Issues in Hamlet

Female Sexuality

The two women in the play are little more than pawns in the patriarchal world of sexual exploitation.

Gertrude

→ She has been ‘taken to wife’ by Claudius. Just as he has seized Denmark, so too has he appropriated her body. She has no real power or agency, but is a possession to be fought over by king and prince, husband and son.

→ Her relationship with her first and second husbands are largely seen through Hamlet’s eyes. Hamlet has a courtly memory of his father like a sun-god ‘Hyperion… So loving to my mother/that he might not beteem the winds of heaven/visit her face too roughly… She would hang on him/as if increase of appetite had grown/by what it fed on…’.

→ The ghost accuses his ‘most seeming virtuous queen’ of adultery.

Ophelia

→ Used as an object, manipulated by men.

→ Her brother lectures her; seeking to control her sexuality.

→ Her father uses her as bait in a spy trap: ‘I’ll lose my daughter to him’.

→ Hamlet takes out on her a misogynistic side to his character

→ The masculine brutalities of Denmark, her brother, Polonius and Hamlet, literally drive Ophelia mad.

Politics and Society

Madness

→ The madness that Hamlet displays and into which Ophelia descends is the individual symptom of a deeper social unease. Hamlet projects his disgust onto a variety of subjects: Claudius, Gertrude and Ophelia’s sexuality and death itself.

→ The language Hamlet uses mirror the deeper social corruption that pervades Denmark. “Foul deeds”, “maggots”, “the ulcerous place”, “an unweeded garden”. However civilised outward appearances are, the routine oppressions of a police state prevent natural social interaction.