It all started when he was seven years old. Here are the facts that we know, spare and sparse as they are: a sixteen-year-old unmarried woman drowned herself in the Avon at Stratford. She was seven months pregnant, and just beginning to show. At the time, young William lived in Stratford with his parents, although there is no direct evidence that he was acquainted with the woman. Oh, yes, and her name was Kate Hamnet.
For some of you, her last name immediately rings a bell, for others, it may not, but we'll get to that. First, I'd like to simply note an obvious parallel: Kate, a young, stained girl drowns herself. Years later, Shakespeare would write a character, Ophelia, a sixteen-year-old whose virginity is questioned and who subsequently drowns herself.
I don't mean to suggest by any means that Kate Hamnet was the exact template for Ophelia. No, I look at her as more of a hazy metaphor that stood to Shakespeare for all the weakness, all the desperation of women of the time. When Hamlet tells Ophelia to "get thee to a nunnery," it is with a pointed double blade: a nunnery in Shakespeare's day could either be a convent or a whorehouse. Whether Hamlet is telling Ophelia to guard her virtue or accusing her of already having sold it is not even clear to her. And with equal ambiguity, Shakespeare constructs the character of Ophelia, who is made up of the two extremes used to characterize the female sex. Are they virgins or whores? That is the question Shakespeare's contemporaries asked again and again. But in Ophelia, Shakespeare asks another: can they be both? Can she sacrifice her virtue for the man she loves and still come out as less amoral than a whore? In the play, it's not possible, and it is this duality that eventually kills Ophelia. Perhaps Shakespeare remembered the girl floating down the Avon as he wrote the description of Ophelia's death. Perhaps the "willow aslant the brook" actually sits near Stratford. And perhaps he remembered Kate Hamnet as special because she first opened his eyes to the ambiguity of the female position.
