Hamlet (Vol. 71) | James W. Stone (essay date 1995)
James W. Stone (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: Stone, James W. “Androgynous ‘Union’ and the Women in Hamlet.” Shakespeare Studies 23 (1995): 71-99.
[In the following essay, Stone studies Shakespeare's representation of androgyny in Hamlet, and finds that the collapse of sexual difference in the play leads to a parallel disintegration of moral boundaries.]
Some wish to see in Hamlet a womanish, hesitating, flighty mind. To me he seems a manly, resolute, but thoughtful being.
I cannot see Hamlet as a man. The things he says, his impulses, his actions entirely indicate to me that he was a woman.
—Sarah Bernhardt
Hamlet has proven to be an interpretive mystery for critics interested in gender, a play whose proverbial excess of meaning has led some critics to gender the excess and the mystery of the text itself as feminine. Since the problem of...
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