Ophelia : Shakespeare and Gender in Contemporary Spain

Ugalde’s fascinating and well-documented study demonstrates how Spanish authors, dramatists and visual artists bring Shakespeare’s desperate and suicidal heroine to life in new guises.

It is astonishing how deeply the figure of Ophelia has woven itself into the fabric of Spanish literature and the visual arts, from her first appearance in the eighteenth century (translations of Hamlet), through depictions in seminal authors such as Espronceda, Bécquer, and Lorca, to turn-of-the millennium figurations. This provocative, gendered figure has become what male and female authors and artists need her to be. Is she invisible? A victim? Mad? Controlled by the masculine gaze? An agent of her own identity? Ugalde’s well-documented study addresses these questions in the context of Iberia. Poets, novelists, and dramatists, penning works in Spanish, Catalan, and Galician, and painters and art photographers bring Shakespeare''s heroine to life in new guises. She performs as an authoritative female author, a sexually fulfilled woman, in a male body, as a cyborg, a lesbian, and as a historical marker of past oppression. New looks both reflect and authorize the gender diversity that has gained legitimacy in Spanish society since the political Transition.