Portfolio 7
In 1621 Robert Burton published Anatomy of Melancholy, a text significant in its attempts to move nervous disorders from classification as physical afflictions to psychological ills. It was in that text that hysteria, already thoroughly explicated by Elizabethan authors Weyer and Jordan, was classified as a fit of the “Mother” occasioned by physical maladies coupled with extreme stress. It is important to note that Burton, following the conviction of his time, averred that the lower a woman’s social class, the less likely her affliction by hysteria. It was, by all accounts, a rich woman’s disease. So it is with Ophelia. By Act IV, scene 5, Ophelia is well-progressed into madness. An Elizabethan audience would doubtless see the signs of hysteria and witchcraft. It is important to note, however, that Shakespeare, responding, perhaps, to the medical developments of his day, complicated the notion of madness. The gentleman describing her affliction states: “her speech is nothing, / Yet the unshaped use of it doth move / The hearers to collection; they aim at it, And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts.” It is possible, of course, that Shakespeare refers to the infectious nature of madness. However, it is also possible that the “hearers” are only constructing Ophelia’s hysteria, ignoring her true ailments in favor of their presuppositions. So it is that Ophelia enters with the phrase “Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?” In so doing, she summarizes the entire play as well as the opening query “Who’s there?” Ophelia’s question is aimed at the location of greatness, in persons, in families, in systems. In asking as to the vestment of majesty, Ophelia in fact locates the conflict of the play with more accuracy than any character in the scene, thus demonstrating the Elizabethan potential for the hysterical woman to act as a kind of oracle.