Essay Contrasing Gertrude and Ophelia of Shakespeares Hamlet

Contrast of Gertrude and Ophelia in Hamlet Queen Gertrude and Ophelia, the main womanish characters in Shakespe bes spectacular tragedy Hamlet, have a admixture of contrasting or dissimilar personal qualities and experiences. This essay, with the help of literary critics, impart explore these differences. John Dover Wilson in his book, What Happens in Hamlet, discusses what is perhaps the superlative dissimilarity mingled with Ophelia and Gertrude their morality His Hamlets mother is a criminal, has been guilty of a sin which blots out the stars for him, makes life a bestial thing, and even infects his genuinely blood. She has committed incest. Modern readers, living in an age when marriage laws are the subject of free discussion and with a deceased wifes sister act upon the statute-book, can hardly be anticipate to reach estimabley into Hamlets feelings on this matter. Yet no unitary who reads the first soliloquy in the Second Quarto text, with its illuminating drama tic punctuation, can doubt for one moment that Shakespeare wished here to make full dramatic capital out of Gertrudes infringement of ecclesiastical law, and expected his audience to look upon it with as much abhorrence as the Athenians matt-up for what we should consider the more venial, because unwitting, crime of the Oedipus of Sophocles (39). Quite opposite the criminality of the nances wife is the innocence of Ophelia, who might be called a confused lily (ODonnell 241). In the Introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hamlet, David Bevington enlightens the reader regarding this dissimilarity between the two ladies Characters also serve as foils to one another as well as to Hamlet. Gertrude wishfully sees in Ophelia the b... ...ffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968. Boklund, Gunnar. Hamlet. Essays on Shakespeare. Ed. Gerald Chapman. Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press, 1965. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and Other English Poets. Lo ndon George Bell and Sons, 1904. p. 342-368. http//ds.dial.pipex.com/thomas_larque/ham1-col.htm ODonnell, Jessie F. Ophelia. The American Shakespeare Magazine, 3 (March 1897), 70-76. Rpt. in Women Reading Shakespeare 1660-1900. Ed. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts. New York Manchester University Press, 1997. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts appoint of Technology. 1995. http//www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html No line nos. Wilson, John Dover. What Happens in Hamlet. New York Cambridge University Press, 1999.