Gender and Power
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: How power in Elsinore is held by men and used to control women, and how little room the two women in the play are given to act on their own behalf.
- Key Characters: Gertrude, Ophelia, Prince Hamlet, Polonius, Laertes.
- The Core Tension: Gertrude and Ophelia are watched, instructed and judged by the men around them. Neither is allowed a private life that is not also the property of a father, a brother, a husband or a son.
- Key Manifestations: Laertes and Polonius warning Ophelia about her chastity in Act 1; the nunnery scene in Act 3; Hamlet's attack on female "paintings" and faces; the policing of Gertrude's remarriage; Ophelia's broken speech and death.
- Famous Quote:
"Frailty, thy name is woman!"
(Act 1, Scene 2) - The Outcome: Both women are destroyed. Ophelia loses her reason and drowns; Gertrude dies drinking a cup meant for her son. Neither death is something either woman chose.
The Daughter Under Instruction
Before Ophelia has spoken more than a few lines, she is being told what to feel. Her brother Laertes, on the point of leaving for France, takes the time to warn her against Hamlet's affection. The warning is not really about Hamlet. It is about her, and about the value the household places on her chastity.
Original
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Ophelia, be careful, my dear sister,
And keep affections under your control
Away from carnal instincts of desire.
The language is military – "the rear," "the shot and danger" – as though Ophelia's own feelings were an enemy position she has to hold a line against. Desire is treated as a threat to be managed, and the person doing the managing is her brother. When their father Polonius arrives, the instruction only hardens. He tells her she does not understand her own situation, that Hamlet's vows are counterfeit, and that she must value herself more highly – which in practice means valuing the family's name. In A1S3 Ophelia is lectured by two men in a single scene, and at the end of it she has agreed to obey both. The daughter's role in this house is to be advised, corrected and directed. Her own judgement is never asked for.
The Nunnery and the Policing of the Female Body
The pressure placed on Ophelia turns cruel in Act 3. Knowing he is being watched, Hamlet rounds on her in a scene that begins as a conversation about returned love-tokens and becomes a sustained attack on women in general. The repeated command – "to a nunnery" – is doubled-edged: a nunnery is a place of chastity, but "nunnery" was also Elizabethan slang for a brothel. Either way, the instruction is to remove herself from the world of marriage and children.
Original
Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Resettle in a convent! Why become a mother of more sinners?
What makes the scene so painful is that Ophelia is being punished for a corruption that is not hers. Hamlet's disgust began with his mother's remarriage, and it spills onto the nearest available woman. He moves from Ophelia's particular case to a blanket charge against female deceit – the painted face that hides a true one, the woman who "makes herself another." The female body becomes, in his mouth, a thing to be distrusted on principle. Ophelia, who has done nothing but obey her father, absorbs the full weight of a contempt she did not earn. She leaves the stage believing the man she loved has lost his mind, and grieving for it.
The Wife Defined by Her Sexuality
If Ophelia is policed as a daughter, Gertrude is policed as a wife. The play gives her very little private speech, and almost everything said about her is said by men measuring her against a standard of marital and sexual conduct. Hamlet's first soliloquy reduces her remarriage to its speed and its appetite, and the word he reaches for – "frailty" – is offered not as her flaw alone but as the defining weakness of her entire sex.
Her one moment of sustained attention comes during "The Mousetrap," when Hamlet has the player-queen swear undying loyalty to her first husband. Gertrude's dry reply is one of the few lines in which she comments on her own situation.
Original
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I think the lady witters on too much.
The line is sharper than it first appears. Gertrude is watching a performance staged to indict her, and her response is cool, observant and entirely composed. She does not flinch and she does not confess. For a character so often dismissed as weak, it is a moment of real self-possession – and it is almost the only time the play lets her assess a situation in her own words rather than be assessed in someone else's.
The Closet Scene and the Limits of the Mother
The play's most direct confrontation between a man and a woman is the closet scene in Act 3, where Hamlet corners his mother and forces her to look at her remarriage through his eyes. He compares the two kings, accuses her of lust, and presses until she begs him to stop. The scene is often read as Hamlet finally telling the truth – but it is also a son seizing the right to judge his mother's marriage and her desire.
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.
Gertrude's surrender here is total. She admits her guilt, promises to keep Hamlet's secret, and from this point becomes an instrument of the very men who have judged her. The power in the scene is never hers. She can be wounded, she can repent, she can obey – but she cannot turn the moral examination back on the son who has appointed himself her judge. The same pattern governs both women: a man defines the terms, and the woman's only available move is to comply. It is worth noting how little either woman is permitted to want for herself, and how completely the play's tragedy closes over them both.
