Ophelia
Dame Judi Dench and Brendan O'Hea on Seven Decades of Shakespeare
Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea talk about Dench’s experiences playing Ophelia, Gertrude, Lady Macbeth and Titania. Plus, parrots, Polonius, dirty words, hijinks with Sir Ian McKellen, and more.
Utah Shakespeare Festival re-examines Hamlet and Ophelia
The Utah Shakespeare Festival has a fresh take on Hamlet and Ophelia’s relationship, inspired by Artistic Collaborator Jerry Murdock.
How Ophelia is represented in nineteenth-century English art
Victorian artists in England painted many portraits of Ophelia, including this one from 1889 by John William Waterhouse.
Shakespeare and early modern girlhood
The word “girl” means different things to us today than it meant in the Middle Ages, and Shakespeare was writing at a time when that meaning was changing, as Deanne Williams of York University in Toronto explains on a recent episode…
Debating Ophelia’s Death—and Becoming a Better Teacher
I am an English teacher because of my English teachers. What dedication I have I learned from a man who had Paradise Lost taken off of his syllabus but came into work an hour early, each day, to teach…
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…