Hamlet (Vol. 35) | Baldwin Maxwell (essay date 1964)
Baldwin Maxwell (essay date 1964)
SOURCE: "Hamlet's Mother," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. XV, No. 3, Spring, 1964, pp. 235-46.
[In the following essay, Maxwell maintains that Gertrude is a passive character, dominated by Claudius until the final moments of the play.]
In an article entitled "The Character of Hamlet's Mother" (Shakespeare Quarterly, VIII (1957), 201-206), Miss Carolyn Heilbrun expressed strong disagreement with what had been the generally accepted estimate of Queen Gertrude. Seemingly unaware of the essay by Professor Draper1 , the Queen's most ardent defender, Miss Heilbrun wrote that "critics, with no exception that I have been able to find, have accepted Hamlet's word 'frailty' as applying to [Gertrude's] whole personality, and have seen in her … a character of which weakness and lack of depth and rigorous intelligence are the entire explanation" (p. 201). She, as had Professor Draper, rejected...
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