"Deprived of thought, sexuality, and language, Ophelia's story becomes the Story of O—the zero, the empty circle or mystery of feminine difference, the cipher of female sexuality to be deciphered by feminist interpretation."
— Elaine Showalter, Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism, 1985
Key Quotes on Gender and Power
Quote 1
I shall obey, my lord.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I will obey you, lord.
Quote Analysis: Four words, and they tell the whole story of Ophelia's position. This is her reply to Polonius after he has ordered her to stop seeing Hamlet. There is no argument, no question, no plea – simply assent. The line is grammatically tiny but dramatically enormous, because it shows obedience as Ophelia's default setting. She has been raised to take instruction from the men of her family, and she gives it without resistance. Everything that goes wrong for her later flows from a household in which a daughter's first duty is to obey.
Which are not sterling. Tender yourself more dearly;...
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
For they’re not real. Think better of yourself,...
Quote Analysis: Polonius speaks to his daughter in the language of money. Hamlet's vows are coins that are "not sterling" – counterfeit currency – and Ophelia must "tender" herself, hold herself at a higher price. The metaphor is revealing. To Polonius, his daughter is a commodity whose value is her reputation, and his job is to protect that value until it can be spent advantageously. Affection does not enter the calculation. The scene shows how completely a woman's worth, in this world, is measured by men in terms of what she is worth to them.
God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another...
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
God gave you one face, but you paint another.
Quote Analysis: Here Hamlet's private disgust becomes a general theory of women. Cosmetics – "paintings" – become evidence of a deeper female falseness: the woman who paints a second face over the one God gave her is, in his logic, deceitful by nature. The charge is aimed at Ophelia but indicts all women, and it borrows the period's commonplace suspicion of make-up as moral counterfeiting. The cruelty is that Ophelia wears no disguise at all. She has been honest throughout; it is Hamlet who is performing. The accusation tells us far more about his fear of women than about anything Ophelia has done.
There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love, remember: and there is pansies. That's for thoughts.
(Act 4, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
There's rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember. And there are pansies: they’re for thoughts.
Quote Analysis: By the time Ophelia distributes her flowers she has lost her reason, and only in madness is she finally allowed to speak without being corrected. The flower-giving is broken and strange, but it is also pointed: rosemary for remembrance, pansies for thoughts, each bloom carrying a meaning her listeners have to interpret. There is a terrible irony in it. The one moment Ophelia commands the stage, says what she likes and is heard at length, is the moment she has gone mad – as if a woman in this play can only find a voice once she has lost everything that made her governable.
Key Takeaways
- Women Are Watched, Not Heard: Both Gertrude and Ophelia spend the play being observed, judged and instructed by men. Neither is granted a private life that is truly her own.
- Chastity Is the Currency: Ophelia's value to her father and brother is her reputation. She is warned, priced and protected like a family asset, not a person with her own desires.
- Hamlet's Disgust Spreads: His revulsion at his mother's remarriage widens into a contempt for all women. Ophelia is punished for a corruption that was never hers.
- Powerlessness Ends in Death: Neither woman chooses her end. Ophelia drowns after losing her mind; Gertrude dies drinking poison meant for her son. The play's tragedy closes over both of them.
Study Questions and Analysis
How much real power do Gertrude and Ophelia have in the play?
Very little, and the play is careful to show exactly how little. Both women are surrounded by men who hold formal authority over them – fathers, brothers, husbands, kings, princes – and almost every important decision about their lives is made by someone else.
Ophelia's case is the clearest. In A1S3 she is instructed by Laertes and then by Polonius, and her answer is total compliance.
I do not know, my lord, what I should think.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My lord, I really don’t know what to think.
She does not even claim the right to her own opinion; she hands the question of what to think back to her father. Later she is used as bait to spy on Hamlet, with her own consent never seriously sought. Gertrude has the status of a queen but no more genuine agency. Her marriage is a political fact she is fitted into, her conscience is managed by her son in the closet scene, and her death is an accident of a plot designed by and aimed at men.
Elaine Showalter, in her 1985 essay "Representing Ophelia," argued that Ophelia functions less as a character with an interior life than as a blank surface onto which the men of the play – and generations of critics after them – project their own meanings. She is, in Showalter's reading, the site of male meaning-making rather than an agent in her own right.
There is a counter-current. Carolyn Heilbrun, writing as early as 1957 in "The Character of Hamlet's Mother," pushed back against the long tradition of reading Gertrude as merely weak and sensual, arguing that her few lines show a woman of intelligence and self-command. On Heilbrun's reading, Gertrude has more inner life than the men around her are willing to grant her – it is simply that the play rarely lets her use it. Both readings agree on the central point: whatever these women are inwardly, the structures of the play give them almost no room to act.
