Gertrude
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: Queen of Denmark, widow of the late King Hamlet, wife to King Claudius, and mother to Prince Hamlet.
- Key Traits: Affectionate, adaptable, politically pragmatic, emotionally dependent, and morally ambiguous.
- The Core Conflict: Torn between her intense maternal love for her son and her romantic and political allegiance to her new husband, she is forced to watch her family tear itself apart.
- Key Actions: Marries her brother-in-law weeks after her husband's death; summons Rosencrantz & Guildenstern to spy on her son; confronts Hamlet in her closet; drinks the poisoned wine intended for the Prince.
- Famous Quote:
"O Hamlet, speak no more:
Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul;
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct."
(Act 3, Scene 4) - The Outcome: During the final fencing match, she disobeys Claudius and drinks from the poisoned cup to toast her son, dying moments before the King and Hamlet.
The Pragmatic Queen
Gertrude is frequently viewed through the deeply biased, misogynistic lens of her son, who equates her speedy remarriage with grotesque corruption. However, a more objective reading reveals a woman of political pragmatism. In the patriarchal world of Elsinore, a dowager queen has very little power. By marrying Claudius, Gertrude immediately secures her position, maintaining her status and ensuring stability in a kingdom threatened by foreign invasion.
Original
Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust...
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Remove, dear Hamlet, your black mourning clothes
And look like you're a friend of Denmark's king.
Don't permanently stare with sorry eyes
Towards the ground to seek your noble father.
Gertrude's plea to Hamlet is not inherently malicious; it is practical. She accepts mortality as a common, unavoidable reality ("all that lives must die") and urges her son to adapt to the new political landscape. She represents the necessity of moving forward, directly conflicting with Hamlet's obsession with the past and his father's Ghost.
Maternal Conflict and Blindness
Gertrude's primary tragedy lies in her divided loyalties. She genuinely loves Hamlet, frequently attempting to protect him and soothe his madness. Yet, she is willfully blind to the sinister reality of Claudius. She relies heavily on her husband to interpret the world for her, preferring a comfortable, deceptive peace over hard truths.
Original
I doubt it is no other but the main;
His father's death, and our o'erhasty marriage.
(Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I'm sure it's nothing more than what we know:
His father's death, and speed with which we wed.
In private, Gertrude displays sharp intuition. She correctly identifies the source of Hamlet's distress before Polonius or Claudius do. However, she lacks the agency to act on this intuition. She allows herself to be managed by the men around her, passively consenting to their plots out of an intense desire to avoid conflict.
The Turning Point in the Closet
The turning point for Gertrude occurs in her private chamber (the closet scene). Hamlet's violent verbal assault forces her to confront the moral implications of her marriage. For the first time, the comfortable illusion she has built around her new life is violently shattered.
Original
O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.
(Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh Hamlet, you have broke my heart in two.
Hamlet forces her to look upon the "counterfeit presentment of two brothers," demanding she recognise the vast difference between the noble King Hamlet and the corrupt Claudius. Her "cleft" heart perfectly symbolises her impossible position: split between a son demanding revenge and a husband offering security. Following this scene, her allegiance subtly shifts toward Hamlet, though she remains trapped in the King's court.
"Unable to explain her marriage to Claudius as the act of any but a weak-minded vacillating woman, they fail to see Gertrude for the strong-minded, intelligent, succinct, and, apart from this passion, sensible woman that she is."
— Carolyn Heilbrun, The Character of Hamlet's Mother, 1957
Key Quotes by Gertrude
Quote 1
O Hamlet, speak no more:
Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul;
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.
(Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh Hamlet, speak no more!
You're making me examine my own soul
And I'm observing grainy, blackened spots
That cannot be removed.
Quote Analysis: Stripped of her royal defences by Hamlet's brutal honesty, Gertrude experiences a profound moment of self-reflection. She acknowledges her moral failings and feels genuine guilt for the swiftness and nature of her remarriage, proving that she is not entirely without a conscience.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I think the lady witters on too much.
Quote Analysis: Watching the Player Queen swear never to remarry if her husband dies, Gertrude offers this iconic critique. It reveals her pragmatic approach to life and love. She finds the Player Queen's absolute, idealistic vows unrealistic and insincere, indirectly defending her own choice to remarry and move on.
