The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines

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Cowden Clarke, Mary. The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. New York: A. C. Armstrong & Sons, 1887. Volume 2. “Ophelia, the Rose of Elsinore.”

Image Source: University of Oregon Knight Library

In 1850, scholar Mary Cowden Clarke published 15 novellas depicting the childhood of Shakespearean characters including Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and Juliet. These tales satisfied a growing desire to imagine more of the stories of Shakespeare’s characters. Cowden Clarke’s novellas were popular, reprinted in dozens of editions over a hundred years. While children as well as adults eagerly read them, the novellas often include disturbing content, evoking the dangers and violence of girlhood in the worlds imagined by Shakespeare.

Later scholars criticized Cowden Clarke's work as endorsing a fallacious impulse to treat fictional people as real. Yet her stories allowed Cowden Clarke to offer scholarly insights into details of Shakespeare’s characterizations and text that had puzzled critics and to redress the playwright’s lack of female characters. All of her novellas depict complex relationships between women and in female communities, as well as paying attention to the often punishing concern about female chastity in Shakespeare’s work.

In the novella about Ophelia seen below, Cowden Clarke answers an interpretive question that troubled some of Hamlet’s readers: how does Ophelia, raised at court, know the obscene songs she sings in her mad scenes? She imagines Ophelia being hosted at her wet nurse’s home when her parents left Elsinore on a diplomatic mission. Young, naïve Ophelia witnesses without understanding her wet nurse’s daughter’s seduction by a local and callous lord. Pregnant and abandoned, the daughter, Jutha, commits suicide. Ophelia is also threatened by the wet nurse’s troubled son. Later, she meets Jutha’s seducer again, now pursuing a woman at court, Thyra, who is Ophelia's friend and mentor. Cowden Clarke’s narrative of Ophelia is designed to explain her characterization in Shakespeare and to stir and complicate the reader sympathies to which Shakespeare appeals with his use of Ophelia. The novella is also a forerunner of feminist analyses of Shakespeare’s work. The images here reveal key moments of Cowden Clarke’s Ophelia narrative.