Who Gets to Be a Person in Hamlet? Companion Texts, Verse Novels, and Writing Our Way to Understanding

Dr. Melanie Hundley is a Professor in the Practice of English Education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College; her research examines how AI, digital and multimodal composition informs the development of pre-service teachers’ writing pedagogy.  Additionally, she explores the use of AI, digital and social media in young adult literature.  She teaches writing methods courses that focus on AI, digital and multimodal composition and young adult literature courses that explore diversity, culture, and storytelling in young adult texts. 

She teaches AI and literacy courses including AI and Storytelling. Her current research focus has three strands: AI in writing, AI in Teacher Education, and Verse Novels in Young Adult Literature She is currently the Coordinator of the Secondary Education English Education program in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College.

​Who Gets to Be a Person in Hamlet? Companion Texts, Verse Novels, and Writing Our Way to Understanding by Melanie Hundley

It is no secret that I love verse novels. As a reader, I am drawn to the way poetry slows me down and invites me to linger in a character's thoughts. As a teacher, I appreciate the opportunities verse novels create for students to notice how writers use language, structure, and silence to create meaning. As a teacher educator, I value the ways these texts help students move beyond summary and into interpretation.
 
Recently, while reading Hamlet with a group of students, I found myself returning once again to Joy McCullough's Enter the Body. McCullough's collection gives voice to Shakespeare's female characters, allowing them to tell stories that are often overshadowed by the narratives of the men around them. These poems do not retell the plays, rather, the poems enter into conversations with the events, with the characters, with the ideas presented. They invite readers to reconsider characters they thought they knew.  They ask the reader to ask, “What if…”

Reconsidering Ophelia

As the students and I moved between Shakespeare's play and McCullough's poems, questions began to emerge: What do we actually know about Ophelia? Who gets to be a person in Hamlet? Is Hamlet a good guy? The discussions around Ophelia, her role, and her personhood were particularly thoughtful. At first the question of whether or not Ophelia is a person seemed simple.  Of course she is.  She speaks. She appears in multiple scenes. She influences the actions of the play
 
But the more closely we read, the more complicated the question became. Students could easily identify what other characters say about Ophelia. They could point to Laertes warning her about Hamlet. They could describe Polonius instructing her how to behave. They could analyze Hamlet's contradictory declarations of love and rejection.
 
Yet when we looked closely at the text, students noticed something important. We know a great deal about what others think of Ophelia. We know far less about what Ophelia thinks of them.
Much of what we learn about Ophelia comes through the words of the men around her. She is advised, directed, protected, criticized, and used. She is important to the plot, but her interiority her private thoughts, fears, hopes, questions, and desires that shape her experience, often remains just beyond our reach. In many ways, Ophelia functions as a daughter, a sister, a love interest, a source of concern, a symbol of innocence, and eventually a symbol of tragedy.

Reading the Poetry

But when does she get to simply be a person? That is one of the gifts of Enter the Body.
 
McCullough enters the spaces Shakespeare leaves open. She invites readers to dwell in the limited space Ophelia is allowed to occupy and imagine what exists beyond it. Rather than asking what Ophelia represents, the poem asks who Ophelia might be.
 
To explore the poem, we read it three times. The first reading was as readers.
We asked:

• What do we notice?
• How do we feel?
• What lingers with us after we read?

Students responded emotionally to the poem. They noticed Ophelia's confusion, heartbreak, and uncertainty. They commented on the tension in the dialogue and the impact of the white space on the page. This reading invited students to experience the poem before analyzing it.

The second reading was as scholars.
We asked:

• What lines stand out?
• What literary elements do we notice?
• What can we say based on the evidence?

Students began identifying patterns. They noticed contradictions in Hamlet's statements. They examined repetition, dialogue, and structure. They discussed how the poem shifted attention away from Hamlet's emotional turmoil and toward Ophelia's experience of the interaction. Their observations moved from reaction toward interpretation.

The third reading was as writers.
We asked:

• What does this text model?
• What does it inspire?
• How does it help me make sense of something?

This reading changed everything. Students noticed how McCullough used fragmented dialogue, white space, and layered voices to reveal a character's inner life. They began thinking about what stories exist between the lines of canonical texts. They considered what becomes visible when we enter the perspective of a character whose voice is often overshadowed by others. Most importantly, they began writing.  That third reading opened the door to some of the most interesting thinking of the unit.

Student Writing (Erica)

After reading Enter the Body, pp. 100-101, several students chose to write an updated high school version of the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia.  What would it look like now?  Erica wrote:
 
In the hallway, between classes
 
We passed each other and       paused,           
 
I said               I have remembrances of yours
                        things to give back
You said          I never gave you anything
The world of the hallway shrank and grew, fell silent, echoed with your words
                                    *I can’t breathe.*
I said               You know right well you did. Sweet notes, perfume, a poem, your t-shirt.
                        They were the best of gifts
                                                but not now.  Now, they mean…nothing.
You asked       Did you lie?
                        What?             *I can’t breathe.*
You asked       Were you faithful?
                        What? *I can’t breathe*
You said          I did love you…once.
                                    *I feel like I am drowning*
I said               You made me believe you did…but now…
You said          You shouldn’t have believed me
                        I didn’t love you.
                                    *I feel like I am drowning*
I thought         You were the liar.
You said          Women lie and cheat and make monsters of men.
                        You paint yourself as sweet and you are just a whore.
                                    *I feel like I am drowning*
I thought         I am not the one who pretended to love, who gave false words and false gifts. 
                        Is it his grief? Or is he really just a jerk?
                                    I feel like I am drowning*  

Erica’s poem opens, “In the hallway, between classes/We passed each other and paused” and quickly establishes the emotional intensity of a public breakup.  We see the speaker’s confusion when the male partner in the breakup denies doing things she knows he did and then her pain when she is accused of things she did not do.  Throughout the poem, Erica includes the repeated lines “I can’t breathe” and “I feel like I am drowning.” These refrains function as both an allusion to the play and an interior voice running alongside the spoken dialogue.  Much like McCullough’s poem, Erica’s writing invites readers to do more than observe the interaction. She invites them to experience its emotional impact.
 
