Shakespeare With A Fever

A City Shakespeare With A Fever

It’s funny how things from thousands of years ago seem to not really change all that much, and it tends to be the things that most need changing. Women are starting to speak up for themselves, but it took years and years for this to happen. Even Shakespeare knew that women were dealing with unspoken struggles, and he showed this through his play Hamlet.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince Hamlet is destroyed after the death of his father, King Hamlet. Meanwhile, his mother Queen Gertrude marries King Hamlet’s brother (Prince Hamlet’s uncle) for the sake of her country. Sometime later, a ghost visits Prince Hamlet and tells him that the king had been murdered by none other than his brother. Hamlet wants to confirm this information before exacting revenge, so he pretends to be insane, knowing that people would say things around him assuming that he was unaware. While pretending to be insane, he says a lot of things that only the insane could get away with saying: the truth.

In Act 2 Scene 2, Hamlet talks to some actors who are going to be putting on a play for the royal family. At some point he essentially tells clowns to make people laugh, knights to swing their swords around, and women to speak their minds a lot. If you look at his commands, you can see that he is telling these groups to do what they are constantly doing. It is clear that clowns make people laugh, and knights are supposed to fight, but telling women to speak, as always? This is extremely ironic considering the fact that his girlfriend, Ophelia, is being pressured into fixing Hamlet when he is considered to have gone insane. Not only does she get the responsibility of saving him, but also the blame of his insanity in the first place.

Polonius (Ophelia’s father) and Queen Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother) both tell Ophelia- whether directly or indirectly- that her femininity is the source of Hamlet’s insanity. They then decide that because it is her fault, she is the one who should cure him of his state of mind. Ophelia is also instructed not to love Hamlet by her father and brother. It’s easy to see how the burdens put on her would drive anyone crazy, but in her case, she actually was driven mad. Throughout the play, the audience hears all about the pressures placed on her, but nothing about how she reacts until we hear about her death.

Ophelia drowns. This sounds pretty harsh when taken literally, but quite honestly I didn’t find it to be all that surprising. After all, though she hadn’t physically drowned yet, Ophelia had been sinking the entire time. All of the stress put onto her because of her relationship with Hamlet had been pulling her down until eventually, she gave in. Some people say that her death was a suicide, but I think that if anything it was more of a murder. She drowned in expectation before anything else, and I think that she was so accustomed to drowning already that she didn’t feel the difference when she decided to let herself go.

If Ophelia had spoken about the pressure she was feeling, perhaps things may have gone differently for her. For example, in Plato’s The Republic, it is said that a fever is not a disease, but a symptom of it, and speaking up is not a disease, but rather the symptom that warns us of injustice. If Ophelia had talked about the stress she must have been feeling, then she may have been treated differently and not ended up dying so young.

Women today are much more likely to speak about the way they have been treated. Sadly, because of all of the negative ideas assigned to protesting, recent events in our country (such as the #MeToo movement) make it seem as though our country is bad. In reality, all countries are filled with injustice, but people in America are beginning to speak up (symptom) which helps us to realize and try to solve injustice in our society, (the disease). While this gives us a bad rap, it means that at the very least we are working towards justice and won’t end up like Ophelia, drowning in expectation.