Ophelia’s Character between Imagery and Interaction: An Intersemiotic Pragma-stylistic Analysis

Abstract

With respect to her male counterpart, Shakespeare’s Ophelia utters very few lines in Hamlet (1600-1601), opening an interpretative chiasm about her madness, her death and her very existence in the great scheme of the plot. Her character is elusive, entrenched with silence, absence and isolation (Fischer 1990). Therefore, her fleeting image has called for many representations – in poetry, music, painting, film – each one influencing the other in raising awareness about her role in the play. This study aims to analyse the points of contact and divergence across overlapping resources, seeking to highlight a consistency across the various semiotic modes through which Ophelia’s character is constructed, thus taking into account her textual (the original play), filmed (Claire McCarthy’s 2018 Ophelia) and painted (John Everett Millais and John William Waterhouse’s 1851-1852 and 1910 works of art) identities. Moreover, it intends to show how it is possible to add multiple meanings to the character through the lenses of different perspectives and research methods. Focusing on the intersemiotic translation under which the methodologies of pragmatics, stylistics and multimodality operate, the study aims to show how similar effects are reached in the multilayered image of Ophelia, through the analysis of her broken turns, her overly polite and acquiescent language and through foregrounding, shading and modality in her multimodal representations. By giving importance to context and capturing more possible interpretative impressions from linguistic, paralinguistic and non-linguistic elements, the proposed multidisciplinary model allows for a greater understanding of the source text, while also providing new insights about one of its principal characters.