Poetry review – THE DEATH AND REBIRTH OF OPHELIA: Charles Rammelkamp manages to keep up with Robert Cooperman’s extensive re-working of Shakespeare’s Hamlet
The Death and Rebirth of Ophelia
Robert Cooperman
Kelsay Books, 2025
ISBN: 978-1639807055
$23.00, 108 pages
One of Robert Cooperman’s many talents as a poet and storyteller is his re-imagining of classic, iconic characters. There are the handful of books about the Trojan War, Odysseus and Achilles and Hector – Troy, Lost on the Blood-Dark Sea, The Ghosts and Bones of Troy, and Bearing the Body of Hector Home. There is The Long Black Veil, the classic country ballad originally recorded by Lefty Frizzell and subsequently covered by everybody from Johnny Cash and Marrianne Faithfull to the Chieftains, the Kingston Trio and Joan Baez, which Cooperman reimagines almost as a Greek tragedy. And there is Letters to Juliet, Romeo’s teenage squeeze.
The author of dozens of books with themes ranging from family in New York to the Grateful Dead to the American wild west, Cooperman’s latest is another reimagining of a classic Shakespeare character, the spurned lover of Prince Hamlet who, heartbroken and crazy with grief, takes her life by drowning in Act IV.
Or does she?
In the first poem in Cooperman’s book, “Ophelia Fakes Her Own Drowning,” Polonius’ daughter tells us:
After Hamlet insulted my virtue yet again,
and me giving him my all and gladly,
I ran sobbing to the Lower Town,
there glimpsed a strolling female player.
That strolling female player, Cunegunde, bears a striking resemblance to Ophelia, and a plan starts to form. ‘I wished by to escape my mad prince,’ Ophelia tells us. She proposes that they change places. It’s a very Shakespearean trope, after all – twins, doubles, mistaken identity, disguise. Shakespeare employs disguise throughout his plays. There’s Portia in The Merchant of Venice, who disguises herself as the lawyer, Balthazar; Rosalind in As You Like It, who disguises herself as Ganymede; Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona who disguises herself as Sebastian. Appearance and reality are interchangeable. ‘I am not what I am,’ is a phrase uttered by both Viola in Twelfth Night and Iago in Othello.
Without giving away the plot, let’s just say that the “death” and the “rebirth” of Ophelia are more than symbolic. In The Death and Rebirth of Ophelia, Ophelia becomes her own woman. For just as Ophelia is hardly the fragile flower we take her to be in Hamlet, so Hamlet himself is not the vacillating noble prince tortured by his uncertainties but a brute. For one thing, we learn in that first poem, Hamlet has knocked Ophelia up (‘the unwanted flower / he planted in me by the rich soil of the riverbank.’) In fact, he’s also a murderer. In the very next poem, “Cunegunde, the Strolling Player Who Changes Places with Ophelia, Is Killed by Hamlet,” the prince kills the erstwhile strolling player when, after having sex with her, he discovers she’s an imposter and suspects she herself has killed Ophelia. It’s not the accidental killing of Polonius, stabbed through his mother’s tapestry, but a cold-blooded drowning.
And in fact, the entire court at Elsinore is suspicious, as we read in “Claudius View the Drowned Corpse of Ophelia,” “Gertrude Observes Ophelia’s Corpse,” “Laertes Views the Corpse.” But Ophelia has made her escape!
No less suspicious, the strolling players suspect something is up. “Cunegunde” simply doesn’t seem herself. We meet a whole new set of characters, for this is Robert Cooperman’s storytelling style, a series of monologues in the voices of various characters that moves the plot along. There’s the Player King, Griselda, Gunnar, Feste the Clown. They all suspect something’s up. Feste muses, considering the erstwhile haughty Cunegunde:
Since Elsinore, she’s no longer arrogant
in her beauty, but gentle and genteel,
as if upbraided by Our Lady,
on how a woman with her gifts
of face and form should comport herself.
While away with the strolling players, the denouement of Shakespeare’s play occurs, the bloodbath at the end in which Hamlet, Gertrude, Laertes and Claudius all die and Fortinbras comes to restore order. Ophelia hears about all of this and in a series of poems – “Ophelia Hears of the Deaths of Her Brother Laertes and Her Former Lover Hamlet,” “Ophelia Ponders the Death of Queen Gertrude” (‘You’d think, at the least, / I’d delight in her death.’), “Ophelia, as Cunegunde, Thinks of Fortinbras” – considers it all and how this affects her, but she is content with her current situation. Who needs Elsinore? We meet yet more of the players – Samson, the strongman of the troupe, and Isaak, who likewise detects a change in “Cunegunde.”
Ever since we left Elsinore
Cunegunde’s changed:
where once she’d see me
carrying logs for our fires,
she’d trip me and laugh,
“Clumsy Jew!” Now she helps.
In the company of her new companions, further plot twists occur, including Griselda’s scheme to kill Ophelia/Cunegunde (“Griselda Plots the Downfall of Ophelia,” “Griselda and the Vial of Poison”), and Fortinbras learns Ophelia’s true identity and proposes to her, but how this turns out I’ll leave for the reader to discover. Suffice it to say that Cooperman keeps you on the edge of your seat, turning the pages.
Cooperman is also as bawdy as the Bard. Take the opening stanza of “Griselda Plots the Downfall of Ophelia” as an example, when we learn about her jealousy:
My face pasty-plain as dough,
my titties tiny as peach pits,
Gunnar paid me less attention
than he would a sliver
of smashed crockery:
too busy playing
the randy bull
with Cunegunde’s
swaying hipped heifer
I hate her for her soft curves,
her lush-as-satin lips…
When the collection ends with “Ophelia Considers Her New Life,” the reader has been through a roller coaster. This is a fun reconsideration of the characters in Hamlet. The only things missing are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!
