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Weakness Of Women In Hamlet - Online Essays

Weakness Of Women In Hamlet

In The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare, women are portrayed as ineffectual and impressionable creatures dependent on men for emotional stability. The two women characters in the play, Ophelia and Gertrude, are similar in their weaknesses and frailties. Ophelia’s madness ensues from the loss of her father, who made her choices for her, and from Hamlet’s renouncement of their love. Shakespeare uses Ophelia’s reaction to tragedy to show how women are hysterical and lost without the voice of a man to guide their actions. Through her speedy remarriage and her refusal to believe in her son, Hamlet, Shakespeare depicts Gertrude as a traitor and a coward. The female ...

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a month, ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears had left the flushing in her gallèd eyes, she married. O, most wicked speed, to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets!” (Act1.scene2.158-162). The absence of a mourning period for the Queen suggests that she needed a husband so badly that she brazenly betrayed Hamlet and her late husband, and involved herself in an immoral marriage simply for the sake of pacifying her own loneliness. Gertrude’s eagerness to remarry attests to her inability to function independently from a man. Shakespeare portrays Ophelia in a similar manner to that of Gertrude in that she is incapable of maintaining a state of emotional stability when she does not have a man playing a significant role in her life. Ophelia’s descent into madness directly follows the death of her father, Polonius. Shakespeare immediately makes it obvious to the reader that it is her father and brother, rather than Ophelia herself, who make the important decisions in her ...

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Weakness Of Women In Hamlet. (2008, July 24). Retrieved January 10, 2026, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Weakness-Of-Women-In-Hamlet/87249

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 7/24/2008 10:50:06 AM
Category: Arts
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 1102
Pages: 5

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