There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come...
(Act 4, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
There is a leaning willow by a stream
Whose greying leaves reflect within the water;
She went there wearing lovely floral wreaths...
Quote Analysis: Gertrude's poetic narration of Ophelia's drowning serves to aestheticise the young girl's horrific death. By turning a tragic potential suicide into a beautiful, natural accident, Gertrude attempts to soften the harsh reality of Elsinore's brutality, acting as a mother figure to the girl who could have been her daughter-in-law.
No, no, the drink, the drink, – O my dear Hamlet, –
The drink, the drink! I am poisoned.
(Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh no, it was the drink! Oh my dear Hamlet!
The drink. The drink! I have been poisoned.
Quote Analysis: Her final words are a desperate warning to her son. Despite Claudius explicitly telling her not to drink from the cup, she defies him. In her dying breath, she exposes the King's treachery to Hamlet, choosing her son over her husband in the very end.
Key Takeaways
- The Pragmatic Survivor: Gertrude is not a villain; she is a woman navigating a dangerous, patriarchal society using the only tools available to her: marriage and compliance.
- The Ambiguity of Complicity: Shakespeare intentionally leaves her level of guilt regarding King Hamlet's murder ambiguous, making her one of the play's most complex and debated characters.
- The Source of Misogyny: Her hasty remarriage is the catalyst for Hamlet's deep-rooted disgust with gender and female sexuality, fundamentally poisoning his worldview.
- Maternal Redemption: Her final, fateful action – drinking the poisoned wine and warning Hamlet – serves as a redemptive sacrifice, proving her ultimate loyalty lay with her son.
Study Questions and Analysis
Was Gertrude complicit in the murder of King Hamlet?
The play's evidence is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of dramatic ambiguity in Shakespeare. The answer depends on which piece of evidence you give priority to.
The case for innocence is substantial. The Ghost's instructions in A1S5 separate Claudius from Gertrude with structural precision.
Leave her to heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,
To prick and sting her.
(Act 1, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Leave her to God,
And let her actions dig into her heart,
Like thorns that prick and sting.
The Ghost is the only character in the play who actually knows what happened in the orchard. He explicitly excludes Gertrude from the revenge mandate. He suggests she has a "fighting soul" that her own conscience will punish without external intervention. He treats her offence throughout the scene as remarriage rather than murder.
The A3S4 closet scene confirms the pattern. When Hamlet accuses her of having killed a king ("almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king, and marry with his brother"), Gertrude's response – "As kill a king!" – sounds, in most productions, like genuine shock. The performance choice matters. Either she knew, in which case her response is dissembling, or she didn't, in which case her response is the first evidence that Hamlet's accusations have access to information she has been kept from. The Ghost's return later in the same scene confirms the second reading: "But, look, amazement on thy mother sits: / O, step between her and her fighting soul:" – language that names her continuing astonishment as a moral fact rather than a performance.
The interpretive tradition has divided.
A. C. Bradley's 1904 reading argued that Gertrude was not part of the murder but had probably committed adultery with Claudius before it. J. Dover Wilson's 1935 What Happens in Hamlet developed the pre-murder adultery argument more directly.
Carolyn Heilbrun's 1957 feminist intervention – the source of the pull-quote on this page – rejected both readings. Heilbrun argued that the critical tradition's investment in making Gertrude guilty tells us more about male critical imagination than about anything in the play's text.
The Elizabethan category of "incest" the play deploys may not even require pre-existing sexual contact. A marriage between a widow and her brother-in-law was, by the period's canon law (Leviticus 20:21), a marriage in the prohibited degree of kinship. The play's "incestuous" framing names this rather than necessarily an earlier affair.
Shakespeare leaves the question open. Modern productions can position Gertrude anywhere on the complicity spectrum: as full-knowledge accessory (Branagh's 1996 film), as ambiguous semi-knowledge (most modern stage productions), or as wholly innocent (the Heilbrun-derived feminist tradition). The play's text permits all three readings, and the openness is itself one of Shakespeare's most pointed pieces of writing on the difficulty of assigning moral responsibility within marriage arrangements whose secret history the wife may or may not have known.
