Comparing Gertrude and Ohpelia
Love. It is the emotion that will eventually weaken every heart. “A lame doe is preyed upon by a wolf that senses her weakness; a human is destroyed by something that finds theirs. A disease can find its way through a hole in a fragile immune system like man uses any flaw in a coat of armour to get in his blow. If you do not love, then you have a better chance of getting somewhere in life. No disease of the heart will make you infirm, powerless, or dead, for that matter. You can achieve your ambitions by hook, crook, or trick, and never once think about the opinion of another on what you did. Freedom from love is freedom to do whatever you want; however you want.” In the play Hamlet, Shakespeare uses the two women, Gertrude and Ophelia, demonstrate that eventually love weakens people and destroys them, and perhaps this could be their greatest weakness of all.In Elizabethan times, men always dominated over women. Women were not allowed to perform on stage, which meant that female characters in Shakespeare’s plays were always played by boys dressed up as women. The boys were young of course, without the years of acting training or experience of much older adult actors. So female parts are almost always relatively small, an
Gertrude is, more so than any other character in Hamlet, the antithesis of her son. Hamlet is a scholar and a brave man, even said to be by many critics some sought of ‘tragic hero’. Gertrude on the other hand is somewhat shallow and tends to think only about her body, her position and external pleasures. Why else would she remarry so quickly after her husband’s death; and to his brother! Because she longs to retain her position. Back in the Elizabethan times, when a queens husband died, she would not maintain her royal position any longer; would be shunted away and would become a nobody. This is why Gertrude was so quick to remarry back into royalty. She has grown to love the royal lifestyle so much so that she would not even give it up for the sake of her Hamlet who is disgusted with her marriage to his uncle and only two months after the death of his father! Hamlet later receives some even more disturbing information about the queen: (refer to pg 47, Act 1, Scene 5, 42 – 46). Gertrude was also sleeping with Claudius, the man who murdered his father. This then brings in the question; did Gertrude commit adultery before Hamlet the king was murdered? Even if she did, which we don’t know and can only guess, this would make the queen more loathsome than perhaps Shakespeare intended. d some of the female characters might be less developed than Shakespeare might ideally wanted to make them. This is why the women in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, are more often than not, dominated by the men, whic
Some topics in this essay:
Ophelia’s Hamlet,
Queen Elizabeth,
Hamlet Gertrude,
,
Gertrude Ophelia,
Ophelia Gertrude,
Act3 Scene,
Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
Hamlet Shakespeare,
death father,
scene 2,
elizabethan times,
female characters,
love hamlet,
scene 5,
gertrude ophelia,
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Approximate Word count = 1015
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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