Paul Griffiths: let me tell you / let me go on

“She is like the rest of us; we all have no more than the words that come to us in the play.We go on with these words. We have to.” In let me tell you, Paul Griffiths gives Ophelia what Hamlet scarcely allows: a childhood, a family, and a love whose end we already know. He makes this life from the 481 distinct words Shakespeare allotted her. Whereas Hamlet can ask whether to be, Ophelia is given “I shall obey” and must discover whether its “I” can survive the command. What sounds like literary engineering becomes the intimate difficulty of making a life in language inherited from others. A word first spoken in obedience returns as doubt. A flower that delights a child already carries an omen for the reader. Nothing is added to her vocabulary, yet a person takes shape within it. Memory obeys no firmer rule. Rosemary is for remembrance, but to remember here is also to re-member, to gather a semblance of self from words that once belonged to other people. Ophelia cannot place her…