The theory focuses upon one line in Ophelia's mad scene, a line that has drawn a blank from scholars. It is called a crux line because it is a puzzling problem. This crux line, delivered by Ophelia to her brother, late in the mad scene, Act IV, scene v., is simply "It is the false steward that stole his master's daughter" (4.5.171-172).
Why bother with an obscure crux line? Most of us know the plot of Hamlet,—or do we?. The play is full of darkness, doubts, confusion, uneasiness. Its opening line sets the stage for what follows: "Who's there?"—and from that moment the plot unfolds to us, —or does it, fully? At the end, Hamlet in his final moments begs his friend, Horatio, to "report my cause aright/to the unsatisfied: (5.2..318-319) . . ."Things standing thus unknown" (l.324). Even after Hamlet's death, Horatio refers to "th' yet unknowing world . . ."(l.358)
Well, there certainly have been quite a few of us "unsatisfied" because we have been finding new ways to read and explain Hamlet ever since. E. M. W. Tillyard, however, wisely states in his Shakespeare's Problem Plays, "No one is likely to accept another man's reading of Hamlet"; and that dictum probably holds true for my theory, especially tonight when I can only tempt you with a summary. Meanwhile, as Horatio says to Hamlet , "Season your admiration for a while/With an attent ear . . ." (1.2.191-192).
We all know there's a lot of talk about sex in Hamlet and frequent play on words that have a sexual connotation and these should not be ignored. We should, tonight at least, try to forget that we are in the post-Victorian Age, and imagine, instead, that we are true Elizabethans. As Elizabethans, we have a hearty sense of humor, both men and women, and have an ear for the play on words that have sexual or bawdy connotations. Our being a little more Elizabethan and less post-Victorian will help us with clues to this problem play.
In the opening of the mad scene, where the remarks made by Horatio and a Gentleman tell us how we should experience the scene, Shakespeare encourages us to decipher Ophelia's lines. This is not unusual in Shakespeare. The Gentleman says that Ophelia speaks "but half sense." He says, "Her speech is nothing,/Yet the unshaped use of it doth move/The hearers to collection" (4.5.7-9). In other words, we are not to see the mad scene as simply a poor girl gone mad, speaking nonsense: no, we are to "collect" what she says and shape or reassemble it. I should say, too, that " it into some sense. I think it's quite simple: Reversal is the key, as we shall see it is elsewhere in Ophelia's lines in the mad scene. For example, the two words "steward" and "master" reversed give us, not "It is the false steward that stole his master's daughter," but, instead, "It is the false master that stole his steward's daughter." Get it? Simple! Of course, Ophelia is the daughter, Polonius is the steward (the house manager at Elsinore), and, I understand something sexual in it. We know it as Biblical ("Adam knew Eve") and Shakespeare often uses this now archaic meaning. Then, who would be the queen's "true-love"? In Ophelia's "unshaped" speech, that's Claudius; but we know that he has killed his own brother, the true king (he himself being actually the "false king"), and married the queen. True love? True anything? To my "ill breeding mind," she is asking: "How should I be able to tell, or 'know,' your 'true-love' (the false king, Claudius) from another one (Hamlet, she saw as her own?)?"
A few moments later, when Ophelia laments her father, dead and buried, she sings, "At his head a grass-green turf,/At his heels a stone (ll.31-32). At his heels a stone? "At his head" is where you put the headstone, not at "heels"! She, in her madness, sees it backwards again: reversal. Furthermore, her next song, in the form of a dialogue between a female and a male, suggests that Claudius had promised to wed her to Hamlet, but after he "tumbled" her, he mocked her: "Quoth she, 'Before you tumbled me,/You promised me to wed.'/He answers:/'So would I ha' done, by yonder sun [another play on sun/son?]/And thou hadst not come to my bed'" (ll.62-66) In other words, the scene is full of possibilities for such interpretation, once we have heard Horatio and the Gentleman suggest that we try to give meaning to her garbled speech.
Near the end of Ophelia's first appearance in the mad scene, she lets out what sounds like a threat: "My brother shall know of it" (ll.69-70). When she re-enters, by which time her brother Laertes has returned from Paris, she tells him, "It is the false steward that stole his master's daughter." In response, Laertes is simply puzzled: "This nothing's more than matter" (l.173). That's the Elizabethan way of saying, "There's more to this than meets the eye." As Phillip Edwards points out in his Cambridge University Press edition (1985), this emphasizes that Ophelia's line has "special significance."
