A Marriage Built upon Lust
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.”
159-60). 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.
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.
The reader quickly learns that Hamlet is upset with his mother because she married Hamlet's uncle instead of grieving for his father. Hamlet sees it as an act of betrayal. Throughout the book, Hamlet develops a plan of revenge for the death of his father, the king.
Instead, Gertrude's love for Claudius creates a thrilling twist to the closet scene in which he is revealed as a murderer. The final Act, in which she is clearly aware that the wine is poisoned, sees her sacrifice herself to save Hamlet. This is the tragic pinnacle of the production, and shapes its remaining moments.
She married less than two months after the death of Old Hamlet. And while Hamlet's father was "Hyperion," a sun-god, King Claudius is another kind of mythical creature, a "satyr," an oversexed half-goat.
Gertrude and Claudius, a John Updike novel, serves as a prequel to the events of the play. It follows Gertrude from her wedding to King Hamlet, through an affair with Claudius, and its murderous results, until the very beginning of the play.
Hamlet sees the ghost of his father. The ghost tells him that it was his brother Claudius, the new king, who killed him and commands Hamlet to get revenge. Hamlet has been behaving strangely and Claudius asks Hamlet's childhood friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to find out why.
This is very subtle and brief. There is an implied incestuous relationship between Hamlet and his mother in this film's interpretation of the play. They kiss in such a way that implies more than filial love and he even briefly mimes sexual intercourse at one point. This is subtle.
Gertrude, seeing Hamlet talk to a ghost that she herself can't see, thinks he really has lost his mind. Hamlet threatens his mother and tells her that he knows Claudius is plotting against him, but that the king will get his just desserts in the end.
In her defense, as a woman, Gertrude likely felt pressure to remarry, especially in a position as queen of Denmark. She cares deeply for Hamlet. Still, her loyalty lies most closely with Claudius, not Hamlet, as she defers to any decision made by Claudius on Hamlet's behalf.
Gertrude betrays Hamlet and the late King Hamlet by marrying Claudius. Hamlet, being still depressed about his father's death was further upset and felt betrayed by his mother when she quickly married Claudius. By marrying her former husband's brother, she also betrayed the late King Hamlet.
Saying that he is the spirit of Hamlet's father, he demands that Hamlet avenge King Hamlet's murder at the hands of Claudius. Hamlet, horrified, vows to “remember” and swears his friends to secrecy about what they have seen.
The ghost exhorts Hamlet to seek revenge, telling him that Claudius has corrupted Denmark and corrupted Gertrude, having taken her from the pure love of her first marriage and seduced her in the foul lust of their incestuous union.
Shakespeare ensures that Hamlet does avenge his father in the end.
Hamlet is cruel to Ophelia because he has transferred his anger at Gertrude's marriage to Claudius onto Ophelia. In fact, Hamlet's words suggest that he transfers his rage and disgust for his mother onto all women. He says to Ophelia, “God has given you one face and you make yourselves another.
In Sigmund Freud's concept, which Shakespeare was familiar with, it is proposed in Hamlet that he and his mother kiss because Hamlet no longer wants to allow his mother to sleep with Claudius.
One moment he says 'I did love you once', the next 'I loved you not'. He goes on to insult Ophelia and tells her to go to a nunnery. He tells her that this will be the best place for her and, by being a nun, Ophelia won't have children and produce wicked men like his uncle.
Gertrude is just a mother, trying to protect his son from being hurt. In the final scene of the play, Gertrude drinks the poisoned wine that Claudius has prepared for Hamlet. Even though Claudius tells Gertrude not to drink, Gertrude does it for his son.
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.
Hamlet reconfirms his sincere love for Ophelia at her death bed. He calls her “Fair Ophelia” (Act 5, scene 1, 228), implying he sees her as pure and virtuous. A real madness replaces a fake one. Hamlet proclaims that “forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum.”
The intimate mother-son relationship is revealed in the film primarily through the kisses that Hamlet and Gertrude exchange. This occurs once at the beginning of the film in a semi-close-up camera shot when the queen asks her son to stay at Elsinore.
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.
The last words Hamlet speaks are to his friend Horatio: "The rest is silence." These words were crucial to audiences at the time because they provided a sense of ease in death and the afterlife. Hearing that Hamlet could now rest in peace for avenging his father's death meant he was no longer suffering.