Throughout the play is Hamlet quite spiteful toward women. Some would say to a misogynistic extent. He orders Ophelia, for example, to "go to a nunnery" and tells his mother, Gertrude, "frailty, thy name is woman" even though Hamlet is not very strong willed person. He is always split between his decisions and can never make up his mind. Hamlet is not a solid character with a clear path to achieve his goal. The irony; Hamlet as prince of Denmark has power to make his decisions but fails by contrast the women presumably the people with the least power make powerful decisions. A basic reading of Hamlet would look like this: Claudius has and abuses his power, Hamlet has power, but mostly choose not to use it, Polonius has less power than he imagines …show more content…
He is heir to the throne should be his, the son of a mother who he does not trust, nephew of the man who possibly killed his father, well, Ofelia is in a pretty tight spot too. Ophelia's father has been murdered by Hamlet, who used to be in love with her, and is now yelling at her about nunneries and then making strange sexual jokes and then goes to the sea. In the second act, Polonius says of Hamlet, "Though this be madness, yet there is method in it" and let's not overlook the method in the madness of Ophelia, like towards the end of Act Four, which delivers flowers you've collected to Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes. These flowers have meanings that each would be known to the Elizabethan audience, they were the kind of people who liked their bouquets to contain secret codes. “There’s fennel for you, and columbines," says Ophelia, presumably to Gertrude fennel meant as flattery and columbines, marital infidelity. Also distributes rue, which meant repentance, and mentions that the violets, associated with faithfulness, quote, "withered all when my father died." This is Ophelia in her most defiant, delivering their own form of judgment, speaking against corruption and injustice and doing it very feminine way, behind the mask of apparent madness. So while Hamlet is out in a pirate ship, spewing out more soliloquies than on his indecision, Ofelia is meeting its own beliefs about good and evil, life and death, and is doing so in a way that is