Why does Gertrude marry Claudius so quickly?
The "within a month" timeline that Hamlet's A1S2 soliloquy makes the play's central scandal is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of dramatic scandal in Shakespeare. The answer to why Gertrude went ahead works on several levels at once.
The political level is clear. Denmark, in the play's A1S2 opening, is an elective monarchy facing an immediate military threat. Fortinbras of Norway has been mobilising forces against the kingdom, and the throne needs an adult male occupant capable of mounting a credible response.
The dowager queen's remarriage to her brother-in-law is, in the period's political language, one of the most direct ways a widowed queen can convert her late husband's authority into the new king's mandate while keeping her own position as queen consort. The alternative is reduction to the politically marginal status of dowager.
A. C. Bradley's 1904 reading emphasised the personal level. Gertrude is, on Bradley's reading, a woman of strong sexual attachment whose marriage to Claudius reflects genuine desire rather than purely calculated political manoeuvring. The A3S3 soliloquy from Claudius confirms the feeling is mutual. Gertrude is one of the three "effects" Claudius can't surrender, alongside the crown and the ambition. The original murder was driven partly by sexual desire for the brother's wife.
The 1957 Heilbrun reading complicates the conventional account by questioning the "incest" framing the play repeatedly uses.
By Elizabethan canon law, a marriage between a widow and her late husband's brother fell within the prohibited degree of kinship as defined by Leviticus 20:21 – the same passage that had organised Henry VIII's eventual divorce from Catherine of Aragon, the brother's widow he had been granted papal dispensation to marry. So the framing of Gertrude's marriage as "incestuous" isn't the play's eccentric invention. It's the period's canonical category for any marriage within prohibited kinship, regardless of whether the parties shared blood relation.
Shakespeare keeps all three levels in play at once. Gertrude's remarriage is, by the play's evidence, politically rational (preserving her queen consort status, providing the kingdom with an adult male monarch who can handle the Norwegian threat), personally affectionate (the A4S5 and A4S7 scenes confirm the marriage operates within genuine intimacy), and canonically scandalous (the prohibited degree of kinship producing the period's "incestuous" label).
The speed of the remarriage is the mechanism that makes all three visible at once. Without the speed, the marriage would be unremarkable politically, the affection would be normal, and the canonical scandal would have been processed through the usual dispensation channels. With the speed, the marriage becomes the play's central piece of evidence on the difficulty of separating political pragmatism from personal desire from moral transgression. Three categories the play insists on holding together rather than separating into their conventional moral hierarchy.
How does Hamlet's view of Gertrude affect his behaviour towards other women?
The A1S2 soliloquy is the mechanism by which Hamlet's specific grief at his mother gets converted into a general framework that then colours every encounter he has with women. The generalisation comes in a single phrase – "Frailty, thy name is woman!" (A1S2). Hamlet's universe has, by the time he meets the Ghost, already been organised around Gertrude's hasty remarriage. The "frailty" generalisation converts the particular case into the universal claim. The female figures Hamlet encounters from this point on – primarily Ophelia, but also the Player Queen – are received through this generalised framework rather than on their individual terms.
The A3S1 nunnery scene is the clearest evidence of the displacement. Hamlet's interactions with Ophelia operate by direct transfer of his disgust at Gertrude onto a figure who has done nothing to deserve it. In the nunnery scene he tells Ophelia that she would be better off as the "breeder of sinners" only inside a convent, and that his own faults are bad enough that "it were better my mother had not borne me." The reference to his mother is exact. Hamlet's cruelty to Ophelia is being routed through the maternal figure whose perceived betrayal has organised his worldview.
The "Get thee to a nunnery" instruction, repeated five times across the scene, deploys the Elizabethan slang sense of "nunnery" – brothel – alongside the conventional religious sense. The cruelty depends on both meanings being heard.
The A3S2 Mousetrap scene develops the misogyny in a more public register. Hamlet's cruel jokes to Ophelia during the play – "Lady, shall I lie in your lap?" and the increasingly pointed sexual innuendo that follows – operate as a public version of the private cruelty he has delivered in A3S1. The function is to humiliate Ophelia in front of the court while extracting the maximum theatrical pressure on Gertrude that the Player Queen's vows can produce.
