The Collectible Ofelia: Object-Oriented Feminisms and the Un-Human Corpus of Q1’s Dispensaniac

This chapter applies an object-oriented feminist lens to Q1 Hamlet in order to explore Ofelia’s placement as a cyborg figuration. Q1’s legacy as a trash(ed)-compacted variant text flattens the play’s contours into an autotopography which can be mined in object-oriented and object-ified terms. Rather than squashing herself into a Shakespearean “Flat Stanley,” Q1 Ofelia instead strews dimensional traces of herself throughout the landscape, a tangible and tradable memento vivere of the life she actively unmakes. As such, Ofelia contours herself into a posthuman figuration through the compulsion to give prosthetic markers of her own body away and therefore we might consider Ofelia the imaginary opposite of a kleptomaniac: a dispensaniac, aiming to heal her own trauma through the distribution of her embodied suffering. By examining Ofelia’s dispensania, this chapter will also explore those characters driven to lust after and to treasure her dimensional memorabilia inside of Hamlet’s Flatland and to collect it all, even in (her) death. This chapter argues that Ofelia’s entanglement with objects invites a posthuman intervention into Hamlet’s landscape focused on an agential Ofelia that curates her own afterlife, opening up a feminist posthuman channel inside of Shakespeare’s already-cyborg text.