Skip to main content
Teaching Shakespeare

Hamlet's Ophelia: How imagery supports characterization

By Jill Burdick-Zupancic

In English 10, I chose to study Macbeth with the students this year. However, because we were also looking at how imagery supports characterization, I decided to get them back into the world of Shakespeare with a look at Gertrude’s recount of Ophelia’s drowning in Hamlet. I’ve recently been really into taking scenes from a variety of plays to support the study of a larger piece. This scene, as described by the queen, has taken root in pop culture as well; there’s even a band! But, what we did is take a look at the speech (as shown below, courtesy of Folger Digital Texts) and explored how artists interpreted the imagery to support characterization.

Comments

Reblogged this on ohyesjulesdid and commented:
For all of my Shakespeare loving former students out there…

ohyesjulesdid — May 6, 2014

Reply

Thank you for posting this assignment. I hope to use a variation of your assignment next year with my students. 🙂 I also appreciate the reflection and student responses. This helps so much in selecting art works for discussion as there are a plethora of Ophelia pieces out there.

ohyesjulesdid — May 6, 2014

Reply

Jill, I love this! I will steal this idea when I’m teaching Shakespeare again next year!

Mrs.McNeely — May 7, 2014

Reply

Interesting piece, I’ve previously made photographic images in response to studying previous artistic interpretations against the text: They’re on my wordpress blog at www.npicola.com

npicola — May 12, 2014

Reply

I love this lesson…I know you weren’t studying HAMLET for this one (and I am so glad to see someone drawing on several texts in a Shakespeare unit!), so there may not have been time, but we made some neat discoveries in playing with the Ophelia/Laertes scene that might lend credence to the Delacroix (sexualized) image, not to mention a close look at her songs… Fun to dig into the text and see if our traditional notions of a character can be changed.

Sarah Enloe — June 3, 2014

Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *