The Women of Shakespeare’s Hamlet- Assignment 1

            The two female characters in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, are portrayed in the old style of thinking where women were thought of as weak and if they didn’t do what they where told then they were viewed as unfaithful and impure. Ophelia, Hamlet’s recent ‘fling’ and daughter of Polonius, is warned by her father and brother that she must remain pure by not given in to Hamlet’s romantic advances. Laertes (her elder brother) warns Ophelia of how shameful it would be to her if she gave in to Hamlet’s advances by saying,

“Then weigh what loss your honor may sustain

  If with too credent ear you list his songs

  Or lose you heart, or your chaste treasure open

  To his unmastered importunity.”

  (I.iii. 29-32)

Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, on the other hand has already become unfaithful and impure by letting herself become seduced by her dead husband’s brother Claudius, the present king of Denmark after King Hamlet’s death. But to be honest I would probably be upset if my mother married my uncle a month after my father’s death.   

We as readers must also take into account that Shakespeare wrote the play Hamlet about four hundred some odd years ago. In the sixteen hundreds such views of women were not uncommon. Back then women had to be virtuous and needed to be steered in the right direction because they could be ‘easily swayed’. Perhaps the views of women at the time are best summed up by the character Hamlet in Act 1 scene 2: “Frailty, they name is women!” (I. ii. 146)

Works Cited

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Hamlet.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2007. Web. 13 Apr. 2012