Women

Question 1

Women as weak and vulnerable

Answer 1

“ Frailty, thy name is woman!”
Gertrude described as “a beast that wants discourse of reason” by Hamlet
“The Mobled queen” Hecuba as a comparison to Gertrude, who was “threat’ning the flames with bisson rheum…the instant burst of clamour she made”

Question 2

Women as morally corrupt

Answer 2

“our sometime sister, now our queen, Th’imperial jointress I’d this warlike state”
“O most wicked speed, to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!”
Sexualisation of innocent love: “ your chaste treasure open To his unmastered importunity.”
GHOST: “won to his shameful lust The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen”
“God has given you one face and you make yourselves another.”

Question 3

Women as the victims of men

Answer 3

Gertrude:

• Hamlet’s obsession: “go not to my uncle’s bed…the bloat king tempt you again to bed”

Ophelia:

• “‘This [letter from Hamlet] in obedience hath my daughter shown me…I’ll loose my daughter to him”
• “Ophelia, walk you here - Gracious, so please you”
• “do you think i meant country matters?” “i think nothing, my lord.”
• Ophelia speak of Polonius and Hamlet in Madness: “he is dead and gone…before you tumbled me, you promised me to wed”
• Claudius: ‘oh this is the poison of deep grief, it springs all from her father’s death…poor Ophelia divided from herself and her fair judgement’
• Laertes: “dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia…whose worth…stood challenger on mount of all age for her perfections”
• Ophelia’s death: “fell in the weeping brook…incable of her own distress…her garments, heavy with their drink pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death” and as a result she only gets “maimed rites” as she “did with desperate hand fordo its own life”
• Funeral: “she is allow’d her virgin crants…fair and unpolluted flesh…I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife”

Question 4

Women as more staunchly loyal and moral than men

Answer 4

Gertrude’s awareness: “I doubt it is no other but the main: His father’s death and our o’erhasty marriage.”

Question 5

Don’t trust men, hamlet to Ophelia 3.1

Answer 5

’we are arrant knaves all, believe none of us’

Question 6

Hamlet to Ophelia 3.1 misogyny

Answer 6

‘Wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them’

Question 7

Hamlet’s misogynistic teasing of Ophelia

Answer 7

OPHELIA: ‘i think nothing my lord’ HAMLET: ‘That’s a fair thought to lie between a maid’s legs’