The A3S4 closet scene returns to the source. Hamlet's confrontation with Gertrude operates at an unsettlingly sexual register. His obsession with her bed, his demand that she "go not to mine uncle's bed," his repeated return to her physical relationship with Claudius – none of this is the conventional son-mother relationship.
The feminist critical tradition has named the mechanism.
Ernest Jones's 1949 Hamlet and Oedipus developed Freud's earlier psychoanalytic note. Hamlet's relationship with Gertrude is Oedipal. His treatment of Ophelia is the displacement of the unspeakable maternal attachment onto a more acceptable female target.
Janet Adelman's 1992 chapter "Man and Wife Is One Flesh: Hamlet and the Confrontation with the Maternal Body" (in Suffocating Mothers) developed the reading in a feminist register. Hamlet's inability to separate his own male identity from the maternal body that produced him generates the misogynistic framework. The cost is paid by the one female character in the play whose innocence has been firmly established.
Elaine Showalter's 1985 essay "Representing Ophelia" extended the argument. Ophelia's destruction by Hamlet's cruelty is the play's most exposed piece of evidence on the cost of male psychological turmoil paid by the women around it.
What does "The lady doth protest too much" mean in context?
The line is one of the most quoted in Shakespeare and one of the most consistently misunderstood. The reason is a shift in what "protest" means.
The setup is exact. Hamlet has commissioned the visiting players to perform "The Murder of Gonzago" with inserted material designed to test Claudius's guilt. The inserted material includes a scene in which the Player Queen, anticipating her husband's death, swears that she will never remarry under any circumstances.
Such love must needs be treason in my breast:
In second husband let me be accurst!
None wed the second but who killed the first.
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Remarrying is treason of my heart!
Damn me if my own vows I have reversed;
No one reweds unless they've killed the first.
The vow is aimed at Gertrude. Hamlet's theatrical project in the scene is double. He's testing Claudius via the murder reconstruction, but he's also pressuring Gertrude via the Player Queen's model of an alternative widow. The Player Queen represents the marital fidelity Gertrude has, by Hamlet's framing, betrayed. The inserted vows operate as the moral indictment of his mother's remarriage delivered through theatrical proxy.
Gertrude's response – "The lady doth protest too much, methinks" – has been misread for four centuries because the Elizabethan sense of "protest" has shifted.
In Shakespeare's English, "protest" meant primarily "to vow," "to declare emphatically," "to swear." Not, as in modern English, "to object." Gertrude isn't saying the Player Queen is objecting too vigorously. She's saying the Player Queen is making too many vows. The Player Queen's declarations of eternal fidelity are excessive to the point of becoming theatrically implausible.
The line operates as a piece of literary criticism delivered by Gertrude on the theatrical scene Hamlet has constructed. The function is exact. Hamlet has aimed his theatrical weapon at his mother and expected her to receive the inserted material as a moral indictment of her remarriage. Gertrude has instead received it as bad drama. The Player Queen's vows register as theatrical excess rather than as a moral standard.
Carolyn Heilbrun's 1957 reading names the mechanism. Gertrude's response is one of the play's clearest pieces of evidence on her psychological resilience and the intelligence the critical tradition has consistently denied her. In a single line, she has deflected the most carefully constructed theatrical assault in the play.
The dramatic irony is that the play has actually been right about the underlying problem. Vows of eternal fidelity in widowhood are theatrically excessive precisely because no one keeps them. Gertrude is the play's clearest evidence of the historical accuracy of that cynical observation. The Player Queen's vows are the kind of thing widows say at the funeral and stop saying within the month. Hamlet has constructed his theatrical weapon out of a moral standard the world doesn't actually hold to. Gertrude's literary-critical response is, however accidentally, the deepest evidence in the play of the difficulty of indicting widows for behaviour that is, on closer examination, more common than the moralising framework permits.
Does Gertrude actually see the Ghost in Act 3, Scene 4?
The A3S4 closet scene apparition is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of dramaturgical ambiguity in Shakespeare. Keeping the Ghost visible to Hamlet alone is one of the play's most pointed theatrical decisions.
