About Hamlet's Gertrude In William Shakespeare's most famous tragedy, Hamlet, the audience meets a queen who is a queen past and present. You were unhappy before: how do you feel now? Is she bad, guilty, maternal, lascivious? The many aspects of his personality deserve our attention. Angela Pitt in “Women in Shakespeare's Tragedies” comments that Shakespeare's Gertrude in Hamlet is, first of all, a mother: Gertrude shows no need to justify her actions and therefore betrays no meaning. of guilt. She is concerned about her current fortune and does not dwell on the death of her first husband or analyze her reasons for taking another. . . .She seems like a kind, narrow-minded, rather self-indulgent woman, not at all her son's emotional or intellectual equal. . . . She is certainly fond of Hamlet. Not only is she willing to listen to him when he gets angry at her, evidence that he is close enough to her that he has the right to comment on her personal life, but she is unfailingly worried about him. (46-47)Gunnar Bokland in “Hamlet” describes Gertrude's moral descent over the course of Shakespeare's Hamlet:With Queen Gertrude and eventually Laertes also deeply involved in a situation of increasing ugliness, it becomes clear that, although Claudius and those who associate with him are not the embodiments of the evil that Hamlet sees in them, they are quite corrupt from any balanced point of view, a condition also suggested by the “heavy festivity” that characterizes life at the Danish court. (123)Gertrude's "contamination" in fact affects the hero. Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks in "Making Mother Matter: Repression......middle of paper......Lehmann, Courtney, and Lisa S. Starks. "Making Mother Matter: Repression, Revision, and the Stakes of 'Reading Psychoanalysis in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet.' Early Modern Literary Studies 6.1 (May 2000): 2.1-24. Pitt, Angela. "Women in Shakespeare's Tragedies." Readings on Tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Reprint of Shakespeare's Women. Np, 1981.Shakespeare, William. Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. hamlet/full.html No lines n. Smith, Rebecca. "Gertrude: Intriguing Adulteress or Loving Mother?" the user. New York: Limelight editions, 1996.