Feminist

Ophelia is distracted by grief.^[92] Feminist critics have explored her descent into madness. (Artist: Henrietta Rae 1890).

In the 20th century feminist critics opened up new approaches to Gertrude and Ophelia. New Historicist and cultural materialist critics examined the play in its historical context, attempting to piece together its original cultural environment.^[93] They focused on the gender system of early modern England, pointing to the common trinity of maid, wife, or widow, with whores alone outside of the stereotype. In this analysis, the essence of Hamlet is the central character's changed perception of his mother as a whore because of her failure to remain faithful to Old Hamlet. In consequence, Hamlet loses his faith in all women, treating Ophelia as if she too were a whore and dishonest with Hamlet. Ophelia, by some critics, can be honest and fair; however, it is virtually impossible to link these two traits, since 'fairness' is an outward trait, while 'honesty' is an inward trait.^[94]

Hamlet tries to show his mother Gertrude his father's ghost (artist: Nicolai A. Abildgaard ca. 1778).

Carolyn Heilbrun's 1957 essay "The Character of Hamlet's Mother" defends Gertrude, arguing that the text never hints that Gertrude knew of Claudius poisoning King Hamlet. This analysis has been championed by many feminist critics. Heilbrun argued that men have for centuries completely misinterpreted Gertrude, accepting at face value Hamlet's view of her instead of following the actual text of the play. By this account, no clear evidence suggests that Gertrude is an adulteress: she is merely adapting to the circumstances of her husband's death for the good of the kingdom.^[95][96]

Ophelia has also been defended by feminist critics, most notably Elaine Showalter.^[97] Ophelia is surrounded by powerful men: her father, brother, and Hamlet. All three disappear: Laertes leaves, Hamlet abandons her, and Polonius dies. Conventional theories had argued that without these three powerful men making decisions for her, Ophelia is driven into madness.^[98] Feminist theorists argue that she goes mad with guilt because, when Hamlet kills her father, he has fulfilled her sexual desire to have Hamlet kill her father so they can be together. Showalter points out that Ophelia has become the symbol of the distraught and hysterical woman in modern culture.

11Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), English playwright, poet, director, and actor, who uses forms of the word ‘fairy’ in at least ten of his plays, as well as in Venus and Adonis. Shakespeare mentions elves in five plays; nymphs in eight plays, Venus and Adonis, The Passionate Pilgrim, and the Sonnets; sprites or supernatural spirits in 20 plays, Venus and Adonis, Troilus and Cressida, and The Rape of Lucrece; goblins and hobgoblins in five plays. These references, as well as marked presence of fairies in the works of Spenser, Drayton, and Lyly, among many other contemporaries, indicate that fairy folk and legends were familiar to Shakespeare's audience. In The Anatomy of Puck, thus far the longest recent study of Shakespeare's general use of fairy material, K. M. Briggs maintains that the Elizabethan era was a golden age of fairy lore. She ascribes this to an increasing number of yeoman writers who had learned fairy lore from their ancestors and felt freer to articulate it in an age less intimidated by fears of heresy. Briggs hints at, but does not elaborate upon, the tenor of humanism and humanists who, like Marlowe's Dr Faustus, were intrigued by opportunities to tinker with the supernatural. The alchemical and necromantic interests of such scholars are but further evidence of a growing fascination with the human power to affect, even to command, the universe. In such an atmosphere, fairies, sprites, and elves were more innocent familiars than devils, while nymphs and nature spirits evoked ancient Greek and Roman beliefs harmonious with the taste for the classical past. With rare exceptions, however, the origins of Shakespeare's fairy lore remain uncertain. Celtic legend is the most frequently invoked, though often questionable, source. Perhaps the Shakespearian fairy with the clearest genealogy is Oberon of A Midsummer Night's Dream, whose avatar is Auberon, the fairy king of Huon de Bordeaux, a 15th‐century romance. Generally, Shakespeare's fairies serve as light embellishments with a strong appeal for audiences. Pageantry, so entrancing to Elizabethan ceremony and theatre, was enhanced by the addition of glittering creatures with magic powers. As Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream illustrates so well, portrayals of fairies were highly effective in creating the atmosphere desirable in masques. Shakespeare's fairies appeared in several sizes and guises: in a stature equal to that of very young children, as full‐sized or even outsized mortals, as miniature creatures, as hobgoblins, as good and as evil spirits. In general, however, fairies in the literature of this period were meant to be charming figures of fun, and the frequent appearance of full‐length portraits of wicked fairies was, with rare exceptions (see Morgan le Fay), a later phenomenon. Most of Shakespeare's references to fairies are brief. There are three notable exceptions: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Outstandingly fey among Shakespeare's plays is, of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream, two of whose chief characters are Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies. The same play features Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow. His appeal to generations of theatregoers may be attributed to his mischief‐making charm as a hobgoblin or his philosophical unmasking of ‘What fools these mortals be’. In this play, the actions of fairies both divide and unify three worlds—the dreamworld, the world of the fairies, and the world of ordinary mortal affairs. The intervention of the fairies in the lives of mortals is part of the dreamworld that unites the lovers with their desired partners and solves all the problems in the play, partly by potions and spells, but ultimately by means of the fairy ex machina. The Tempest is densely populated with strange creatures, some of whom are fairy‐like, but some of whom, like Caliban, seem to challenge or even defy classification. Prospero, the typical humanist scholar, spends too much time on his books. Becoming a wizard king, he conjures Ariel, the airy spirit whom many call an elemental. ‘As swift as thought’, Ariel can make his master's wishes come true, creating illusions, charming mortals and monsters alike, and controlling the weather. The air surrounding the island is ‘full of spirits’, as Caliban, the resident monster and colonial, complains. The play's masque includes goddesses like Iris and features a pageant of supernaturals. The tiniest of all Shakespeare's fairies is Mab, recognized in Shakespeare's England as queen of the fairies. In Romeo and Juliet she drives a nutshell coach drawn by ants and small enough to light on suitors' noses. She is touted here for her ability to make men dream of love and courtship. Perhaps the strongest Shakespearian proof that fairies were conventional enough in the lore and literature of the era to be mocked and parodied appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Here the fairies, though the size of children and ruled by an adult‐sized queen, are not real fairies. Briggs has pointed out how faithfully these false fairies reflect popular beliefs. They carry torches of glow worms and rattles for fairy bells. Like good legendary fairies of their era, they dance around in a circle and control the order of things. But the ultimate Shakespearian evidence of the fairy fashion may be that Macbeth's witches know the traditional terpsichorean kinship of fairies and witches. Both witches and fairies dance, as the witches sing, like ‘elves and fairies in a ring’.

12An Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment or Age of Reason) was a cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe, that sought to mobilize the power of reason, in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted science and intellectual interchange and opposed superstition,^[1] intolerance and abuses in church and state. Originating about 1650 to 1700, it was sparked by philosophers Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), John Locke (1632–1704), Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), physicist Isaac Newton (1643–1727), and historian Voltaire (1694–1778). The wide distribution of the printing press, invented in Europe in 1440, made possible the rapid dispersion of knowledge and ideas which precipitated the Enlightenment. Ruling princes often endorsed and fostered figures and even attempted to apply their ideas of government in what was known as Enlightened Despotism. The Enlightenment flourished until about 1790–1800, after which the emphasis on reason gave way to Romanticism's emphasis on emotion and a Counter-Enlightenment gained force.

The centre of the Enlightenment was France,^{[citation needed]} where it was based in the salons and culminated in the great Encyclopédie (1751–72) edited by Denis Diderot (1713–1784) with contributions by hundreds of leading philosophes (intellectuals) such as Voltaire (1694–1778), Rousseau (1712–1778) and Montesquieu (1689–1755). Some 25,000 copies of the 35 volume set were sold, half of them outside France. The new intellectual forces spread to urban centres across Europe, notably England, Scotland, the German states, the Netherlands, Russia, Italy, Austria, and Spain, then jumped the Atlantic into the European colonies, where it influenced Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among many others, and played a major role in the American Revolution. The political ideals influenced the American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the Polish–Lithuanian Constitution of May 3, 1791.^[2]