Shakespeares Hamlet - Regarding Gertrude Essay -- Essays on Shakespear

Regarding Hamlets Gertrude In William Shakespeares most famous tragedy Hamlet, the audience meets a queen who is a former and present queen. She was unhappy before how does she feel now? Is she evil, guilty, motherly, lascivious? The multiple aspects of her personality deserve our attention. Angela Pitt in Women in Shakespeares Tragedies comments that Shakespeares Gertrude in Hamlet is, first and foremost, a mother Gertrude evinces no such need to justify her actions and thereby does not betray any sense datum of guilt. She is concerned with her present good fortune, and neither lingers over the death of her first husband nor analyses her motives in taking another. . . .She seems a kindly, slow-witted, rather self-indulgent woman, in no way the emotional or intellectual equal of her son. . . . Certainly she is fond of Hamlet. Not only is she prepared to listen to him when he storms at her, proof that he is sufficiently close to her to have a right to make comments on her perso nal life, but she is unfailingly concerned about him. (46-47) Gunnar Bokland in Hamlet describes Gertrudes moral descent during the course of Shakespeares Hamlet With Queen Gertrude and finally to a fault Laertes deeply involved in a situation of increasing ugliness, it becomes produce that, although Claudius and those who associate with him are not the incarnations of evil that Hamlet sees in them, they are corrupt enough from any balanced point of view, a condition that is also intimated by the heavy-headed revel that distinguishes life at the Danish court. (123) Gertrudes contamination does indeed affect the hero. Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks in Making spawn Matter Repression... ... Lehmann, Courtney and Lisa S. Starks. Making Mother Matter Repression, Revision, and the Stakes of Reading Psychoanalysis Into Kenneth Branaghs Hamlet. Early Modern Literary Studies 6.1 (May, 2000) 2.1-24 <URL http//purl.oclc.org/emls/06-1/lehmhaml.htm>. Pitt, Angela. Women in Shake speares Tragedies. Readings on The Tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego Greenhaven Press, 1996. Reprint of Shakespeares Women. N.p. n.p., 1981. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts initiate of Technology. 1995. http//www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html No line nos. Smith, Rebecca. Gertrude Scheming Adulteress or Loving Mother? Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. of Hamlet A Users Guide. cutting York Limelight Editions, 1996.