Stowaway Ophelia
It was another Tuesday night open mic at the Point in Bryn Mawr, circa 2000-2001. A collegiate trio ambled up to the slightly elevated stage. Two guys and a girl with two guitars and a violin. The girl sang and played one of the six-strings for a Shakespeare-themed, brokenhearted love song. Her voice recalled the soothing tones of a mother in mid-lullabye.
I was so captivated by the sound I had to find them after they performed. They had a compact disc, which I paid for as I paid my compliments. The trio went by the name Ellipsis, which I thought was cute, especially when coupled with a CD titled And so on… .
The song they performed also piqued my interest because of a longtime fascination with Shakespeare and, more specifically, with the Hamlet scene from which some of the imagery in the song was lifted. The song, called “Stowaway Ophelia”, used the phrase “the more deceived” from a passage in Act 3, Scene 1 of Hamlet. Personally, I like to call it the “nunnery” scene.
The nunnery dialogue from Hamlet entered my consciousness while watching Olivier’s rendition in high school English. It was our senior year. Our teacher, an admitted Shakespeare addict, had us recite from Shakespearean plays for part of the grade in both junior and senior years. Junior year, we studied Macbeth; senior year, it was Hamlet.
When we recited Macbeth, I chose the soliloquy in Act Five, the one from right after Macbeth is notified of his wife’s death. I did well on it, which is to say I got a good grade. But apparently I also impressed one of the girls in my English class, who approached me senior year when it was time to choose our lines again. She asked me to do a scene with her.
I was flattered, and a little nervous. I had a little bit of a crush on the girl, and the scene she wanted to do carried a bit of a romantic charge. We had a few weeks to rehearse, which we began doing within a few days. Then it happened.
Just as I was starting to feel more comfortable opposite her, I started to feel worse in general. I ended up missing a chunk of time from school, including some time in the hospital. She eventually gave up on waiting for me and just chose a different set of lines she could do herself. By all accounts she did fine. My teacher never made me do the recitation when I returned, so I never did my Hamlet lines for 12th grade English.
I hated not getting to do those lines. I resented most not getting to do those lines with her. I got over it, but I always wondered about it.
It’s strangely fitting that most of my romantic entanglements have carried almost as much drama and frustration as the nunnery dialogue. I hope I haven’t just been trying to recapture the tension from an exchange I never got to have in front of my 12th grade English class.
Maybe it’s just metaphor for things I wanted to do, but the world got in my way. Or maybe it’s just my restless mind searching for something to write about on a Sunday morning.
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