so she's just left alone, and then this veil, of like “I've behaved so well all this time. I've done everything by the book” is lifted. Then she sees everything for what it is — I guess you could say, bulls**t. In her madness she calls out the hypocrisy of the state and these systems that have been put in place to keep people obedient.’ Georgia adds: ‘I think there's something very powerful about the fact that she kills herself. It takes a lot of strength and a lot of willpower to do that, and so I think her death is kind of an act of defiance in a way.’

Tristan Marshall, a lecturer at Shakespeare’s Globe says: ‘I get the feeling we're missing stuff with Ophelia … It could be that part of her has been cut and that’s why we’re not getting the full picture — I feel there's one scene that we're missing with her to make narrative sense.’ Perhaps her ‘incompleteness’ has fed the desire of modern day creatives to fill in the gaps. ‘It's intriguing in all the right ways,’ Dr Marshall says, of Ophelia’s story. Fame wise, he admits ‘it helps that she’s in a play like Hamlet — probably the most discussed Shakespeare play of all time’ but adds that ‘she is fascinating, not only for what she says, but for what she doesn't say’.

One of the flowers Ophelia gives out in her madness speech is rue, for example. She offers some to Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, and keeps some for herself. ‘Rue was associated with provoking abortion,’ Dr Marshall explains. ‘There's a language in all the flowers that she uses that I think an original Elizabethan or a Jacobean audience would be picking up on a lot more on than we are, so I get the feeling that there is an unsaid character here, which is really interesting.’

Charles Moseley, a scholar who specialises in Shakespeare at the University of Cambridge, thinks that Shakespeare’s Ophelia is a long way from the cultural symbol we have today. ‘She’s only a minor part in the play as Shakespeare wrote it, but that play has got its own particular agenda in its own time,’ he says. ‘The agenda of the play does not survive, but the play itself still exists, and the more it's used, the more it becomes a place onto which we map our own concerns and interests.’

He notes that, like fellow minor roles Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose barely acknowledged death inspired a fully fleshed-out exploration in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, today’s critics have an appetite for learning more about those that have been sidelined.

‘The whole thing can be seen from the angle of somebody who is a marginal character, but who has a massive story of her own to tell,’ Dr Moseley adds. ‘People aren't actually that interested in the play that Shakespeare wrote, they're interested in taking people out of this narrative and saying: “What's their perspective? How can we see something through them?” And that's what's happened, I think, to Ophelia.’

For Sophie King, the CEO and founder of the perfumery Soki London, that is exactly the case. Her fragrance, Ophelia (think ‘peonies, delicate feminine notes and aquatic notes’ for obvious reasons), is a homage to the character, as Sophie has reinterpreted her. ‘The perfume brand is all fragrances inspired by women from history or literature. The reason I chose Ophelia for this fragrance is because in Hamlet she's very innocent and young. She doesn't really have much agency and, of course, she had a tragic death. I wanted to recreate her. The fragrance is feminine, pretty, but still powerful and meaningful.’

On the surface Ophelia's madness is innuendo-laden gibberish. She is mocked by her male onlookers ('her speech is nothing', one says, which was also a crude reference in Shakespeare's day), but she becomes a bold symbol of honesty in a play ruled by fear where the characters refuse to say what they really feel to one another. It was her beauty and obedience that gave rise to her stardom, all those years ago, but it's her feral honesty that the modern woman loves and has led to Ophelia's reinvention time and time again.

Dada Masilo’s Hamlet is on at Sadler’s Wells theatre in London from May 25-26. For tickets see their website.