H - “Hoary Leaves”
When Gertrude gives her poetically detailed account of how Ophelia drowned, she lists a number of botanicals that seem well out of season, given all the other clues in the play (and the film) setting it during wintertime. The “long purples” for example, aka “dead men’s fingers” are a type of marsh orchid—the only orchid mentioned in the Shakespearean canon—and are a common sight during the summer in the English countryside. Earlier, when Kate Winslet delivers her lines about pansies and daisies, she mimes handing them to Michael Maloney, since these would not be in bloom in the colder months.
In this most famous of Shakespeare’s “unscenes,” Gertrude also mentions the “hoary leaves” of the willow that “grows askant the brook” from which the poor Ophelia falls and meets her watery end. Branagh intercuts a very brief shot of Winslet underwater as a “tribute to Millais”—John Everett Millais, the British artist whose famous painting depicting a “mermaid-like” Ophelia hangs in the Tate Britain. Olivier, in his Hamlet (1948), very deliberately re-created Millais’ illustration to film Ophelia’s death.
The willow was typically associated with sorrow and unrequited love. In Othello, Desdemona recounts to Emilia that her mother had a maid named Barbary who “had a song of ‘Willow’” that she often sang because she was unfortunate in love. The imagery in the song is most apt, and Ophelia may well have been singing this very tune to herself as she floated in the brook:
The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow:
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
Sing willow, willow, willow:
The fresh streams ran by her, and murmur'd her moans;
Sing willow, willow, willow…
Her salt tears fell from her, and soften'd the stones;
Sing willow, willow, willow…
Sing all a green willow must be my garland.
Let nobody blame him; his scorn I approve… (Othello, 4.3.37-49)
In Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995), Iréne Jacob, as Desdemona, sings this song to Emilia, played by Anna Patrick. Three of the film’s actors would go on to star in Hamlet: Michael Maloney as Roderigo, Nicholas Farrell as Montano, and Branagh as Iago. Fun fact: A 26-year-old Michael Sheen, in his film debut, played Desdemona’s relative Ludovico. Sheen would go on to give a much-lauded performance as Hamlet on stage at the Young Vic theatre in 2011.
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