2 - Ophelia with Spectator: Hamlet and Watery Cognition

Summary

Abstract

Why does Ophelia drown? The most curious sort of Lucretian pleasure is that which the spectator, safe on shore, derives from watching the shipwreck — a moment Lucretius details in De rerum natura to highlight the benefits of Epicurean philosophy. This potent metaphor, probed by Hans Blumenburg, raises questions about the relationship between the philosopher and the public, and about the ultimate duty of the learned to the unlearned. This chapter explores this metaphor and its watery connotations through Gertrude's account of Ophelia's death. In Shakespeare and Lucretius, a spectator on dry land observes a less fortunate soul experience watery destruction. There is no explicit pleasure in Hamlet, but by considering the scene alongside Lucretius, and by probing the nature of the metaphor, we may derive similar existential relief.

Keywords: Shakespeare, Hamlet, Ophelia, Hans Blumenberg, Lucretius, shipwreck and water metaphors

Perhaps the most curious sort of Lucretian pleasure is that which the spectator, safe on the shore, derives from watching the shipwreck. At the start of the second book of De rerum natura, Lucretius explains:

When on the great sea the winds are tossing the waters, it is sweet to watch from the land the great struggles of some other—not because it gives you pleasure and delight that anyone is distressed, but because it is a joy to discover from what misfortunes you yourself are free. (2.1–5)

Though this moment is later revealed to be a sort of metaphor for the pleasurable relief the philosopher experiences in contemplating the meanderings of the less educated, it is instructive and intriguing in and of itself. The moment of observation is quite specific: the spectator is positioned on firm and stable land, while upon the sea the rough waters are whipped into turbulence by the winds. The great struggles (magnum … laborem) of the other, the unfortunate soul upon the water, constitute the pleasurable object. Sweetness (suave) inheres in the moment because of a perceived distance, both literal and metaphorical, between the observer and the struggler. In a literal sense, the distance is optical, of a kind with what a museum patron experiences in examining a painting (of a shipwreck, say); in a metaphorical sense, the distance underlines the difference between the safe and the toiling, the solid and the fluid, the known and the uncertain.