The contrast with the earlier ghost scenes is exact.
In A1S1, the Ghost appears to Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo – three independent witnesses who can corroborate its existence and its physical appearance before Hamlet has even been alerted to its presence. In A1S4 and A1S5, the Ghost is visible to Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus simultaneously. The arrangement establishes that the Ghost is, by the play's evidence, an objectively present supernatural entity rather than Hamlet's private hallucination.
The A3S4 scene reverses the arrangement. The Ghost appears to Hamlet but not to Gertrude. Gertrude's response is the evidence on the change: "Nothing at all; yet all that is I see." (A3S4).
The first reading the scene permits is that the Ghost has chosen, for thematic reasons, to be visible only to Hamlet.
The argument for this reading is that the Ghost's mission in A3S4 is exact. He is, by his own self-presentation, returning to "whet thy almost blunted purpose" – to chastise Hamlet for the delay in carrying out revenge and to redirect his attention away from the maternal confrontation that has been distracting him. The Ghost's specific instruction is to step between Gertrude and her own troubled conscience – to manage her distress rather than enlist her in addressing his own grievance. The logic is exact. A Ghost visible only to the avenger is a Ghost whose mission stays the avenger's alone.
The second reading the scene permits is more destabilising. The Ghost may, by A3S4, have become Hamlet's hallucination – the externalisation of his obsession with paternal revenge rather than the objective supernatural presence the earlier scenes had established.
The argument for this reading is that Hamlet's mental state has, by A3S4, been substantially destabilised. He has just killed Polonius behind the arras in an act of impulsive misdirection. His confrontation with Gertrude operates at an unsettlingly sexual register that the conventional son-mother relationship would not produce. The question is whether the Ghost has, in A3S4, become the symptom of Hamlet's deteriorating mind rather than a supernatural visitation.
Shakespeare keeps the question deliberately open.
Stephen Greenblatt's 2001 Hamlet in Purgatory developed the theological-historical reading. The Ghost's progressive private-ising across the play tracks the Reformation's progressive privatising of supernatural experience – from the publicly verified apparitions of the medieval Catholic tradition to the increasingly subjective inner visions of post-Reformation Protestant spirituality. The A3S4 ghost may, on Greenblatt's reading, be neither objectively present nor hallucinated. It may be operating right on the fault-line where the categories the period's framework would have used to distinguish the two have stopped working.
Modern productions stage the scene variously. Some give the Ghost full visual presence, with Gertrude failing to see what the audience and Hamlet see. Some leave the Ghost wholly off-stage, with Hamlet performing toward empty space. Some compromise with partial visual effects that suggest the indeterminacy itself.
How does Gertrude's description of Ophelia's death serve the play?
The A4S7 "willow grows aslant a brook" speech is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of aestheticised description in Shakespeare. Its function in the play works at several levels the surface beauty of the writing doesn't always make explicit.
The structural problem the speech addresses is exact. Ophelia has, by A4S7, drowned offstage. The audience hasn't seen the death. The play needs a way to report the death to Laertes (on stage with Claudius at the moment Gertrude enters) and to the audience without resorting to a conventional messenger's report. Shakespeare gives the report to Gertrude in a poetic register rather than a factual one. The resulting speech is one of the most distinctive pieces of writing in the play.
The irony is exact. Gertrude was not, by any textual evidence, present at the drowning. She can't, on any realistic reading, have witnessed the events the speech describes. The detailed account of the "fantastic garlands," the "Mermaid-like" floating, the "snatches of old tunes" Ophelia sang as the water gradually pulled her down – all of this is imaginative reconstruction rather than eyewitness testimony. The speech is, by the play's evidence, Gertrude's poetic creation. A piece of literary imagination addressed to the problem of how to make a brother and a kingdom mourn a death they haven't witnessed.
The aestheticisation has direct theological consequences. The A5S1 gravediggers' scene confirms the function. The priest performing Ophelia's burial complains that her funeral rites have been "enlarged" beyond what would normally be permitted for a "doubtful" death – that is, a probable suicide. The Coroner's verdict, on the gravediggers' account, has been politically managed: "the crowner hath sat on her, and finds it Christian burial" (A5S1).
