Gertrude is Hamlet's mother and Queen of Denmark. She was married to the murdered King Hamlet (represented by the Ghost in the play) and has subsequently wed Claudius, his brother. Her close relationships to the central male characters mean that she is a key figure within the narrative.
Therefore, marrying Claudius was possibly the only way for Gertrude to keep the crown in the same family and give Hamlet a chance to be a king but also delay his ascension to the throne. This scheme works only with the assumption that Gertrude loves her son.
In William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Gertrude is Hamlet's mother and Queen of Denmark. Her relationship with Hamlet is somewhat turbulent, since he resents her marrying her husband's brother Claudius after he murdered the king (young Hamlet's father, King Hamlet).
Claudius's love for Gertrude may be sincere, but it also seems likely that he married her as a strategic move, to help him win the throne away from Hamlet after the death of the king.
Gertrude marries Claudius two months after the death of her husband. Hamlet believes that is too short for mourning and his famous charge forms in this context: “Frailty, thy name is woman.”
Gertrude describes her love for Hamlet when she asks him not to return to Wittenberg. When she shares with Ophelia her hope that the young woman would have married her Hamlet, she divulges her wish for his happiness. However, she never declares any kind of emotion for Claudius, either positive or negative.
Even though Hamlet lashes out at her with all the rage he can muster, Gertrude remains faithful to him, protecting him fron the King. And, although her love for Claudius is wrong by moral standards, she is now his queen, and remains loyal to him.
Hamlet delays killing Claudius because Claudius represents Hamlet's innermost desires to sleep with his mother Gertrude.
But other interpretations, in both stage productions and paintings, suggest Gertrude's guilty knowledge of the murder, and Hamlet suspects her as well as Claudius; Hamlet's "mousetrap" therefore sets out to capture the conscience of a king and a queen.
In Laurence Olivier's film adaptation of Hamlet, Gertrude drinks knowingly, presumably to save her son from certain death. If she drinks on purpose, then she's the self-sacrificing mother Hamlet has always wanted her to be.
Hamlet is made to change his perception of love after his mother marries his late father's brother, two months after the death of his father (Shakespeare I. ii. 138). As a result, Hamlet concludes that his father truly loved his mother, yet his mother never loved him.
Laertes must have been clued in to Ophelia's pregnancy. Polonius inadvertently admits to such a claim. Polonius's knowledge is revealed when Hamlet discloses that he knows Ophelia, his lady love might be pregnant. Check out the words that Hamlet uses when he confronts Polonious.
It would have been risky for Shakespeare directly to portray pre-marital sex between aristocratic characters, but Hamlet gives us reasons to suspect that at some point before the beginning of the play, Hamlet and Ophelia have had sex.
After the death of her husband, Queen Gertrude quickly marries Claudius, her late husband's brother. She demonstrates that she never did truly love her husband, but rather that she only wanted to remain in her powerful position and have a male figure to depend on.
Because he was in love with her. The fact that she was “the imperial jointress to our warlike state”(Act I, scene 2) and thus secured his claim to the throne was also, no doubt, quite a bonus. Claudius loves Gertrude more than anything, except himself.
In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the general scholarly consensus is no, the Queen does not know that Claudius killed Hamlet's father until Hamlet tells her.
Gertrude dies on-stage, accidentally poisoned by Claudius. Laertes dies on-stage, stabbed by his own poisoned blade.
Gertrude's betrayal of her son was caused by Claudius, as he comforted her after her husband's unfortunate demise, and later married her, this was betrayal to Hamlet because he had a very high opinion of his father and thought very little of his uncle, Hamlet said “-married with my uncle, / My father's brother, but no ...
tragic flaw was no other than the innocent desire for reconcilement and her too human need to avoid conflict.
He urges her as well not to reveal to Claudius that his madness has been an act. Gertrude, still shaken from Hamlet's furious condemnation of her, agrees to keep his secret.
Gertrude reveals no guilt in her marriage with Claudius after the recent murder of her husband, and Hamlet begins to show signs of jealousy towards Claudius. According to Hamlet, she scarcely mourned her husband's death before marrying Claudius.
While she does keep her promise not to reveal that Hamlet was only pretending to be insane, the immediate and frank way in which she tells Claudius about Hamlet's behavior and his murder of Polonius implies that she sees herself as allied to the king rather than to her son.
Also, Gertrude reports Ophelia's death in one of the most lovely, poignant, poetic speeches in all of Shakespeare. She uses nature, water, and flower imagery to show how she is now free of the cruel human world.
At Ophelia's next appearance, after her father's death, she has gone mad, due to what the other characters interpret as grief for her father. She talks in riddles and rhymes, and sings some "mad" and bawdy songs about death and a maiden losing her virginity. She exits after bidding everyone a "good night".
Claudius is the primary antagonist in Hamlet. He thwarts Hamlet by killing his father.