While we're on Shakespeare...

There's rosemary, that's for rememberance; pray love remember; & there is pansies; that's for thoughts.




There's fennel for you, & columbines; there's rue for you; & some for me; we may call it herbgrace o' Sundays; Oh you must wear your rue with a difference. There's a daisy; I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died: they say he made a good end.

Ophelia from Hamlet Act 4 scene 5.

The things you don't get taught ~ though I quite see why a sedate Anglican girl's school wasn't going to teach on what was really going on between Hamlet & Ophelia~ though the omission turned Ophelia, who is quite the most interesting of the female characters, into something of a namby~pamby & made her suicide quite incomprehensible. Actually everyone still skips over Ophelia, which is unfortunate as it leaves everyone with quite incorrect impressions of both Ophelia & Hamlet.

Enough to say Ophelia was neither chaste nor virginal. If you want the relevant speeches try here. I must say, a pregnant Ophelia makes far more sense than one driven mad by thwarted love, which always seemed rather unlikely to me. Be that as it may, & given that most productions completely ignore all the snide references to any suggestion that something improper may have been going on between Ophelia & Hamlet [which actually makes better psychological sense of Hamlet's rants about his mother as well], poor old Ditz got lumbered with this speech, mostly because the floriography is fairly easy to interpret.

Actually once you interpret what Ophelia is actually saying in this passage her whole character is floodlit as being altogether stronger & more interesting, far more 3~dimensional & driven than she is usually given credit for. I found it fascinating, but I can do this stuff standing on my head under water. I forget Ditz has a little more trouble organizing her thoughts. She has a little more trouble dealing with metaphor. She grasps it on an intuitive level but has utmost difficulty conveying her sense in words.

Taking this passage apart actually proved quite challenging. The first bit was fairly easy. Go through the passage & put in the meaning of each flower. Rosemary & pansies are easy, being already done for us by the author. Fennel, which means strength is a little harder. Columbine, which means folly but specifically folly of a sexual nature, opens innuendo that is exacerbated by the mention of rue. Daisies are innocence & violets for virtue.

Remember these are being passed out in public to the King & Queen & what Ophelia is actually saying is both pointed & rather rude. She skyrocketed in my estimation. It took a brave woman to do what she is actually doing. Having chatted about what has been happening in the play & what Ophelia is actually saying I asked Ditz to rewrite the passage in plain prose without the floral camouflage. After 20 minutes with no result Dearest mildly suggested I may have given the child rather too much to cope with so we sat down together & worked through the passage.

What we came up with is this:

I know what you've done & I'm not going to forget it. I'm not going to let other people forget either. You think you're so tough but you've been running round as mutton dressed up as lamb with another man. One day you're going to regret it, just like I regret my folly & we'll pay for it. We've lost our innocence. We left it behind when my father died.

Not perfect, no, & it skirts round the implicit threat of the rue [which was considered an aborticant in Elizabethan times & prior] but it was a useful exercise. Ditz, more than most, has to be able to deal with metaphor & symbolism so we will do some more of these until she stops giving me the stunned rabbit look every time I ask her to turn poetry into prose! Good be a while.