Gertrude and Ophelia: A Play (1993)

Margaret Clarke (Helen M. Buss)

Margaret Clarke

Margaret Clarke (a.k.a. Helen M. Buss) was born in St. John's Newfoundland in 1941 before moving to Manitoba at the age of fourteen. She is currently Professor of English at the University of Calgary, where she specializes in life writing (especially in relation to women's autobiographical practices) and Canadian literature. In addition to Gertrude and Ophelia: A Play, she has published, among others, academic books entitled Mapping Our Selves: Reading Canadian Women's Biography and Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women, two novels, short stories, poetry, a short radio play performed on the CBC (My Name is Isabel Gunn), and a number of edited volumes. Her academic focus on women's writing practices and feminist subjectivity has consistently articulated the importance of reclaiming lost (or ignored) narratives by women, not to mention the importance of critical interventions that address the key features of these narratives.

Gertrude and Ophelia (1993), Clarke's first play, is consistent with this academic practice: not only does it rewrite a major canonical Shakespearean play (Hamlet) and in so doing approaches Shakespearean texts as unstable sites of potential for retelling stories from a female perspective, it also enables what American feminist critic Sue Ellen Case has described as a feminist "new poetics" in which received values and systems pertaining to how women are represented and perceived get undercut, deconstructed, and reformulated. Shakespearean adaptation here serves a particular purpose in asking its audience to rethink traditional perceptions filtered through a patriarchal ideological frame, recasting the Shakespearean source text as one in which a feminist poetics is indeed possible. The play, then, reflects on the dramatic changes in the ways in which women's rights have been addressed in Canada and elsewhere and the ways in which the marginalized stories of women can be recuperated to contribute to the building of an inclusive vision of civil society. The play has received several performances in Canada, first as a student production in 1987 with Manitoba's Black Hole Theatre Company, then at the Pumphouse Theatre in Calgary in 1992, followed by another production by City theatre in Victoria, British Columbia in March 1993.

The play's focus on the two central female figures in Hamlet references the extent to which especially Ophelia has come to signify something well beyond the perceived limitations of her role in Hamlet (for further information on the ways in which Ophelia has been represented post-Shakespeare, click here). Clarke draws attention to the material conditions of production of the play, an important adaptive practice in its own right, staging the play as a play about the staging of the play (a kind of meta-play). The play makes extensive comments on Shakespeare's lines and early on makes it clear that those lines are subject to interpretive revision. The female Playwright , for instance, played by the same actress who plays Gertrude has the following exchange with the actor who plays both Horatio and the Actor:

Actor: ( speaking his "Gertrude" line in response to the line "you are the grave of all my hopes" ) "Am I, my child? I had meant to be the womb of all your hopes."
Playwright: There, that's where it goes wrong. Gertrude wouldn't say that!
Actor: Gertrude is always saying that!
Playwright: Maybe Shakespeare's Gertrude. Look, what you don't understand is that as "The Mother," Gertrude is like an ideological sponge. The crap and piss left over from shaping the play is sucked up into the Gertrude character, where we can safely feel all the disgust and contempt we want. Then we're supposed to identify like crazy with Hamlet and his pals, feeling our ever-so-neat fear and pity, because all the nasty bits have been displaced into her. Well, I'm here to tell you it's a crock. I identify with Gertrude and I don't like the bad press she she's been getting. [indent]

The play, then, ranges through a number of topics that address its feminist poetics––from lesbianism through to women's disempowerment through to the violence of men against women and the politics of adaptation as practiced from a feminist perspective (about which it is explicit). Perhaps its most disturbing revision involves Ophelia's retelling to Gertrude of how she was raped by Hamlet, thus providing a powerful explication (some might argue more powerful than the subtle justifications given in the Shakespearean source) of the despair that leads to Ophelia's suicide.

As an adaptation, the play makes use of lines from the Shakespearean source, integrating these in such a way as to clarify the radical departures it makes from the source. When the Actor tells the Playwright that she is "Writing inside Shakespeare's play," the Playwright responds: "Yes, but I'm doing it to write myself out of the world that Shakespeare had to write in. The world we still live in because of the power of his plays. It's not easy; it's a world with many seductions, including the mainstage." Hence, Clarke's play comments on the relations between theatrical representation and its effects in shaping the world in which we live, her play providing a powerful example of the kinds of alternative practices and discourses made possible through radical acts of adaptation. In this last regard, Shakespearean theatre is seen as a site in which power is made visible and adaptation becomes the means by which resistant, critical discourses are enabled.

Daniel Fischlin

Download Script
Link to Database
Link to An Interview with Margaret Clarke

CASP gratefully acknowledges Margaret Clarke's permission to publish this play to its website.