Regarding Hamlet’s Gertrude
In William Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy Hamlet, the audience meets a queen who is a former and present queen. She was unhappy before – how does she feel now? Is she evil, guilty, motherly, lascivious? The multiple aspects of her personality deserve our attention.
Angela Pitt in “Women in Shakespeare’s Tragedies” comments that Shakespeare’s Gertrude in Hamlet is, first and foremost, a mother:
Gertrude evinces no such need to justify her actions and thereby does not betray any sense of guilt. She is concerned with her present good fortune, and neither lingers over the death of her first husband nor analyses her motives in taking another. . . .She seems a kindly, slow-witted,
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At the outset of the drama, Hamlet’s mother is apparently disturbed by her son’s appearance in solemn black at the gathering of the court, and she requests of him:
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity. (1.2)
The queen obviously considers her son’s dejection to result from his father’s demise. She joins the king in asking Hamlet to stay in Elsinore rather than returning to Wittenberg. Respectfully the prince replies, “I shall in all my best obey you, madam.” So at the outset the audience notes a decidedly good relationship between Gertrude and those about her in the drama, even though Hamlet’s “suit of mourning has been a visible and public protest against the royal marriage, a protest in which he is completely alone, and in which he has hurt his mother” (Burton “Hamlet”). Gertrude would be hurt even more if she were to overhear Hamlet’s first soliloquy, which expresses anger at the quickness of his mother’s marriage and its incestuousness: “Frailty, thy name is woman! . . . .” Mary Bradford-Whiting, in her article “Mothers in Shakespeare” compares the mother of Juliet to the mother
When Hamlets father speaks to him and tells him to speak to his mother, Hamlet immediately obeys him. He respects his father and loves him enough to listen to him and stop fighting with his mother. It shows that no matter the flaws he has with his mother he would throw them out just to please his father. Hamlet has proven himself in many ways that he would do anything for his father no matter what the circumstance was.
Hamlet's rant to persuade her that Claudius is a bad man and the murderer of his father depicts his disrespect to his mother. For instance, he tells her, "You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you." (III.iv.20-21) He is threatening his own mother! Later, he addresses her as "thou wretched, rash, intruding fool" (III.iv.32) Even though Gertrude's lust for Claudius aggravates him, Hamlet fails to show even the most fundamental respect to his superior. The relationship is full of disloyalty and distrust from Gertrude's part. First, she appeases, "Be thou assured... I have no life to breathe what thou hast said to me." (III.iv.201-203) It is assumed that she will listen to Hamlet and stay away from Claudius. However, in the next act, she displays her true loyalty to her husband, telling him that Hamlet is "in this brainish apprehension kills / The unseen good old man." (IV.I.12-13) This is partially contributed by her observations of her son talking to a ghost that she doesn't see. Polonius' death causes her to think Hamlet is dangerous, further driving the two apart. Her distrust to her son harms him by further solidifying Claudius' plan to execute him in England because the king sees him as a threat to the throne who is capable of killing. In the end, Hamlet and Gertrude's relationship take a bittersweet ending.
(1) Hamlet’s feelings can no longer be helped back. He wants to be with his mother. Two of the Queen’s character traits that cause Hamlet to have these feelings would be her sensual nature and her fondness so her son. Hamlet misinterpreted Gertrude’s love for him as a sexual desire, instead of the maternal love that she has for him. Even though Hamlet felt what his mother was doing with Claudius as wrong, he still had considerable respect for her.
The nature of Shakespeare’s plays, with its notable lack of stage directions, gives way to multiple different interpretations of the characters, plot, and even of the purpose of the play itself. The character of Gertrude is no exception. Gertrude’s character and motives, being left ambiguous, have been interpreted in many different ways in various productions of Hamlet. Was she implicit in the death of King Hamlet, or was she merely a clueless bystander? Did she drink the poison as an act of motherly self-sacrifice, or was it an accidental tragedy? Zefferelli’s Hamlet (1990) and Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) provide two different interpretations on Gertrude’s characterization. In particular, there exist substantial differences in their renditions of Gertrude’s death—while Almereyda portrays her death as a noble suicide, Zefferelli paints her death as a by-product of her unceasing lust for pleasure. Furthermore, in that scene, we also notice a difference in Hamlet’s attitude towards Gertrude. By analyzing these points along with other scenes within the context of the entire film, we manage to develop an understanding of Almereyda’s and Zefferelli’s view on Gertrude and how use that to develop the tragic conclusion of the final scene.
