Shakespearean Criticism | 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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