Women's Characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear

iv.90). That statement that sets the tone for the all told line of action. Gertrude's character is emblematic of that rottenness. She is initially deliberately tedious ab let out the death of elder Hamlet and about Claudius's ardor, therefore increasingly culpable in what happens as she willfully disregards the separate of Claudius's treachery. Ophelia, meanwhile, the quintessential tragic victim, is the focus of the sharpest tragic irony in Hamlet and a poignant emblem of the waste implied by tragic momentum because of her innocence. She is crushed by circumstance and a father who suppressed his daughter's will and natural intelligence.

Hamlet's apocalyptic fundament touches Gertrude inasmuch as she sack be characterized both as faggot of a corrupt court--literally a poisoned one--that is doomed and as a wife and mother whose conjugal and maternal sense has been seduced out of her. She takes Claudius's part and offers small support when the new father criticizes Hamlet's wo of his father as "unmanly grief" (I.ii). His entire produce of home and family disrupted, he sees his home as an unweeded garden and the conjugal union as incestuous sheets.

The intensity of Hamlet's grief and the sense of lese majesty caused by the marriage makes it possible to interpret his relationship with Gertrude in Oedipal terms, and indeed Freud attributes Hamlet's delaying the rev

In tragedy, it is constantly too late. Only when natural entropy has completed its achievement can any(prenominal)thing like ordinary experience be reclaimed. In both Hamlet and Lear, the women are in the path of entropy, complaint various degrees of responsibility for a fate none of them can escape.

Kitto, H.D.F. Form and Meaning in Drama. New York: Barnes & Noble/Methuen, 1956.

---. female monarch Lear. The Annotated Shakespeare. Vol. III, The Tragedies and Romances. Ed. A.L. Rowse. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1978. 345-411.

To the degree Cordelia does not explain herself fully formerly Lear demands declarations of passionateness, she seems unyielding. Her terse "Nothing" in I.i when asked what she can say to overtake her sisters' phony prostrations, and her refusal to be drawn into their overearnestness, call for explanation.

If it is the case that in his foolish vanity and susceptibility to flattery Lear refuses to give any weight to the truth or explanation of such statements of love that Cordelia makes ("I . . . obey you, love you, and most honour you"), therefore it is also true that Cordelia does not press to make herself more(prenominal) clearly understood. Instead of referring to different kinds or qualities of love that whitethorn be infinitely partitioned, she agrees with Lear that love can be partitioned concord to quantity. The possibility that love itself provides its own increase does not overtake to anyone, least of all, but not only, Lear. Troubled by the appearance of her sisters' declarations, Cordelia fails to argue that love eludes measure, with the result that to "love and be silent," an teetotal recasting of the truism that children should be seen and not heard, is no gimmick for the pending cataclysm. Still less does that strategy answer the calendered and phony emotionalism of Goneril and Regan. However authentic Cordelia's love, she cannot seem to support a self-image of superior virtue: "I am sure, my love's / to a greater extent richer than my tongue" (I.i.79-80). To be sure, Cordelia's expressions of self-knowledge are dramatic as
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