Why does Hamlet treat Ophelia so cruelly in the nunnery scene?
The nunnery scene is one of the hardest moments in the play to read, because Hamlet's cruelty seems out of all proportion to anything Ophelia has done. Several explanations operate at once.
The simplest is displacement. Hamlet's revulsion at his mother's remarriage has soured his view of women in general, and Ophelia is the woman in front of him. His attack moves quickly from her particular case to a sweeping charge against the whole sex.
what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go, and quickly too. Farewell.
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
that you will cheat on them. Go to the convent, and make it snappy. See you.
A second explanation is that Hamlet suspects he is being watched – which, in this scene, he is – and performs a harsher contempt than he feels in order to mislead Polonius and Claudius. On this reading the cruelty is partly an act, though it lands on Ophelia all the same.
Janet Adelman's 1992 Suffocating Mothers offers the deepest account. Adelman argues that Hamlet's disgust originates in the maternal body – in his horror at Gertrude's sexuality – and that this horror contaminates his feeling for every woman, Ophelia included. The "paintings" and false faces he attacks are versions of the fear that women's bodies conceal an appetite he cannot control or forgive. Ophelia becomes the target because she is available, not because she is guilty.
The scene's cruelty, then, is not really about Ophelia at all. It is the overflow of Hamlet's broken relationship with his mother, poured onto an innocent woman who has done nothing but obey the men who arranged the trap.
Is Gertrude guilty, weak, or simply trapped?
The play deliberately leaves Gertrude's guilt unresolved, and the gaps are where the argument lives. We are never told whether she knew of the murder of her first husband, whether her remarriage was love or politics, or how much she understands of what is happening around her.
Hamlet's reading is the loudest. In his first soliloquy he condemns the speed of her remarriage in terms that border on disgust.
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
She married. Oh, with cruel velocity
She jumped with skill to his incestuous bed.
But Hamlet is not a neutral witness, and the play does not endorse his verdict. Carolyn Heilbrun's 1957 "The Character of Hamlet's Mother" made the influential case that Gertrude has been misread for centuries – that her actual lines show a woman who is shrewd, loyal and far from stupid, and that the "frailty" charge belongs to Hamlet rather than to the text. Janet Adelman, in Suffocating Mothers (1992), reads her differently again: Gertrude is less a moral agent than the screen onto which Hamlet projects his terror of female sexuality, so that the question "is she guilty?" may be the wrong one.
Jacqueline Rose, in her 1986 essay "Hamlet – the Mona Lisa of Literature," went further, arguing that the critical tradition itself has made Gertrude (and the play's femininity in general) into a problem to be solved, blaming the women for a difficulty that really belongs to the men and the critics. On Rose's reading, the urge to convict Gertrude says more about her judges than about her.
The most defensible position is that Gertrude is trapped before she is anything else. She has almost no power to determine her own situation, and what little agency she shows – the cool line at the play-within-the-play, her tenderness toward Ophelia, her final act of drinking the cup – is exercised inside a cage built by men. Guilt and weakness are both readings the play allows; being trapped is the condition it makes certain.
What does the play suggest about masculinity and honour?
Gender pressure in Hamlet does not fall on women alone. The men are held to a code of masculine honour that is just as confining, and a good deal more violent in its consequences.
The clearest expression of the code is the honour-revenge ethic carried by Laertes and, in a different key, by Fortinbras. A son whose father has been killed is expected to act – immediately, decisively, and with his blood up. Laertes embodies this without hesitation, storming the palace and declaring himself ready to cut Hamlet's throat in a church. Hamlet, by contrast, measures himself against this standard and finds himself failing it. Much of his self-disgust is the shame of a man who feels he is not man enough for the task his father's ghost has set him.
The policing of women is bound up with this masculine economy. The reason Ophelia's chastity matters so much to Laertes and Polonius is that a woman's reputation is, in their world, an extension of the family's honour – which is to say, the men's honour. Controlling her desire is part of guarding their name.
Lisa Jardine's 1983 Still Harping on Daughters set this within the realities of the early modern stage and household, arguing that the period's drama is preoccupied with daughters precisely because female chastity was a form of property that fathers and brothers were anxious to protect. The warnings heaped on Ophelia are not personal cruelty so much as the routine operation of a system in which women's bodies underwrote men's standing.
