1. Corbeil, Carole, In the Wings (Toronto: Stoddart, 1997), 45–46Google Scholar.

2. Barber, Frances, “Ophelia in Hamlet,” Jackson, Russell and Smallwood, Robert, eds., Players of Shakespeare, vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 138Google Scholar.

3. Thompson, Judith, Lion in the Streets (Toronto: Coach House, 1992), 15, 34–36Google Scholar. Needless to say, Rhonda's “real of it” is also an artfully constructed and far from disinterested representation.

4. Showalter, Elaine, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Parker, Patricia and Hartman, Geoffrey, eds. (New York: Methuen, 1985), 85, 83Google Scholar. West, Rebecca, in The Court and the Castle: Some Treatments of a Recurrent Theme (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 18Google Scholar, argued that Ophelia as a “correct and timid virgin of exquisite sensibilities” who dies of a broken heart is “a misreading [that] would not have lasted so long in England had it not been for the popularity of the pre-Raphaelite picture by Sir John Millais which represents Ophelia as she floated down the glassy stream, the weeping brook; for his model was his friend Rossetti's bride, the correct, timid, sensitive, virginal, and tubercular Miss Siddal.” I am indebted for this reference to Linda Burnett, “Margaret Clarke's Gertrude and Ophelia: ‘Writing Revisionist Culture,’ Writing a New Poetics,” forthcoming in Essays in Theatre/Études théâtrales (November 1997). I am grateful to Linda Burnett for permission to quote from the typescript of her article, from which I have benefitted greatly, particularly in my discussion below of Margaret Clarke's play.

5. It is the specificities of place and localized language that set Thompson's Canadian confrontation of the romantic image with “the real of it” apart from a comparable moment in Scottish poet Bums's, Elizabeth poem, “Ophelia,” in Ophelia and Other Poems (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991), 41–42Google Scholar:

This is not the beautiful floating death by water

She will not have her skirts drawn out around her

billowed along by the current

her hair floating like some golden weed

and a cloak of wildflowers scattered round her

This death by water

will be sticky with mud

Her wet clothes will drag her down

and the stones in her pockets

sink her quickly.

6. I am drawing this description directly from Richard Paul Knowles, “From Dream to Machine: Peter Brook, Robert Lepage, and the Contemporary Shakespearean Director as (Post)Modemist,” forthcoming in Theatre Journal. The sequence described here is as performed in the fall 1997 touring English-language version of Elsinore featuring Peter Darling, rather than the earlier English or French versions performed by Lepage himself.

7. Doane, Melanie, “Never Doubt I Love,” music and lyrics by Ted Dykstra, Shakespearean Fish, Sony Music Canada CT80233, 1996Google Scholar.

8. The lyrics for the album's title song, “Shakespearean Fish,” were adapted from Yeats by Melanie Doane. For a discussion of female pop vocalists, including Canadian Jane Siberry, in relation to high and popular culture, see O'Brien, Lucy, “‘Sexing the Cherry’: High or Low Art? Distinctions in Performance,” in Analysing Performance: A Critical Reader, Campbell, Patrick, ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 234–243Google Scholar. The use of Shakespeare by pop musicians in Canada to position themselves culturally is similar to that elsewhere, ranging as it does from Loreena McKannit's high-culture Celtic settings of Shakespearean songs and speeches (together with others by Blake, Tennyson, and Yeats), to the entirely gratuitous title, Shakespeare My Butt, of the debut album of the rock group, The Lowest of the Low—gratuitous in that the album contains no other Shakespearean references. Both of these types, of course, serve to reinforce the high/low-culture binary, and police its borders. Somewhat more complex is the song “Cordelia” by the Tragically Hip, on their 1991 album, Road Apples, MCA Records MCAC–10173, with its reference to stage superstitions, “Treading the boards, screaming out Macbeth/Just to see how much bad luck you really get,” and its revisionist refrain, “It takes all your power/To prove that you don't care/I'm not Cordelia, I will not be there.”

9. Although I saw both the Passe Muraille and Toronto Free Theatre Hamlets, I am indebted for my accounts of the productions to G.B. Shand, who worked on both productions, for lending me archival videos of the productions and for his article, “Two Toronto Hamlets,” Hamlet Studies 13 (1991): 98–107Google Scholar.

10. Horatio/Reynaldo was metatheatrically performed by a new character, Jimmy “Spider” McKuen, who initiated the action by breaking in through a broken basement window and “activating” the ghostly cast. Although not commercially published, the script of the Haunted House Hamlet that I have consulted is available in “compuscript” form from Playwrights Canada Press, Toronto.

11. Showalter, 91. On schizophrenia Showalter cites and discusses Laing's, R.D.The Divided Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965)Google Scholar, but might also have made reference to Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari's, FelixAnti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Hurley, Robert, Seem, M., and Lane, H.R. (NY: Viking, 1977)Google Scholar. Her descriptions, respectively, are of Jonathan Miller's 1981 production at the Warehouse, London, and Melissa Murray's agit-prop play, Ophelia, written for Hormone Imbalance in 1979, in which “Ophelia becomes a lesbian and runs off with a woman servant to join a guerrilla commune.”

12. Gass, Ken, Claudius, first performed by Canadian Rep Theatre, Toronto, 09 1993, and published in 1995 in Toronto by Playwrights CanadaGoogle Scholar. Subsequent references to this play will appear parenthetically in the text.

