Word: ophelia
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...theaters, tents and schoolrooms of every land, wherever the sun sets and curtains rise, Falstaff struts with his gorbellied wit, Bottom bumbles through the woods, and wide-eyed Ophelia trembles before Hamlet's abuse. Malvolio preens like a toad in yellow stockings. Hotspur wells blood. In soliloquy and song, in bantering bawdry and scalp-tingling rhetoric, in the kingliest English and in tender or rough translation, they speak to man from mankind's heart. Never in the nearly 400 years since their creator was born have Shakespeare's characters spoken to so many, or meant so much...
...intelligence, gave a performance that would shock insulin: giggling behind a waterfall of hair, pacing the room on invisible paths of tension, she movingly evoked the torment of madness with subtle and abandoned gestures, darted back and forth across the borders of sanity from the vague lostness of Ophelia to the purring, look-how-balanced-I-am attitude of a Dr. Joyce Brothers...
...years ago did not think much of actors, on the quaint ground that they tended to have loose morals. Poe's mother had been playing Boston when Edgar was born in 1809. By all accounts she was a fair Lady Teazle and a wistful Ophelia, but Poe's father David was no Prince Hamlet but an attendant, and an intemperate lord. He deserted his wife when she was pregnant, and before he was three, Poe was an orphan...
...Ophelia, Barbara Jefford goes mad quite prettily, in the most fetching rags you ever saw. One wonders why Laertes insists on ranting and shouting and making such a fuss, just as if something serious had happened to her. (It can be argued, however, that this incongruity exists to some extent in the text...
...most forlorn is Floyd, until he improbably makes it up with his wife and Ophelia, ready to live happily ever after on his borrowed time. This is like preparing the reader's palate for hemlock and serving him Postum. Author Hauser has symbollixed up her main character so thoroughly that it is never clear whether he is the old Adam, the fool-in-Christ, or just plain fool. Author Hauser has a sharp eye and sure words for the homeliest of scenes, e.g., "an empty clothesline strung with rain pearls." Her novel is best when her people are worst...