Throughout William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Shakespeare portrays Hamlet with the same types of behaviors and frustrations in humans that Sigmund Freud saw at a much later date. When the relationship between Hamlet and his mother is analyzed Freud's oedipal complex theory comes to mind. The oedipal complex is a theory created by Freud that states that "The child takes both of its parents, and more particularly one of them, as the object of its erotic wishes."(51) Because of this desire to be with the parent of the opposite sex, a rivalry is formed with the parent of the same sex. In the play, Hamlet shows great hostility toward his uncle Claudius because his mother's remarriage to him. Hamlet sees his mother's remarriage as disgusting
Sometimes mothers can be hard to deal with. They can be overbearing and strict, and sometimes it’s hard to know what they are thinking. Still, mothers are an integral part of life and they help to guide one in the directions of life. In Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Hamlet has a complex relationship with his mother, Queen Gertrude. After Hamlet’s father’s death, which the ghost of King Hamlet tells his son is due to murder from his brother Claudius, Queen Gertrude hastily remarries Claudius. This shapes Hamlet’s rage for the majority of the play, as he is at odds with his mother. The audience only sees Queen Gertrude through the eyes of Hamlet, and he paints
Moreover, as mother to Hamlet, she acts largely as a reflection of the evils within Claudius. Much of the antagonism Hamlet directs towards her is, thus, aimed clearly at the elements of her that mirror Claudius: her lustfulness and corruption. In return, however, Gertrude offers Hamlet a level of motherly love and understanding. When she says "Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet. / I pray thee, stay with us, go not to Wittenberg," she quite clearly is expressing simple love and a desire to remain close to Hamlet. While Claudius is purely destructive towards Hamlet, Gertrude's ability to filter her lustfulness and corruption through her womanhood allows her to act, at least on some level, as a positive force on Hamlet.
William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is perhaps one of his most intriguing and scandalous pieces of work. One character who is liable for much of this excitement and outrage is Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude. To some readers and critics, Gertrude is conceived as an erratic, superficial and sensual woman. Others discern the Queen as an earnest, intellectual and sagacious woman whose tragic fault is her yearning for sexual satisfaction. Throughout the text, there are several legitimate arguments for both sides, but in the end, Hamlet seems to sum up the Queen’s true persona with the words “Frailty, thy name is woman”. Evidence of Gertrude’s true nature can be found in many instances through out the play such
She is the type of woman who never thinks too deeply into a situation, which is where her and Hamlet are complete opposites. Hamlet put on a play to get a reaction out of his mother, but instead she responded casually. She didn’t put the pieces together as to how the story line related to her, but she did mention that all widows would like to remarry soon and suggested that Player Queen was an unrealistic character. By doing this, Gertrude shows the audience and her son that she doesn’t possess the thought process to make the connection between her life and the Player Queen’s life. Although she shows genuine concern of people’s feelings, she doesn’t react in a way that would help.
The purpose of this essay is to analyze the role of Gertrude in "Hamlet", which is counted as one of the famous plays of English language (Thompson and Neil Taylor 74) and the most popular work of Shakespeare (Wells and Stanton 1). This essay will evaluate the role of 'Gertrude', who was the mother of Prince Hamlet and also the title character of the play.
We first realize in Act I, Scene 2 that poor judgment is her major character flaw. As the mother of a grieving son, Gertrude should have been more sensitive to Hamlet's feelings. Instead, less than two months after King Hamlet's death, Gertrude remarries Claudius, her dead husband's own brother. Gertrude should have realized how humiliated Hamlet would feel as a
Queen Gertrude is the mother to Hamlet, widow to the late King, and new wife to King Claudius as shown within the first act of Hamlet. Following her marriage to King Claudius, her relationship with her son Hamlet becomes strained. Queen Gertrude symbolizes much of what is considered to be a negative aspect of womanhood. To Hamlet, Queen Gertrude is a failure of a woman. Through his dialogue, it is presented that Hamlet desires a woman and mother to be concerned for her family and place tradition above all else. When Hamlet’s mother makes a decision outside of that realm and marries King Claudius, Hamlet strives to berate her for her choices. Through
The main character in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet goes through several personality changes. Throughout the novel, Hamlet shows very much hatred towards women. This stems from the actions of his mother. Before she died, she was in an incestuous relationship with Claudius, her cousin, while she was still married to the King (Hamlet’s father). The ghost of the King calls Gertrude an “incestuous, adulterate beast” (Act I, Scene V). Hamlet felt betrayed by his mother when she drank poisoned wine and committed suicide. Gertrude seemingly turns Hamlet against all women.
He acidly snaps at Gertrude, "Mother, you have my father much offended" (Hamlet, III, iv, 13). It is not that his mother is a woman that haunts and maddens Hamlet, but the fact that she chooses Claudius over himself. He believes that she does not actually love Claudius, but was merely seduced or tricked, and he cries out in anguish:
Like Ophelia, Gertrude is a victim of circumstance. She is not completely guiltless, but there seems to be no evidence that there is any desire in her to do evil to others. Indeed she is aware that her