Examine Shakespeares presentation of women in Hamlet. Show how far your appreciation and understanding of this aspect of Hamlet have been informed by your study of the The Revengers Tragedy.

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Examine Shakespeare’s presentation of women in Hamlet. Show how far your appreciation and understanding of this aspect of Hamlet have been informed by your study of the The Revenger’s Tragedy.

The presentation of women in both Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy is fundamental in conditioning the audience’s response to the main characters of the play. Though there are only two female characters in Hamlet, Gertrude and Ophelia, their actions and the response of Hamlet towards them is essential in enhancing our understanding of the protagonist and the misogynistic attitudes of men at the time. Similarly, in The Revenger’s Tragedy, women are presented on  a moral spectrum from the virtuous (Castiza) to the immoral (The Duchess), with Vindice’s mother, Gratiana, seems for a time to move towards the corruption of The Duchess, but this movement only serves to reveal the schematic treatment of women in the play.

During the period in which the two plays were set, there was widespread agreement about the ideals and values that women should embody, many of these linking with the Christian values of the time, and these ideals made women easily susceptible to attack and scrutiny, but also effective symbols within the two plays. The patriarchal world of the time led the women in the two plays to be presented as either passive to their male counterparts or capable of committing immoral acts in order to advance their own agenda. When Polonius asks Ophelia to spy on Hamlet, despite her affection for him, she answers “I shall obey, my Lord”, whilst in TRT, Castiza’s objectification by Vincdice, disguised as Piato, gives evidence to the idea that women were manipulated and were victims of male dominance. On the other hand, both Gertrude in Hamlet and The Duchess in TRT are portrayed as immoral and sexual characters that use the male character for their own benefit and to maintain their hold on power. Gertrude, after only a month of her late husband’s passing, marries Claudius, though in act 3 scene iv of the play evidence of the strain this has put on her conscience comes to light during her conversation with Hamlet, as she says “Take this infectious spot out of my soul”.

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A feminist reading of the negative presentation of the female characters in the two plays would be that they have been corrupted by the male desire to control women at the time. Ophelia’s madness could be attributed to Hamlet’s rejection of her and his murdering of her father, and in TRT Vindice goes out to trick Gratiana into selling Castiza, so one interpretation could be that the male characters are the initiators of the negative aspects within the female characters.

Shakespeare uses Gertrude to show the fickleness of women. There are suggestions that Gertrude and Claudius had a relationship ...

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