Queen Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, is in some ways the epicentre around which Hamlet's emotions revolve. Her role is difficult to determine; she can be seen, like Desdemona, as the passive victim of male ambition and strife, or she can be placed amongst the likes of Lady Macbeth as privy to her husband's misdeeds, and as sharing his guilt to an equal, if not greater extent. Her attitude to Ophelia seems positive ('Scattering flowers. Sweets to the sweet. Farewell. I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife'; V.1.236). Her most vital scene is III.4, in which Hamlet attempts to extract a confession from her, and to persuade her to renounce Claudius. Modern productions regularly home in on the Freudian potential by locating this key encounter between mother and son in the former's bedroom. It takes place in her closet.
At times it seems that Gertrude does not know or pretends not to know why Hamlet is so angry with her and with Claudius ('What have I done, that thou dar'st wag thy tongue/ In noise so rude against me?'). At other times she seems to know exactly what is troubling him ('His father's death and our o'er-hasty marriage', II.2.57). But Hamlet, too, does not come clean directly. He does not confront her with the murder, but rather sets out 'to wring her heart' (III.4.35), and plays upon her emotions rather than on her reason. Instead, he shows her two pictures, and compares at great length his father with his uncle (55 ff.). In this long speech, the son touches on many matters so delicate that critics can be forgiven for detecting more than a whiff oedipal sentiment in Hamlet himself. He plays on his mother's sense of shame, even bringing her eroticism or lack of it into play, and culminating in a vision of his mother making love in a bed stained with semen - not a pretty sight:
You cannot call it love; for at your age
The heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble,
And waits upon the judgment, and what judgment
Would step from this to this? (68 ff.)
[...] O shame, where is thy blush? (81)
[...] Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty! (91 ff.)
Nowhere is Hamlet's morbid preoccupation with the workings of the body more obvious. Though Gertrude seems stunned by her son's outspoken approach to her physical behaviour ('O Hamlet, speak no more'; 'These words like daggers enter in mine ears': 89, 95), her response is ambivalent; she vacillates between 'sweet Hamlet' (96), 'Alas, he's mad' (106), and cryptic one-liners ('O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain'). At least she seems to listen, and to accept, in the end, that Hamlet is essentially 'not in madness' (his words, 189); though the scene ends without her promising to abstain from sex with Claudius (as Hamlet repeatedly urges in a number of colourful phrases) - all she promises is to keep Claudius in ignorance of this conversation; and while Hamlet speaks of his plans for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the journey of which his mother has been informed but now claims to have forgotten ('Alack, I had forgot': 202 f.), Gertrude remains silent.
Gertrude and Ophelia share a common 'frailty' (I.2.146) which prevent them from joining forces with Hamlet and supporting him in his quest for justice and for revenge. Gertrude is stung by Hamlet's accusations, but beyond expressing her horror, remains too weak to resist, let alone to repel the usurper who has killed her first 'Hyperion-like' husband. Ophelia is another weak character, lacking the loving insightfulness of a Cordelia and the hard-nosed independence of the 'ugly sisters'. It is convenient to see her as the Pre-Raphaelites did, a pale, ethereal being, endowed with a soft and yielding temperament. But she allows herself to be used and in so doing is disloyal to her brother, to Hamlet and ultimately to herself. When Laertes warns her to beware of Hamlet, she says 'Tis in my memory locked,/ And you yourself shall keep the key of it' (I.3.85), yet straightway she repeats all his confidences to her father. 'What means your lordship?' sums it up; and 'I do not know, my lord, what I should think.' Hamlet's preoccupations are beyond her comprehension - and since he cannot unburden himself to her, he has no use for her; she becomes no more than a symbol of potential infidelity (in parallel to his mother). 'In her meek conformity, she lives in a meaningless world until her madness relieves her of the responsibility of language and she can ignore the speech of everyone else and herself speak whatever gibberish comes into her mind' (Zulfikar Ghose, Hamlet, Prufrock and Language, London: Macmillan, 1978, pp. 22 f., somewhat unkindly). Hamlet's crude insults to her in III.2 can be interpreted variously (distractors while the play is being prepared, reflections of his mother's conduct, or of the debauchery of the court, or even as a form of self-torture; Rosenberg, 569). It seems plausible that he should see aspects of his mother in Ophelia; an element of anti-feminism is often not far from the surface in Shakespeare (The Taming of the Shrew). Only in the final act does Hamlet return to her as the object of his true affection, protesting that 'forty thousand brothers' (V.1.264) could not equal his love for her.
