Katie, I agree, Gertrude is most certainly a hard character to get a handle on. My current interpretation is that she is a woman living in a difficult time. She has done what she needs to survive and remain comfortable. I do not personally believe she had a hand in killing her husband. However, the fact that this questions looms over our head as an audience is what makes her character so interesting. There is no clear answer and therefore Gertrude can take on whatever role the actress, the director, or the audience wants.
In her moral ambiguity and unclear intentions, Shakespeare managed to make Gertrude the most fascinating character within the play.
Your email address will not be published. Later in act three she allows Claudius and her father to use her in an attempt to find out why Hamlet is acting crazy. Then while being exploited, Ophelia allows Hamlet to humiliate her.
Gertrude is also used by Claudius in the sense that he only married her in order to be crowned King. After Laertes returns to France and Polonius is killed, Ophelia is left without commanders to narrate her activities.
Ophelia obviously does not cope with freedom well. After King Hamlets death, Gertrude too was left to fend for herself.
Ophelia failed without male domination and thus Gertrude remarried to avoid similar fiasco. Amidst her grief and emotional despair from King Hamlets death, Gertrude was easily seduced into matrimony with Claudius. April 16, Why should she turn into a sexless being after the death of her husband, and keep mourning forever? Why should she deny the erotic part of herself? She expresses herself through what she can, and her body is one way to do so.
She has only 70 lines in the whole play, and every time that she speaks, there are some fundamental points being revealed. Learn more about the religious drama of Hamlet. At one scene, the players are putting on the Mousetrap play, and the player queen is exaggeratedly saying that if her husband should die, she would never, ever marry another. Hamlet asks his mother what she thinks about the play. Learn more about staging Hamlet.
Despite all that happens, Gertrude chooses to remain loyal to Hamlet. In Act 4 Scene 7, Queen Gertrude reports that Ophelia had climbed into a willow tree There is a willow grows aslant the brook , and that the branch had broken and dropped Ophelia into the brook, where she drowned.
Her apparent suicide denotes a desire to take control of her life for once. It is likely that Hamlet really was in love with Ophelia. Readers know Hamlet wrote love letters to Ophelia because she shows them to Polonius. For example in Hamlet, he and Horatio were more than just friends they were lovers.
Horatio is the only one who knows for certain that Hamlet madness is an act. He is the one person Hamlet love deeply, and trust personally, and the main person to comfort him at his death. I believe that Hamlet tells Ophelia to go to the nunnery to protect her from what is coming.
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