Women’s Roles

By: Josh, Anthony, and Jeshad

 What does Gertrude say about Ophelia?

“When down her weedy trophies and herself / Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread

wide; / And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up: / Which time she chanted snatches of old

tunes; / As one incapable of her own distress, / Or like a creature native and indued / Unto that

element: but long it could not be / Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, / Pull'd the poor

wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death” (Act 4 Scene 7).
 How Claudius describes Gertrude

“Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen, / Th' imperial jointress to this warlike

state, / Have we—as ’twere with a defeated joy, / With an auspicious and a dropping

eye, / With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, / In equal scale weighing delight

and dole— / Taken to wife. Nor have we herein barred / Your better wisdoms, which have

freely gone / With this affair along. For all, our thanks / Now follows that you know…”
 How King Hamlet Treated Gertrude

“So loving to my mother / That he might not beteem the winds of heaven /

Visit her face too roughly.—Heaven and earth, / Must I remember? Why, she

would hang on him / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed

on…”
 Hamlet’s Description of Gertrude

“O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer!—married

with my / uncle, My father’s brother, but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules.

Within 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! It is not nor it cannot come to good”

 Ophelia’s Purpose Within Hamlet

“My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,/ Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced;/ No

hat upon his head; his stockings foul’d,/ Ungarter’d, and down-gyved to his ancle;/ Pale

as his shirt; his knees knocking each other;/ And with a look so piteous in purport/ As if

he had been loosed out of hell/ To speak of horrors, – he comes before me.”
 How Hecuba Relates to Gertrude

“O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!/ Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in

a fiction, in a dream of passion,/ Could force his soul so to his own conceit… With forms

to his conceit-and all for nothing!/ For Hecuba!/ What’s Hecuba to him, or he to

[Hecuba]/ that he should weep for her? What would he do/ Had he the motive and [the

cue] for passion/ That I have?”