Sexuality In Shakespeare's Hamlet

“To, be or not to be,” is one of William Shakespeare’s most notable inquiries regarding the self in the tragedy Hamlet (3.1.55). By orchestrating chaos, Shakespeare creates an environment in which the male characters; Hamlet and Claudius, are free to contemplate and express their respective nature. However, when it comes to Gertrude; Hamlet’s mother and initial instigator of Hamlet’s conflict, there is no interior examination. There is only vilification of her sexuality, and the interior disruption that results from her decision to lay with Claudius. If we consider the historical context in which Shakespeare is writing, we can conclude that how men of the Renaissance classified women based on their sexuality influences the treatment of Gertrude.

Because of the consummation between Gertrude and Claudius, Hamlet responds that his desire is to consummate with death.
Hamlet’s obsession of Gertrude’s sexual desire is indicative of his misplaced desire for his mother’s affection, also known as the Oedipal complex. Hamlet is obsessed with the thought that his mother was motivated by sexual desire: “It is the male characters who perceive free choice on the part of the female character as an inevitable sign of irrational lust, and as the inevitable prelude to disorder and disaster” (Jardine 72). However, it is possible Hamlet’s outrage of his mother’s sexuality is even more complex. Psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, argued that Hamlet suffered from a variation of the Oedipus complex:
The killing of the Elder Hamlet and the marriage of the murderer with Hamlet’s mother were realizations of Hamlet’s own repressed childish wishes. His condition when the action begins would be accounted for, then, by the workings of incestuous fantasy. The nephew cannot kill the uncle because he recognizes in him the image of his desire (Goddard

Women, who were seen as “imperfect men,” did not have the freedom to explore their interiority. Women were not made in the “image of God,” but rather: “she is the image of man in a restrictive and analogical sense, because woman was made from man, after man, inferior to him and his likeness” (Farber). Women were by design lower in the hierarchy. Shakespeare does not write any lines for Gertrude regarding the transition of power to Claudius, or her interior thoughts of the marriage. We only see Hamlet’s reaction to the marriage: “…and yet within a month - / Let me not think on’t! Frailty, thy name is woman! - / … / Oh God, a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourn’d longer – married with my uncle” (1.2.144-151). Here we begin to see Gertrude’s initial restriction. Her decision, according to Hamlet, to marry her late husband’s brother is a weakness. As a woman, Gertrude is incapable of “reason,” therefore she is acting upon her sexual desires. This “frailty” associated with women is a historical flaw that has been traced all throughout Christianity. While men of the Renaissance could break free from the restrain that the church held on their ideologies, women were not so fortunate. The classical and medieval ecclesiastical opinion of women was that women were “a temple built over a