Essay Contrasing Gertrude and Ophelia of Shakespeares Hamlet

Contrast of Gertrude and Ophelia in Hamlet Queen Gertrude and Ophelia, the main womanly characters in Shakespe atomic number 18s melodramatic tragedy Hamlet, have a change of contrasting or dissimilar personal qualities and experiences. This essay, with the help of literary critics, forget explore these differences. John Dover Wilson in his book, What Happens in Hamlet, discusses what is perhaps the superior dissimilarity amongst Ophelia and Gertrude their morality His Hamlets mother is a criminal, has been guilty of a sin which blots out the stars for him, makes life a bestial thing, and even infects his very blood. She has committed incest. Modern readers, living in an age when marriage laws are the subject of free discussion and with a deceased wifes sister act upon the statute-book, can hardly be pass judgment to tuck wide-cuty into Hamlets feelings on this matter. Yet no atomic number 53 who reads the first soliloquy in the Second Quarto text, with its illuminat ing dramatic punctuation, can doubt for one moment that Shakespeare wished here to make full dramatic capital out of Gertrudes infringement of ecclesiastical law, and expected his audience to look upon it with as much abhorrence as the Athenians mat for what we should consider the more venial, because unwitting, crime of the Oedipus of Sophocles (39). Quite opposite the criminality of the powerfulnesss wife is the innocence of Ophelia, who might be called a unconnected lily (ODonnell 241). In the Introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hamlet, David Bevington enlightens the reader regarding this dissimilarity between the two ladies Characters also serve as foils to one another as well as to Hamlet. Gertrude wishfully sees in Ophelia the b... ...ffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968. Boklund, Gunnar. Hamlet. Essays on Shakespeare. Ed. Gerald Chapman. Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press, 1965. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and Other E nglish Poets. London George Bell and Sons, 1904. p. 342-368. http//ds.dial.pipex.com/thomas_larque/ham1-col.htm ODonnell, Jessie F. Ophelia. The American Shakespeare Magazine, 3 (March 1897), 70-76. Rpt. in Women Reading Shakespeare 1660-1900. Ed. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts. New York Manchester University Press, 1997. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts make for of Technology. 1995. http//www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html No line nos. Wilson, John Dover. What Happens in Hamlet. New York Cambridge University Press, 1999.