Mar 25 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Robert Cooperman
Poetry review – THE DEATH AND REBIRTH OF OPHELIA: Charles Rammelkamp manages to keep up with Robert Cooperman’s extensive re-working of Shakespeare’s Hamlet
One of Robert Cooperman’s many talents as a poet and storyteller is his re-imagining of classic, iconic characters. There are the handful of books about the Trojan War, Odysseus and Achilles and Hector – Troy, Lost on the Blood-Dark Sea, The Ghosts and Bones of Troy, and Bearing the Body of Hector Home. There is The Long Black Veil, the classic country ballad originally recorded by Lefty Frizzell and subsequently covered by everybody from Johnny Cash and Marrianne Faithfull to the Chieftains, the Kingston Trio and Joan Baez, which Cooperman reimagines almost as a Greek tragedy. And there is Letters to Juliet, Romeo’s teenage squeeze.
The author of dozens of books with themes ranging from family in New York to the Grateful Dead to the American wild west, Cooperman’s latest is another reimagining of a classic Shakespeare character, the spurned lover of Prince Hamlet who, heartbroken and crazy with grief, takes her life by drowning in Act IV.
Or does she?
In the first poem in Cooperman’s book, “Ophelia Fakes Her Own Drowning,” Polonius’ daughter tells us:
After Hamlet insulted my virtue yet again, and me giving him my all and gladly, I ran sobbing to the Lower Town, there glimpsed a strolling female player.That strolling female player, Cunegunde, bears a striking resemblance to Ophelia, and a plan starts to form. ‘I wished by to escape my mad prince,’ Ophelia tells us. She proposes that they change places. It’s a very Shakespearean trope, after all – twins, doubles, mistaken identity, disguise. Shakespeare employs disguise throughout his plays. There’s Portia in The Merchant of Venice, who disguises herself as the lawyer, Balthazar; Rosalind in As You Like It, who disguises herself as Ganymede; Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona who disguises herself as Sebastian. Appearance and reality are interchangeable. ‘I am not what I am,’ is a phrase uttered by both Viola in Twelfth Night and Iago in Othello.
Without giving away the plot, let’s just say that the “death” and the “rebirth” of Ophelia are more than symbolic. In The Death and Rebirth of Ophelia, Ophelia becomes her own woman. For just as Ophelia is hardly the fragile flower we take her to be in Hamlet, so Hamlet himself is not the vacillating noble prince tortured by his uncertainties but a brute. For one thing, we learn in that first poem, Hamlet has knocked Ophelia up (‘the unwanted flower / he planted in me by the rich soil of the riverbank.’) In fact, he’s also a murderer. In the very next poem, “Cunegunde, the Strolling Player Who Changes Places with Ophelia, Is Killed by Hamlet,” the prince kills the erstwhile strolling player when, after having sex with her, he discovers she’s an imposter and suspects she herself has killed Ophelia. It’s not the accidental killing of Polonius, stabbed through his mother’s tapestry, but a cold-blooded drowning.
And in fact, the entire court at Elsinore is suspicious, as we read in “Claudius View the Drowned Corpse of Ophelia,” “Gertrude Observes Ophelia’s Corpse,” “Laertes Views the Corpse.” But Ophelia has made her escape!
No less suspicious, the strolling players suspect something is up. “Cunegunde” simply doesn’t seem herself. We meet a whole new set of characters, for this is Robert Cooperman’s storytelling style, a series of monologues in the voices of various characters that moves the plot along. There’s the Player King, Griselda, Gunnar, Feste the Clown. They all suspect something’s up. Feste muses, considering the erstwhile haughty Cunegunde:
While away with the strolling players, the denouement of Shakespeare’s play occurs, the bloodbath at the end in which Hamlet, Gertrude, Laertes and Claudius all die and Fortinbras comes to restore order. Ophelia hears about all of this and in a series of poems – “Ophelia Hears of the Deaths of Her Brother Laertes and Her Former Lover Hamlet,” “Ophelia Ponders the Death of Queen Gertrude” (‘You’d think, at the least, / I’d delight in her death.’), “Ophelia, as Cunegunde, Thinks of Fortinbras” – considers it all and how this affects her, but she is content with her current situation. Who needs Elsinore? We meet yet more of the players – Samson, the strongman of the troupe, and Isaak, who likewise detects a change in “Cunegunde.”
In the company of her new companions, further plot twists occur, including Griselda’s scheme to kill Ophelia/Cunegunde (“Griselda Plots the Downfall of Ophelia,” “Griselda and the Vial of Poison”), and Fortinbras learns Ophelia’s true identity and proposes to her, but how this turns out I’ll leave for the reader to discover. Suffice it to say that Cooperman keeps you on the edge of your seat, turning the pages.
Cooperman is also as bawdy as the Bard. Take the opening stanza of “Griselda Plots the Downfall of Ophelia” as an example, when we learn about her jealousy:
My face pasty-plain as dough, my titties tiny as peach pits, Gunnar paid me less attention than he would a sliver of smashed crockery: too busy playing the randy bull with Cunegunde’s swaying hipped heifer I hate her for her soft curves, her lush-as-satin lips…When the collection ends with “Ophelia Considers Her New Life,” the reader has been through a roller coaster. This is a fun reconsideration of the characters in Hamlet. The only things missing are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!