At first glance, Erica's poem appears to be a contemporary adaptation of Ophelia's encounter with Hamlet. But as I read it more closely, I realized she was doing something much more sophisticated. She was developing an interpretation. The poem captures a painful interaction between two people, but it also highlights something central to both Shakespeare's scene and McCullough's reimagining: the denial of shared experience. Just as Hamlet denies the letters and affection Ophelia remembers, Erica's speaker encounters someone who refuses to acknowledge a shared history. The poem also foregrounds the gendered accusations present in the original text. By the end of the piece, the speaker is confronted not only with rejection but with blame and dismissal.

Student Reflection (Erica)

What fascinated me most, however, was Erica's reflection on the writing process. After composing the poem, she wrote:

I was really thinking about Ophelia and wanted to write my essay about her and how she was treated by Hamlet, her father and brother. But I struggled to figure out what I wanted to say. I did poem pre-writing and that helped me think about how Ophelia is treated by the men in her life: she is used as a tool by her father, she is discarded as a girlfriend by Hamlet, and she is dismissed by her brother as unimportant. She doesn't matter to them until she is dead and then they think about her as a person. And even then she is more of a symbol than a person.  She is never fully real to them.
​
I keep returning to this reflection because it reveals something important about writing and learning. The poem was not simply evidence of Erica's thinking. The poem helped create her thinking. At first, Erica was thinking about Ophelia's feelings.  By the end, she was developing a theory about Ophelia's position within the play. She noticed that Polonius uses Ophelia as a tool.
Hamlet discards her when she no longer serves his needs. Laertes dismisses her concerns and agency. What began as individual moments became a larger pattern. By the time Erica wrote her reflection, she was no longer simply asking whether Ophelia was treated unfairly. She was asking whether Ophelia was ever allowed to exist as a full person in the eyes of the men around her.
 
Her observation is powerful: Ophelia doesn't matter to them until she is dead. Erica then pushes the idea even further. Even after Ophelia’s death, she is still more of a symbol than a person.  This insight takes us back to the question that started our reading. Who gets to be a person in Hamlet?  While many students focused on the women in the play, several did ask whether Hamlet was allowed to be a fully formed person or whether he was more of a symbol as well. 

Student Writing (Cory)

Cory wrote:
 
I know.
A crown. A throne. A story.A kingdom.
Everyone knows.
They tell it
over and over.
The murdered king. The usurping brother. The grieving son.
I know my lines.
Then speak them.
You ask as if
they belong to me.
As if I chose them.
As if I woke one morning
wanting blood.
As if grief and vengeance
are the same thing.
I know my lines.
The murdered king. The wicked uncle. The rightful heir.
The son who swears
and remembers
and kills.
I know my lines.
Everyone else does too.
The guards. The court. My mother. Even the audience.
They wait
for me to say them.
To become them.
To mean them.
Then why do you hesitate?
Because you were my father.
Because I cannot remember
the sound of your voice
without hearing
the command beneath it.
Because I miss you.
Because I am angry
that I miss you.
Because I want
one moment
to be a son
before I become
your weapon.
I know my lines.
But I do not know
how to speak them
with your ghost
standing inside my grief.
I know my lines.
I just didn’t write them.

Student Reflection (Cory)

Cory said, “Hamlet seems lost in most of the play. He is trying to figure out what to do when none of it seems to be what he wants to do or what he planned. Everything is coming at him from the outside, everybody’s expectations are piling on him.”  Cory’s observation feels like it gets at something essential in the play; he is focusing on the weight of the expectations on Hamlet.  Everyone wants something from Hamlet.  His father’s ghost wants revenge, Claudius wants obedience, Gertrude wants reconciliation, Ophelia wants honesty, Denmark wants stability, and the audience wants action.  Hamlet is constantly responding to demands rather than pursuing his own wants.  So when Cory says, “Everything is coming at him from the outside, everybody’s expectations are piling up on him,” he is describing a loss of agency that is surprisingly similar to what Erica noticed about Ophelia.
 
The difference is that Hamlet receives attention and authority while Ophelia receives marginalization and dismissal.  Yet both are trapped by roles assigned to them by others.  Ophelia is reduced to daughter, sister, and potential wife. Hamlet is reduced to son, prince, and avenger. Neither is fully allowed to exist outside those roles.

Final Reflection on Using Companion Texts

One of the reasons I continue to use companion texts such as Enter the Body is that they help students notice what literary analysis sometimes overlooks. They encourage students to ask not only what a character represents, but what has been left unsaid about that character's experience.
They invite students to enter the silences of a text. They encourage students to challenge whose stories are centered and whose stories remain at the margins. And, perhaps most importantly, they create opportunities for students to use writing as a way of discovering what they think.
 
For Erica and Cory, writing the poem was not preparation for literary analysis. the poem was literary analysis. It was through writing that they discovered their arguments. They did turn the poem into a well-developed essays, but the poem served as thinking and analysis for them. Sometimes the most important thing a companion text does is help students notice not what a character represents, but who that character might be. And sometimes the most important thing writing does is help students discover that person, too.