Even if Laertes fails to strike Hamlet, Claudius will offer Hamlet a drink from a poisoned goblet of wine. As the two are plotting, Gertrude enters the scene and relays the heart breaking news that Ophelia is dead.
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.
In the midst of her inner turmoil, her depression worsens as she learns that Hamlet, the man she loves departs to England. When she dies, Gertrude reports her death to Claudius and Laertes. Gertrude, The Queen of Denmark, is responsible for Ophelia's death.
Gertrude interrupts their plotting with her report of Ophelia's drowning. She describes the young woman's death graphically, explaining how she had fallen in the brook while weaving flower garlands; the willow tree branch on which she was sitting broke so that she tumbled into the water.
She wilfully disobeys Claudius by drinking the poisoned wine. She dies with cries of 'the drink! the drink! I am poisoned' (5.2. 264), and in so doing identifies Claudius as her killer.
Gertrude dies on-stage, accidentally poisoned by Claudius. Laertes dies on-stage, stabbed by his own poisoned blade.
O my dear Hamlet! The drink, the drink! I am poison'd. [Dies.]
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.
Ophelia's drowning is the consummate representation of an eternal retreat into the feminine, trading an individual voice for eternal silence in union with feminine essence. In turn, her death expresses the danger of reducing an individual to his or her gender and disregarding the voice of the marginalized.
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.
The main reason that Gertrude does not want to see Ophelia is because she (Gertrude) feels guilty over the fact that her son Hamlet killed Ophelia's father, Polonius, and because Polonius was buried quickly and without much formality.
Suddenly, the funeral procession for Ophelia enters the churchyard, including Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and many mourning courtiers. Hamlet, wondering who has died, notices that the funeral rites seem “maimed,” indicating that the dead man or woman took his or her own life (V.i.242).
The penultimate scene of the play begins with the two clowns digging a grave for the late Ophelia. They debate whether she should be allowed to have a Christian burial, because she committed suicide.
Ophelia. Indeed, la, without an oath, I'll make an end on't! Alack, and fie for shame!
Gertrude reveals a clue to her avoiding Ophelia when she says, "So full of artless jealousy is guilt, / It spills itself in fearing to be spilt." The guilt remains ambiguous.
tragic flaw was no other than the innocent desire for reconcilement and her too human need to avoid conflict.
Their particular form of madness was more related to hysteria -- an affliction which was considered to be particularly feminine. Clinically speaking, Ophelia's behavior and appearance are characteristic of the malady the Elizabethans would have diagnosed as female love-melancholy, or erotomania.
Background: Ophelia's syndrome is the association of Hodgkin's Lymphoma and memory loss, coined by Dr. Carr in 1982, while it's most remembered for the eponym in reminiscence of Shakespeare's character, Dr.
His verdict was, as is evident from the text, that Ophelia, like any other Catholic in good standing with the Church, was entitled to Christian burial, either because her death was accidental, or, if wilful and deliberate, was due to her insanity: and one bereft of reason is according to the teaching of the Church, ...
Gertrude's Loyalty to Hamlet
Despite all that happens, Gertrude chooses to remain loyal to Hamlet. At the end of act three, he reveals to Gertrude that he is only mad in craft, not for real, and he askes her not to sleep with Claudius anymore.
Hamlet delays killing Claudius because Claudius represents Hamlet's innermost desires to sleep with his mother Gertrude.
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.
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.
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.
Even the ghost of King Hamlet himself did not implicate Gertrude in the murder, but only asked Hamlet to “leave her to heaven and the pangs of her own conscience.” Queen Gertrude's lack of action and critical thinking prove her guilty not of King Hamlet's death, but indirectly guilty of each subsequent death within the ...