13. Blodgett, E.D., “Heresy and Other Arts: A Measure of Mavis Gallant's Fiction,” Essays on Canadian Writing 42 (Winter, 1990): 5Google Scholar. Blodgett is quoting Keefer, Janice Kulyk, “Mavis Gallant and the Angel of History,” University of Toronto Quarterly 55.3 (Spring 1986): 289CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14, MacDougall, Jill, “Le Festival de Théâtre des Amériques,” TDR (The Drama Review) 117 (Spring 1988): 18Google Scholar.

15. “Viking Hamlet Saga” is O'Brien's, Michael characterization of his play, Mad Boy Chronicle (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1995)Google Scholar, in his Playwright's Foreword, 9. Subsequent quotations from the play will be cited parenthetically in the text.

16. Clarke, Margaret, Gertrude and Ophelia, Theatrum 33 (04/05 1993)Google Scholar: S2. Subsequent quotations from the play will be cited parenthetically in the text. The S# format derives from the original pagination in Theatrum.

17. Burnett, is citing Greenblatt, “Culture,” in Lentricchia, Frank and McLaughlin, Thomas, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1990): 231–232Google Scholar. She takes the term “revisionist mythmaking” from Ostriker, Alicia, “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking,” Signs 8.1 (Fall 1982): 68–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. This paragraph summarizes Burnett's argument, 12–15.

19 By way of contrast, Scottish playwright Ure, Joan, in “Something in it for Ophelia,” in Joan Ure: Five Short Plays (Glasgow: Scottish Society of Playwrights, 1979), 31–57Google Scholar, written for the entirely site-specific purpose of production at the Edinburgh fringe opposite a mainstage Festival production of Hamlet, avoids the Hamlet plot altogether by staging a debate at Waverley Station between a young girl, Hannah, and a middle-aged male professor, Martin, following the Festival's Hamlet that they have both just seen. Hannah is shocked by the play's representation of Ophelia (“a simple, perhaps rather stupid girl”), and engages Martin in a debate about the cultural role played by the performance.

20. Hamlet's mistress, Genevieve (with whom he spends a good deal of the play in bed) echoes Gertrude's judgment, though with a proto-feminist slant: “Did it ever occur to you Ophelia might have thoughts of her own,” she asks him, “even it she is a fucked-up, fucked-over moron?” (67).

21. See Kristeva, Julia, “The Semiotic Chora Ordering the Drives,” trans. Waller, Margaret, from Revolution in Poetic Language, excerpted in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Moi, Toril (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 93–98Google Scholar. Kristeva, of course also associates madness, creativity, and resistance with the semiotic realm, particularly in Powers on Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Roudiez, Leon S. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

22. Other Canadian considerations of Gertrude, in which Ophelia does not figure very prominently, include Carole Corbeil's novel, In the Wings, from which my first epigraph is taken, and Shand's, G.B. article “Realizing Gertrude: The Suicide Option,” Elizabethan Theatre 13, eds. Magnusson, A.L. and McGee, C.E. (Toronto: P.D. Meany, 1994), 95–118Google Scholar.

23. In addition to the play's roots in the Hamlet story, its conclusion seems to echo another early-modem revenge play, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, in its representation of opportunistic Christian hypocrisy: King Fengo, newly “converted” to Christianity for political reasons, responds to the vicious murder of the Mad Boy, impaled by a monk on a wooden cross, with “Well done, my Christian soldiers” (149).

24. MacDonald, Ann-Marie, Goodnight Desdemona (GoodMorning Juliet) (Toronto: Coach House, 1990), 73Google Scholar.

25. The names come from a variety of sources, and some seem to be pure invention. “Fengo” and “Horvendal” are from Saxo, though the latter is an adaptation of what is there the name of Hamlet's (“Amleth”'s) father. “Gerutha” also derives from Saxo.

26. Morrow, Martine, “A Viking free-for-all,” Calgary Herald 6 February 1995, reprinted as a Afterword to the play, 152–154Google Scholar.

27. This moment might be seen as a reversal of the appropriation of Ophelia within a male actor's and character's body in Lepage's Elsinore, described above, in that here the ineffectual male body of Horvendal is appropriated and transformed by Lilja's active female spirit.

28. In addition to Matthius's speech to Lilja, quoted above, and Fengo's eulogy, such passages in the play include the following exchange between Fengo and Gertrude:

29. See Hutcheon, Linda, Narcissistic Fiction: The Metafictional Paradox (New York: Methuen, 1980)Google Scholar; A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Artforms (New York: Methuen, 1985)Google Scholar; Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar; and, especially, Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

30. Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 6.

31 Blodgett, E.D., “Is a History of the Literatures of Canada Possible?” Essays on Canadian Writing 50 (Fall, 1993): 16Google Scholar. See also “Canadians Can't Spell; or, the Virtues of Indeterminacy,” in Knowles, Richard Paul, “Representing Canada: Teaching Canadian Studies in the United States,” The American Review of Canadian Studies 25.1 (Spring 1995): 9–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. Canada may be seen to have been founded on displacements—of First Nations peoples by European settlers, of course, but also by settlers who were themselves displaced in the Highland clearances, the “potato famine,” the expulsion or escape of United Empire Loyalists during the American revolution, the expulsion and return of the Acadians, and more recently in various immigrations from a wide variety of countries suffering from economic or political repression. Colonial and postcolonial relationships exist within Canada between the two “founding cultures” themselves, as the English, historically and currently, play a colonizing role in relation to the French, and both these groups act as colonizers in relation to First Nations peoples within Canada and Quebec as they do in relation to various “ethnic” groups. In addition, of course, Canada has continued to experience culturally colonial relationships to France, England, and other “homeland” cultures, and to function as an economic and political colony of the United States.

33. Showalter, 92.