Gertrude’s Loyalty to Hamletĭespite all that happens, Gertrude chooses to remain loyal to Hamlet. Gertrude knows what Hamlet is implying, and answers, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Gertrude’s lines usually convey a lot of meaning in a little space. Hamlet asks his mother what she thinks about the play. When Polonius continues with the numerous unlikely reasons for Hamlet’s anger without noting the truth, it is Gertrude who reminds him how he is missing the main point: “more matter with less art.” She always tries to say what other characters mean in her few accurate lines.Īt 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. They go on with different causes until Gertrude speaks out the truth in a few lines: “I doubt it is no other but the main, / His father’s death and our o’erhasty marriage.” However, she does not know that her new husband has killed the old one, while Hamlet does. In one act, Claudius and Polonius are trying to figure out the reasons for Hamlet’s anger. Learn more about the religious drama of Hamlet. She has only 70 lines in the whole play, and every time that she speaks, there are some fundamental points being revealed. 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. The point is, most critics have acted just like Hamlet, trying to deny the sexual needs of Gertrude. Hamlet is right about thinking that she enjoys making love to his uncle. There is no reason for her not to have an active and erotic sex life. Gertrude is a woman of around 45 years old.
GERTRUDE HAMLET HOW TO
This is a transcript from the video series How to Read and Understand Shakespeare. This is where the ghost appears again to make him stop ranting about the details of her mother’s sexual life. She uses the same words that her dead husband, the ghost, uses when he describes his death: “in the porches of mine ears did pour …” Hamlet does not stop and continues with how angry he is that his mother and uncle are married and share the same bed: “Nay, but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty!” The lines do not describe what he has seen, but what he imagines. In act three, he finally confronts his mother as he refers to her sexual life and tells her she cannot call it love: “You cannot call it love for at your age / The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble / And waits upon the judgment.” He denies any non-sexual affection between the two until Gertrude is affected and asks him to stop talking because his words are like “daggers that enter in her ears.” Hamlet believes that is too short for mourning and his famous charge forms in this context: “Frailty, thy name is woman.” Gertrude marries Claudius two months after the death of her husband. His first problem with the marriage, before the ghost reveals to him that his uncle, Claudius is the murderer, is Gertrude’s obvious sexual interest in Claudius. Gertrude tries to calm and console him, but he keeps his negative views. When Gertrude and Claudius are getting married, Hamlet stands away from the crowd and shows his displeasure. Are his mother’s sexual interests all that concern Hamlet? Hamlet is against Gertrude and Claudius’s marriage even before he finds out that his uncle, Claudius, is the murderer of his father.
Even though he does not know the new king is the murderer, Hamlet is explicitly against the marriage for some reason, and he keeps accusing his mother of lust until she regrets her decision. Conner, Ph.D., Washington and Lee University Gertrude and Claudius marry each other while Hamlet is still grieving the death of his father.
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