Ophelia, in sound

She who knew Hamlet most, who alone in the play was innocent, who realized the latter half of “To be or not to be.” Sweet, abandoned, betrayed, gone mad, and drowned amidst flowers.

By the nature of her characterization, she has been defined by her relationships—as lover, daughter, sister, pawn. Even her burial becomes a contest of love between her brother Laertes and her lover Hamlet. Therefore I apologize ahead of time that since the soundlist respects canon it is limited in expressing her true self. We know little of her before Hamlet, both the play and the man. But I try to express her environment and her mindset as a sort of narration, to give her the due that is hinted at in the original.

She was her own person, empathetic, loving, loyal, intelligent, and maltreated, a witness of Denmark's collapse, innocent but suffering.

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Uncertain Lover / “Qu’elq’un m’a dit (Someone Told Me)” by Carla Bruni

This quiet French love song is about a woman whose man is hiding his love, and she is trying to decipher his intentions, the messages of a grim world, and the influences of those around her. You can imagine Ophelia in a similar position in her first scenes, trying to understand Hamlet’s intentions as he flails about in pretend madness, sorrow, and regret. Despite what others tell her, and despite her own pride, she cannot shake her affection for him—evidenced later by her huge feeling of betrayal.

 I am told that our lives are not worth much / They pass in an instant like withering roses.

Hamlet likes to test her, and he makes jabs about virtue and life being worthless:  “Be thous as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny” (Hamlet 3.1.147-48). But the two lovers seem to feel there is something still to mourn, something important between them, with Hamlet shying from the subject of their love and Ophelia holding onto his old “musicked vows” (Hamlet 3.1.169). Ophelia clings to what they had, and what everyone, including her father, knew that they had:

Yet someone told me / That you still love me... But who was it that told me…? …”He loves you, it’s a secret, don’t tell him I told you.”

But this is not the only repeated refrain, and cross-applying Bruni’s  lyrics allows us to foreshadow the darkening of their love:

I am told that destiny truly mocks us / That it gives us nothing and promises us all… We reach out and find ourselves crazy.

No star-crossed love saves her here.

The song is quiet and private, the acoustic strums soft and the voice confiding. Even the aspect of it being in French helps: a) it is the language of love, and b) we as an English-speaking audience need translation as to her intent, adding another veil of mystery. The privacy also has a sense of loneliness, and a question that needs to be answered by that lover.

Full lyrics here.

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Secret Keeper / “What a Good Woman Does” by Joy Williams

Ophelia and Hamlet’s love quickly becomes public thanks to her father and his persistent theory that Hamlet has been maddened by obsession. True, Ophelia is still in his thoughts: “Soft you now, / The fair Ophelia. –Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins remembered” (Hamlet 3.1.96-98). However, he casts her away with insults and wildness and Ophelia has to collect herself from his seeming “noble mind…here o’erthrown” (Hamlet 3.1.163).

This song, sung by a lover tiredly guarding the secrets of the lover who left her,  speaks to Ophelia’s recovered presentation of herself at the play, when he sits beside her. Firstly because though she is still attached to him, and feels for him, she is on guard, and certainly sees he has more meaning than madness in his observations and taunts. Secondly because she is being plumbed for information by her father and the royalty but keeps her own opinions to herself.

“Well don’t feel sorry for yourself / You got everything you want / Everyone’s watching you pick up and run.”

Watching the political play and having Hamlet “as good as a chorus, my lord,” and then being the one to announce the king’s sudden change, Ophelia demonstrates a sense of the political situation even if she does not know is shape (Hamlet 3.2.269). This is rather like the queen’s sensitive position, but she will never be given explanation—she is the innocent amidst it all. Certainly she desires nothing but peace and happiness.

“I can’t carry the weight of this war / I can’t do it anymore  / Everyone’s wounded / Nobody’s won.”

Finally there is the title of the song, tied to Ophelia. She must be “a good woman.” So says her protective father: “I prescripts gave her, / that she should lock herself from his resort” (Hamlet 2.2.151-152). So says Hamlet, finding sin intrinsic to woman and her makeup unholy, using her to spread rumors of his madness. So say the royals using her to get to Hamlet. They use it to get here to do as they want.

No one tells her what is going on, while still claiming her loyalty to disclose or keep secrets. And she’s not even sure what secrets she keeps. But though she may in the gray-morality of this mess rethink others' claims on her, she still desires to be good. It will happen after she has a chance to think about her role.

“Hear me / I haven’t lost my voice without you near me / I can tell the truth about you leaving / But that’s not what a good woman does.”

Ophelia at the onset of the play-within-a-play is hurt and unhappy with the complications of court but she has become more guarded. If Hamlet’s loud mouth gives her suspicions, she keeps them to herself. Finding her voice is demonstrated in her silence as she wonders if the worst is done.

“Can’t carry the weight of this war…  / And I won’t do it anymore.”

In addition to the wording, the feeling of this song is solitary but with strength. The piano, later supplemented by strings, supports the lyrics in an almost spiritual way. The singer’s voice is not desperate, but earnest. The simplicity of the music makes it feel like a personal plea for peace—one that will not be fulfilled.

Full lyrics here.

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Witness of Descent / “Pyat Pree” by Ramin Djawadi

This instrumental piece paints in my head a deadly, sinful court. Ophelia is the one who calls out the king’s guilt, and observes Hamlet’s wild delight at seeing it. She can feel something happening in the castle around her, once such a safe home, as the king, queen, advisors and courtiers plot. Claudius brings in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and speaks of sending Hamlet away. Hamlet and Horatio consult together. Others wish to keep the status quo, and not object to the king and queen in marriage or change in rule. It is a storm brewing.

But she cannot prepare for the doom approaching. She has no control. She can only watch and listen, uneasy.

There is a building emphasized by the strings, and truly chilling vibrato that makes you suspect what may come around the corner. The drums and low voices towards the end herald an approaching war. The power struggle begins in honesty as Hamlet kills Polonius, her father. And in all the political confusion that follows, her loss will be the most personal, the most undeserved.

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Grieving Daughter / “If I could bribe them by a rose” by Emily Dickinson

Gentleman: "She speaks much of her father, says she hears / There's tricks i' th' world, and hems, and beats her heart... Her speech is nothing, Yet the unshapèd use of it doth move / The hearers to collection."
Horatio: "'Twere good she were spoken with, for she may strew / dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds." (Hamlet 4.5.5-20)

Ophelia is betrayed. Her father is dead by the sword of a man who “promised me to wed” (Hamlet 4.5.69). She feels anger and guilt but expresses it in madness sugared over, as she has begun to unravel. This poem of a woman begging to trade her music and flowers for her loved one back from the dead indicates the mad pleas the powerless girl takes to. “If I could bribe them by a rose… / I would not stop for night or storm…
/ If they would linger for a Bird / My Tambourin were soonest heard”
(Dickens).

 From a serious young woman she becomes a girlish mourner, combining her losses in a song about her "true love...dead and gone; / At his head a grass-green turf, / At his heels a stone" (Hamlet 4.5.28-37). Her madness is perceived as dangerous, spreading discontent and pestering people who would rather look the other way. So she besets the court with her questions, “importunate” in the hall (Hamlet 4.5.2) but “Who shall say / That such importunity / May not at last avail?” (Dickens).

These two aspects--the danger and the mourning--are reflected in the reader's voice. It quaver and speaks with urgency, as a beggar tugging at a king's robe. Surely you can change this? My brother will hear of this. The reading also says pretty words with a trembling force burning beneath them.

Full text here.

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Madwoman / “Greensleeves” tune on broken music box

This old song of is a melody many have known since childhood. It is improbable that all those who know the tune know the theme of a lover cast off—“Greensleeves was my heart of gold / Greensleeves was my heart of joy.” The details beyond that are even less known. Nonetheless, it is a classic tune, speaking of loss of love, of betrayal: “Alas my love you do me wrong… / And I have loved you oh so long.”

Glitches in the music box give it twangs and skips, changing the tone and unsettling a listener. This speaks to the change that has occurred to Ophelia’s beauty and joy, glitched. She sings “Hey nonny nonny” and looks for flowers, processing her grief through cliché joyful actions. Something has broken inside her. To me this signifies her madness and how she has been broken in the cogs of this larger scale fight of politics and revenge.

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Dead Girl / River flowing underwater

Peace at last to Ophelia, now “incapable of her own distress” when horror is already part of her soul (Hamlet 4.7.203). Hanging crowns of flowers upon a willow, “an envious sliver broke / …down her weedy trophies and herself / Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, / And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up, / …her garments, heavy with their drink, / Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death” (Hamlet 4.7.199-209).

There is not much to say about this sound except that this is what she heard. No more whispers, insults, bad news, or manipulations. She had seen enough death already and in dying, had to hear no more. Peace at last, by suicide or accident or something in between.

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