SOURCE: Dunn, Leslie C. “Ophelia's Songs in Hamlet: Music, Madness, and the Feminine.” In Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, edited by Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, pp. 50-64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Dunn construes Ophelia's songs in Act IV, scene v as emblematic of resistance to—and estrangement from—the patriarchal order that links music with female sexuality and emotional excess. Dunn also comments on the way the onstage auditors of these songs attempt to impose their own meanings on them in order to allay the threat they represent.

In one of the most famous readings of one Shakespearean character by another, Ophelia's brother Laertes calls her a “document in madness.”¹ The word “document” is usually glossed with its older etymological sense of “lesson” or “example.” In Renaissance terms, Laertes sees Ophelia as an emblem—an image for which...