Let me turn now to more general evidence that we should suspect some disaster involving sex has happened to Ophelia. Every scene in which she plays a speaking part has sex at its center. Early on, with, first, her brother and, then, her father, the stress is upon sex. Laertes fears the loss of her viginity as he departs for the pleasures of Paris; then Polonius, too, fears that Hamlet is, as he put it, out to merely "beguile" her; and then, when we see her again she is with Hamlet, and we know—and she finds out—that he no longer can stand any female. Even in the play-within the play, he says, "Lady, shall I lie in your lap?" "No my lord," she replies. "Do you think I meant country [cunt-ry] matters?" (3.2.99-103). He scorns her. Why this excessive attention to sex by those around Ophelia—if it isn't leading us somewhere? I believe the mad scene does what Shakespeare wants it to do: It raises our suspicions that the king has preyed upon Ophelia.
Plot development, too, lends credence to the possibility that Ophelia may have been abused—and by the king. For example, do you remember Hamlet's scene with his mother? —when Polonius, behind the arras, is hit with Hamlet's sword—Hamlet so obsessed with his mother's sexual ties with Claudius that he thinks he is killing this "false" king in her bedroom? "Come, come, and sit you down. You shall not budge./You go not till I set you up a glass/Where you may see the inmost part of you!" (3.4.18-20).
Powerful stuff. As Gertrude says to Hamlet, "Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul/And there I see such black and grained spots as will not leave their tinct"(ll.89-91). She feels deeply guilty. He then requests of her—Get this—that she stay away from Claudius's bed. "Go not to my uncle's bed," he begs of her: "Refrain tonight, and that shall lend a kind of easiness to the next abstinence" (ll.160-168). Well, does she stay away from Claudius's bed? If so, it's one of the great ironies of the play, for it would mean perhaps that he contributes to Ophelia's demise. I believe we are encouraged to "conjecture" that, as Ophelia herself tells us (in her mad, topsy-turvy way), that it is the false master that stole his steward's daughter.
I would now quickly like to suggest that we are also encouraged to suspect Claudius in Ophelia's death. The queen is the only one who gives us a picture of how Ophelia dies. She says, you remember, "There is a willow grows aslant the brook/That shows its hoar leaves in the glassy stream" (4.7.166-167). Now maybe you fellow gardeners out there may think Shakespeare is referring only to the silvery color, as in 'hoarfrost,'of willow leaves, but the rest of you should know better. The queen also refers to flowers Ophelia carries: "long purples,/That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,/But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them" (ll.169-171). Finally, the queen, in describing how Ophelia fell into the brook and drowned, says that the water filling up her heavy garments "Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay/To muddy death" (ll.182-183). Do you soil conservationists out there think that in "muddy death" Shakespeare is referring only to the state of the river bottom? I suggest that how Ophelia dies remains confused, uncertain—yet suspicious, just as Shakespeare intended it to be.
Finally, this mystery is carried over into the final act. The gravediggers at the beginning of the scene make us conscious of uncertainty surrounding her death: They debate, like philosophers, Did she go to the water, or did the water come to her? (see esp.5.1. ll.1-17).We'll never know for sure, but I think it's one of Shakespeare's intentions in this play to arouse our suspicions about Ophelia's death. I suspect foul play. Later (in Hamlet's and Horatio's presence) the gravediggers sing how "age with his stealing steps/Hath clawed me in his clutch,/And hath shipped me intil the land,/As if I had never been such" (ll.60-63) Grotesque humor! "Shipped me into the land"!! The idea and imagery is fascinating! Hamlet has been shipped to England, as Claudius demanded; now Ophelia has been shipped into the land (the grave!) Yes, it's almost as if we are li??? who the scribes and Pharisees thought should be stoned. As somebody says somewhere, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark"(1.4.90) and I say "Touche" to that! Ironically, it is Laertes who exclaims it most plainly, after the queen dies from the poisoned cup: "The king, the king's to blame" (5.2.300).
One quick note for you book club members: You may find it interesting to be reminded that of the three early texts of Hamlet, the first is known simply as the Bad Quarto (1603)—and bad it is. Apparently put together from memory by some minor actor, remembering what he could of the play, he offers his version of our crux line, "It is the false steward that stole his master's daughter." Here it is: "a,t'is a the King's daughter and the false steward, and if anybody ask you . . .": in other words, the actor playing in the first performances of Hamlet remembered "King" for what appears in the Second Quarto and the Folio as "master", suggesting that he, at least, interpreted the line to refer to the king, the false king that stole his steward's daughter.
"Hearing Ophelia," then, is more important to our full appreciation of this play than we had formerly thought. My hope this evening is that my summary tonight will drive you back to the play itself. If it does, I firmly believe that you will see, clearer than before, that Shakespeare's intent in Hamlet is to fill us with uncertainty, suspicion, and doubt, much like that which the characters themselves express throughout. After all, Hamlet is a state of mind, and we are still, in Horatio's words, in "th'yet unknowing world."
For my full study of this subject, see my essay in Hamlet Studies, Vol. 19, 1997, pp.20-46.
Thank you!!
Arthur John Harris, Ph.D. (Jack)