Hamlet (Vol. 35) | Rebecca Smith (essay date 1980)
Rebecca Smith (essay date 1980)
SOURCE: "A Heart Cleft in Twain: The Dilemma of Shakespeare's Gertrude," in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely, eds., 1980, pp. 194-208.
[In the essay that follows, Smith contends that Shakespeare's Gertrude is not lascivious or deceitful, but rather submissive, compliant, nurturing, and caught in the struggle between her two loves, Hamlet and Claudius.]
Gertrude, in Shakespeare's Hamlet, has traditionally been played as a sensual, deceitful woman. Indeed, in a play in which the characters' words, speeches, acts, and motives have been examined and explained in myriad ways, the depiction of Gertrude has been remarkably consistent, as a woman in whom "compulsive ardure … actively doth burn, / And reason [panders] will" (III.iv. 86-88).1 Gertrude prompts violent physical and emotional reactions from the...
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