Impregnating Ophelia

Abstract

Certainly the question of whether Ophelia is pregnant with Hamlet’s child is not original. What is original is my claim that Shakespeare involves the complicity of the playgoer or reader in the possible impregnation of Ophelia, that impregnating her is in fact the consequence of the playgoer’s or reader’s “pregnant” imagination, as that faculty of mind plays over her characterization. George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589) termed “pregnant” a certain imaginative capacity for metaphoric understanding, precisely what Shakespeare stimulates in viewers and readers of Hamlet so that they construct a physically pregnant Ophelia from a plethora of suggestive bits and pieces of dramatic evidence. Plays such as King Richard II Othello, and Twelfth Night illustrate in characters onstage the imagination’s ability to impregnate itself and other minds with seed-ideas eventually delivered to either tragic or comic effect. In this respect, Hamlet represents a singularity in the canon: there we experience the Elizabethan pregnant imagination “making”—so to say—Ophelia physically pregnant, with the result that her personal tragedy is more pathetic than would otherwise be the case.