So the play stages two cages at once. Women are confined by the demand for chastity and obedience; men are confined by the demand for honour and revenge. Both cages are made of the same material – a code that ties personal worth to the control of others – and both, by the final scene, are full of bodies.
How does Ophelia's madness relate to her powerlessness?
Ophelia's madness is not an interruption of the play's argument about gender; it is the conclusion of it. She breaks only after she has lost both the men who controlled her life – her father, killed by the man she loved, and Hamlet, lost to her in the nunnery scene – and her collapse exposes how little she ever had that was her own.
The cruel paradox is that madness is the first state in which she is allowed to speak freely. Her flower-giving and her songs are uncensored, and for the only time in the play she holds the stage and says what she likes, even where the meaning is broken and oblique. The court listens, but only because it has stopped taking her seriously.
Elaine Showalter's "Representing Ophelia" (1985) reads Ophelia's madness as the place where the play's anxieties about women are most visible – and most exploited. In the theatrical and visual tradition, Showalter notes, the mad Ophelia became an object of fascination and even of beauty, her breakdown aestheticised into something to be looked at rather than understood. Her madness is consumed by others much as her obedience was used by others.
Her death extends the pattern. The drowning is reported, not shown, and is described in language so floral and passive that Ophelia seems to dissolve into the brook rather than to die in it. Even her end is narrated by others and shaped to their meanings. From the warnings of Act 1 to the burial of Act 5, Ophelia is acted upon; the madness is simply the point at which the pressure finally breaks the person it had been bearing down on all along.
Was a real Elizabethan woman as constrained as the play suggests?
Broadly, yes – though the picture is more complicated than the play alone implies, and Shakespeare is dramatising real social facts rather than inventing them.
An unmarried woman of Ophelia's rank lived under the authority of her father, and a married woman passed under the authority of her husband. A daughter's chastity was treated as a family asset because marriage was the principal means by which property and alliances were arranged. The pressure Laertes and Polonius put on Ophelia would have been entirely familiar to the play's first audiences as the ordinary anxiety of a propertied household.
The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
If she unmask her beauty to the moon:
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
A cautious maid takes risks if she reveals
Her beauty to the celibacy moon!
Lisa Jardine's 1983 Still Harping on Daughters is the standard study here. Jardine argued that the prominence of women in the period's drama does not reflect real female freedom but rather a cultural preoccupation with controlling women at a moment of social anxiety. The plays talk about daughters constantly precisely because daughters were difficult to govern and important to govern well.
It would be wrong, though, to imagine early modern women as wholly passive. Widows could hold property; women ran households and businesses; a queen, Elizabeth I, sat on the throne for the whole of Shakespeare's early career. The constraints were real but not absolute, and part of what makes Hamlet uncomfortable is that it shows the constraints at their most crushing – two women with rank and intelligence who are nonetheless given almost no power to save themselves. The play is not a documentary, but the cage it describes was recognisably the one its audience lived inside.
Is Hamlet's misogyny the play's view, or the play's subject?
This is the central interpretive question for the theme, and the answer matters a great deal. If the play simply shares Hamlet's contempt for women, it is a misogynist work. If the play stages that contempt in order to examine it, it is something closer to a critique.
The strongest evidence that Hamlet's view is not the play's is that the women's suffering is given real weight, and Hamlet's cruelty real cost. The nunnery scene is not played for the audience's agreement; it is painful to watch, and it helps to destroy Ophelia. Hamlet's blanket condemnation of women – his belief that they all "paint" a false face – is shown to be unjust in the very scene where he delivers it, because Ophelia is plainly honest. The "frailty" he ascribes to the whole sex is his grief talking, not a verdict the play confirms.
God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another...
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
God gave you one face, but you paint another.
Janet Adelman's Suffocating Mothers (1992) reads the play as the dramatisation of a male psychology in crisis rather than an endorsement of it. Hamlet's disgust is a symptom the play diagnoses, rooted in his horror at the maternal body; the text invites us to understand it, not to share it. Jacqueline Rose, in "Hamlet – the Mona Lisa of Literature" (1986), turned the question on the critical tradition, arguing that it is later readers, as much as the play, who have wanted to blame the women – treating the femininity in Hamlet as the problem rather than examining the male anxiety that produces it.
The counter-case should be heard. The play does end by destroying both its women, gives them little voice while they live, and lets Hamlet's most famous lines about women pass into the language as quotable wisdom. A theme that is "examined" can still be reinforced by the examining. The most honest reading holds both: Hamlet makes its hero's misogyny visible and costly, and in doing so it questions a view it never quite escapes. The play is large enough to contain its own critique, and unsettled enough that the critique does not fully win.