Gertrude's poetic account of the drowning has provided the political-theological cover for the Christian burial that suicide would, by canonical rule, have prevented. By framing the death as a tragic accident – Ophelia carried away by the broken willow branch rather than choosing to drown – the speech allows the religious authorities to extend the burial rites that Ophelia's position as a noblewoman of the family requires.
The maternal register confirms the function. Gertrude's earlier exchange with Laertes – "I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife" (A5S1, at the grave) – names the relationship the speech has been protecting. Ophelia is the daughter-in-law Gertrude might have had. The aestheticisation of her death is the protective gesture of the maternal figure who has, in death, been able to extend the protection she had been unable to provide in life.
Carolyn Heilbrun's 1957 reading notes the shift in Gertrude's characteristic style. Throughout the play, Gertrude's speech is, on Heilbrun's analysis, pithy and concise – "succinct," in the formulation the pull-quote on this page preserves. The willow speech is the most direct exception. The shift into extended poetic register is itself the evidence of the genuine grief the speech is processing. Gertrude has moved out of her characteristic mode precisely because the protective function the speech is performing requires the elaborated literary register that the realistic-political register can't supply.
Why does she drink the poisoned wine in the final scene?
The A5S2 cup is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of structural ambiguity in the play. The question of whether Gertrude knows what she's drinking is the play's final piece of evidence on the trajectory the closet scene initiated.
The setup is exact. Claudius has, in A4S7, set up a triple-redundant plot to kill Hamlet: an unbated sword, a poison-tipped sword, and a poisoned cup. The poisoned cup is the third backup, intended to operate if the swords fail. The A5S2 fencing match has been arranged as the public theatre in which the plot will be executed. Gertrude has been present throughout the preceding scene as Claudius's apparent partner in the celebratory occasion.
The pivotal moment comes when Gertrude lifts the cup to toast Hamlet's success in the fencing exchange. Claudius's response is exact: "Gertrude, do not drink." Gertrude's response is equally exact: "I will, my lord; I pray you, pardon me." (A5S2).
The line is one of the most carefully calibrated pieces of dialogue in the play. The "I will, my lord" is Gertrude's first explicit verbal defiance of Claudius.
Throughout the preceding four acts, she has consistently deferred to his political and emotional management. In A1S2 she has supported his framing of Hamlet's "obstinate condolement." In A2S2 she has summoned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at his request. In A4S5 she has managed Ophelia's mad scene at his direction. In A4S7 she has confided in him about Hamlet's return. The A5S2 cup is the first occasion on which her stated will moves explicitly against his stated instruction.
The interpretive question is what she knows in that moment.
The most direct reading is that she doesn't know the cup is poisoned but has, since the A3S4 closet scene, sufficiently distrusted Claudius to override his attempts at marital management on the principle that whatever he doesn't want her to do is, by inference, something she ought to do.
The alternative reading is that she has, by A5S2, drawn the inference. Claudius has produced the cup. Claudius has dropped a "union" pearl into it. Claudius has now urgently told her not to drink. The cumulative evidence may have produced, in Gertrude, the recognition that the cup is one of the mechanisms of the plot her son is being subjected to. The decision to drink is the decision to take the poison herself rather than let it reach Hamlet.
On this reading, Gertrude's death is a maternal sacrifice rather than a tragic accident. The A3S4 closet scene's promise extends, on the sacrificial reading, to include the cup itself.
Be thou assured, if words be made of breath,
And breath of life, I have no life to breathe
What thou hast said to me.
(Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh, rest assured, if words are made of breath
And breath is made of life, I'm not alive
Enough to breathe the words that you have told me.
The dying speech confirms the significance regardless of which reading is preferred. Her last words – the urgent warning about the drink, addressed to Hamlet rather than to Claudius – are the public exposure of the King's treachery that Hamlet has, until this moment, been unable to produce. The woman whose hasty remarriage has organised the play's misogynistic framework has, by her death, produced the mechanism by which her son's revenge can finally be carried out with both the public sanction the regicide requires and the personal motivation the family tragedy demands.
