We have some fine new poetry on tap. From Tony Jones and Rick Diguette. Please comment on their works – and the postings throughout the site. We write, paint, compose, snap pictures, etc. for a reason. To attempt a form of communication and expression deer to our harts. Feedback is most welcome, and often a necessity.
John Everett Millais’ Ophelia. 1852. The Tate, London.
I thought again of this painting while reading Ross King’s The Judgment of Paris (and about his retrospective in the Van Gogh Museum this year). There is always a back story. Elizabeth Siddal was the nineteen-year-old model and muse for Millais, and she seems to have earned her fees the hard way. Millais painted her in a tub, which he attempted to warm with oil lamps but often forgot to. She caught a nasty cold for her troubles. In 1852, catching a cold was a dangerous affair, of course. She sent him the doctor’s bill.
Did she sing like Ophelia, as she floated in that tub? I imagine Millais asked her to. We know he was meticulous about other things, the flora and the fauna of the painting, making sure everything was just right. And, perhaps because Millais was so meticulous and particular, subsequent sleuths have been as well. One Barbara Webb found the actual place of the painting in England, along the banks of the Hogsmill River in Surrey. Six Acre Meadow, alongside Church Road, Old Malden, to be exact.
I love such stories within stories. Who was Shakespeare’s Ophelia? On whom did he model the character? So later we have a painter who chooses a model for Ophelia who was modeled on someone Shakespeare knew. Probably. And what was her story? Why did he choose her? What parallels existed between the model and the literary character, between the artist’s model and Shakespeare’s model and so on? For that matter, who was Shakespeare?
(Well, that’s a subject for another day, and one I will most likely sit out.)
Sometimes, however, mysteries are more fascinating when they are never solved. Sometimes not knowing who a Homer really was is worth all the treasures of Troy.
You might helpfully incorporate a comment-count on the front-page postings to get the conversation going …
Ophelia was on my mind this week, by way of Nabokov: Ron Rosenberg had seized upon Hamlet’s father’s ghost as the trope for Dmitri’s difficult decision on the fate of The Original of Laura, having previously highlighted it in his review of Brian Boyd’s book on Pale Fire (in which Shade’s daughter shares Ophelia’s fate). One of the loose ends that bothered me was how Word Golf fit into that work (aside from transgendering ‘lass’ to ‘male’ in the Index): a tentative, speculative answer is that it is a restriction on Lewis Carroll’s doublet game, one that does not allow a derangement of letter order. As ‘bodkin’ refers to the famous soliloquy (prior to direct colloquy between Ham and Oph), so ‘doublet’ appears in Ophelia’s first indirect report on Hamlet’s disorder (“Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced …”). The madness Hamlet feigns, Ophelia would fain fall into — a commentary upon Kinbote, or John & Hazel Shade? Another mystery …
Thanks. Will see if I can add a comment count.
Interesting about your other doublets. I forgot to mention Shakespeare’s obvious play within the play. Too many to string together, if one would try to play the meta game between new fiction and criticism on top of the original works. Does Nabokov’s fire pale in comparison with the master? And who wears the mantle of Nabokov today?
Thanks for the link to the review. Definitely want to read his posthumous novel.
On another topic:
Did you hear that Sotheby’s is auctioning off Breton’s manifesto? Now he would certainly find that surreal.
Still trying to figure out how to add it to the front page. May not be able to. But I did add a threaded feature for comments (hopefully), and the sitemap now shows comments.