The Importance of Women's Roles in Hamlet

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Women play a vastly important role in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Gertrude, the Queen and Hamlets mother and Ophelia, Hamlets love interest, are the two main women in Hamlet. These women are constantly manipulated, controlled, and taken advantage of by male characters in Hamlet.
In Act I Scene II Lines 142-159 Hamlet condenses the role of women in one simple quote
Hamlet:
Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month—
Let me not think on't—Frailty, thy name is woman!—
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears:--Why she, even she,—
O God! a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer,—married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Hamlet is speaking about his father’s death and Gertrude marrying his uncle, Claudius. Hamlet feels as if his mother has acted too fast in her decision to marry Claudius. Hamlet considers Claudius as nothing compared to his father. Hamlet is...

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