Gender Roles In Hamlet

Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”: male games and their destructive influence on women’s lives

Hamlet or The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is one of the most famous plays written by William Shakespeare. It tells a story of a man who desired to punish his uncle for murder of his own brother (the king and Hamlet’s father) and assumption of power with the aid of marriage with the queen. Prince’s actions led to the death of most characters. The story focuses on male characters like Hamlet with his righteous anger because of his uncle’s actions, Claudius and his conspirations or Polonius with Laertes. Queen Gertrude and Ophelia are the only women in the play. While they have a significant place in the plot, these characters stay in the second division.

3942-3943), the woman died because her husband decided to poison his nephew. In other words, Gertrude became an accidental victim of Claudius’s plots. Some readers can say Gertrude deserved this type of fate. She “betrayed” her husband by the marriage with Claudius and likely continued to support him even after Hamlet described the true situation to her. The queen’s guilt is highlighted by ghost King’s words: “ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast… so to seduce!- won to his shameful lust the will of my most seeming-virtuous queen” (Shakespeare l. 780, 783-784). Some sources interpret the word “adulterate” like the fact that Gertrude and Claudius became lovers before the king’s death; and suggestion the queen participated in the murder plot against her husband. But their counterparts highlights this term is only the synonym of the contamination “with base matter. And Claudius has indeed, according to the Ghost, contaminated his precious Gertrude, but this does not mean that Claudius did so before Hamlet's father died” (“Introduction to Gertrude in Hamlet”). So the woman did not deserve the death as she did not betray her husband. There was a high probability

If Gertrude was a queen and participated in castle intrigues in some way because of that, the girl was not a part of the “highest circle”. Shakespeare did not mention it directly, but it looked like Ophelia participated in the castle’s life only because she was Polonius’s daughter. The beginning of the play described a development of relations between Hamlet and the girl, but prince’s “treatment of Ophelia was little less than brutal, and that there is a lack of manliness expressed in his feigned madness while in her presence” (Vanderlyn, 91). The Act I mentions an active love correspondence between Hamlet and Ophelia. Shakespeare did not say it directly again, but readers can suggest this relationship started to develop before the prince found out about his father’s death and its reasons. Hamlet just started to use the girl whom he probably liked in his game; like Claudius and Ophelia’s own father did too. It was obvious the character did not know much about the real situation that provided the basis for rulers’ change. She jut obeyed to her father and brother, as a decent daughter and sister, and wanted to understand why her potential boyfriend started to act so strangely. Hamlet demonstrated Ophelia the full power of his talent to simulate madness after his “to be or not to be” monologue. His comments about the value of honesty and beauty and pleas for Ophelia’s move to the nunnery could be first factors that affected girl’s mental