HAMLET: Gender

Question 1

Sane OPHELIA:
1. Subjected to MALE CONTROL
- (Polonius to Ophelia) “Tender yourself more dearly, or… you’ll tender me a fool”
2. BORING/PASSIVE…until she goes mad…
- “Th’observed of all observers, quite, quite down”

Answer 1

1.
-> “Tender”
- Wordplay -> Ophelia becomes an object of potential sexual exchange
-> Perverse obsession (familial) with women’s sexuality
- “Dearly” -> Implication of caring for her chastity

2.
-> “observed”
- Passive
-> Endstopping
- Boring, conforming poetry
- Weak, repetitive

Question 2

Mad OPHELIA:

1. “Her speech is nothing”
2. “Let in the maid that out a maid never departed more”
   -> SHOWALTER: Ophelia “symbolically deflower[s] herself”

+ HER DEATH!

-> Ophelia’s madness is accepted as “the poison of deep grief…all from her father’s death” - BUT NOT HAMLET?!?!?!?

Answer 2

1.
-> Absence, “words, words, words”
-> “Nothing” = sexual innuendo (vagina)
- SEXUALISATION OF HER MADNESS:

2. Innuendo, suggests sexual relations (w/ Hamlet)
   -> Disturbing, given the mixing of ‘grief’ for both Hamlet and Polonius
   -> Emphasised in the Tennant: Ophelia undresses as she sings

• Deep psychological repression?
  -> Viewed connected to men:
• (Laertes) “Is’t possible a young maid’s wits should be as mortal as an old man’s life?”
• Lee EDWARDS: “Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet”
  -> PAPA ESIDEAU: Mad Ophelia pulls out her hair
  OR
  -> Sexual madness?

-> Mad people said to say prophetic things, as they have been touched by God, and so communicate His message

Question 3

GERTRUDE
1. “His father’s death, and our o’erhasty marriage”
2. (HAMLET) “Go not to my uncle’s bed” / “let him for a pair of reechy kisses”
3. “…my very soul, and there I see such black and grainéd spots”

Answer 3

1. Says so little, but what she does say is exceptionally insightful
   -> Perfectly articulates the reason (obvious to the audience) in the course
2. Grotesque (“reechy” = soiled/stinky) obsession with his mother’s sexuality
   * Freudian reading: OEDIPUS COMPLEX (although Freud hadn’t written about it yet, it is supposed to be an innate desire)
   -> OLIVIER: Bed onstage, suggestive wresting on it, the actress playing Gertrude was over 10 years younger
   -> YET! Something you grow out of…
   - Hamlet = trapped in his childhood, controlled by Claudius (refuses to let him go back to university)
   - Why Hamlet feels he has to control his mother
3. AMBIGUITY -> never fully hear her story
   a) Admission of sin (“black”)?
   b) Guilt at how she has raised her son?
   c) Scared, so says what Hamlet wants to hear?T
   - Either way, an obsession with her sexuality/accusation of hightened sexual desire
   - A general melancholic hatred of people: “why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?”

Question 4

Hamlet’s Misogyny
1. “The sun breed maggots in a dead dog…Have you a daughter?”
2. “Get thee to a nunnery”

Answer 4

1. Viscerally disgusting -> passed into this mad obsession with women’s bodies
2. “Nunnery” either BROTHEL or CONVENT
   - Either way, an obsession with her sexuality/accusation of heightened sexual desire
   - A general melancholic hatred of people: “Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?”

-> “Hamlet’s disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women and into his brutal behaviour towards women” - SHOWALTER
- “I must like a whore…”
- Yet ‘no man cries’ attitude is distinctly Victorian, whereas in the Renaissance they would’ve celebrated Hamlet as the ‘Philosopher King’