Claudius: Gertrude, do not drink.
Claudius assures Gertrude that, "Our son shall win." Gertrude agrees. She takes Hamlet's wine, wipes his brow, and offers him a drink, which he refuses. She then toasts her son. Claudius asks her not to drink, but she does and then wipes Hamlet's brow one more time.
To ensure Hamlet's death, Claudius also has a poisoned cup of wine should Hamlet win the duel. Claudius does not intervene when Gertrude drinks the poisoned cup of wine because he does not want to give himself away.
Instead, Gertrude's love for Claudius creates a thrilling twist to the closet scene in which he is revealed as a murderer. The final Act, in which she is clearly aware that the wine is poisoned, sees her sacrifice herself to save Hamlet.
Laertes selects the poisoned and sharpened rapier, and the two go at it. When Claudius offers Hamlet the poisoned goblet of wine, Hamlet refuses, and Gertrude picks up the cup instead. Toasting Hamlet, she drinks the poison, ensuring her eventual death.
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks" is a line from the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. It is spoken by Queen Gertrude in response to the insincere overacting of a character in the play within a play created by Prince Hamlet to prove his uncle's guilt in the murder of his father, the King of Denmark.
Act 1, Scene 5 of Hamlet is the play's renowned ghost scene. In this scene, Prince Hamlet encounters a ghost that claims to be his deceased father, King Hamlet. The ghost tells Hamlet that his brother, the new King Claudius, murdered him and married his wife, Gertrude.
But other interpretations, in both stage productions and paintings, suggest Gertrude's guilty knowledge of the murder, and Hamlet suspects her as well as Claudius; Hamlet's "mousetrap" therefore sets out to capture the conscience of a king and a queen.
Claudius's love for Gertrude may be sincere, but it also seems likely that he married her as a strategic move, to help him win the throne away from Hamlet after the death of the king.
Other scholars, like Pragati Das in “Shakespeare's Representation of Women in his Tragedies,” agree that Gertrude is not murderous, but simply selfish, shallow, and addicted to pleasure.
In the final scene of Hamlet, Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet all die as a result of poisoning. Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup intended for Hamlet, while Hamlet and Laertes both wound one another with the poisoned sword.
Without Gertrude knowing the crime Claudius committed of murdering her late husband, she put all her trust into Claudius's false motive of saving the nation as well as agrees to marry him. On top of that, he identifies himself as a loving and caring stepfather to Hamlet in order to gaining Gertrude's love and trust.
He provided a poisoned cup with which Gertrude drank to her death. Claudius manipulated Gertrude to death, and with loving manipulation to her son. Hamlet felt depressed and lonely, at times wanting to give up and not fight the battle.
Gertrude's Loyalty to Hamlet
Despite all that happens, Gertrude chooses to remain loyal to Hamlet. At the end of act three, he reveals to Gertrude that he is only mad in craft, not for real, and he askes her not to sleep with Claudius anymore.
Hamlet tries desperately to convince Gertrude that he is not mad but has merely feigned madness all along, and he urges her to forsake Claudius and regain her good conscience. He urges her as well not to reveal to Claudius that his madness has been an act.
Summary: Act IV, scene i
Frantic after her confrontation with Hamlet, Gertrude hurries to Claudius, who is conferring with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. She asks to speak to the king alone. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern exit, she tells Claudius about her encounter with Hamlet.
Hamlet delays killing Claudius because Claudius represents Hamlet's innermost desires to sleep with his mother Gertrude.
After the death of her husband, Queen Gertrude quickly marries Claudius, her late husband's brother. She demonstrates that she never did truly love her husband, but rather that she only wanted to remain in her powerful position and have a male figure to depend on.
Gertrude and Claudius, a John Updike novel, serves as a prequel to the events of the play. It follows Gertrude from her wedding to King Hamlet, through an affair with Claudius, and its murderous results, until the very beginning of the play.
tragic flaw was no other than the innocent desire for reconcilement and her too human need to avoid conflict.
Gertrude dies on-stage, accidentally poisoned by Claudius. Laertes dies on-stage, stabbed by his own poisoned blade.
Gertrude describes her love for Hamlet when she asks him not to return to Wittenberg. When she shares with Ophelia her hope that the young woman would have married her Hamlet, she divulges her wish for his happiness.
In Laurence Olivier's film adaptation of Hamlet, Gertrude drinks knowingly, presumably to save her son from certain death. If she drinks on purpose, then she's the self-sacrificing mother Hamlet has always wanted her to be.
The ghost exhorts Hamlet to seek revenge, telling him that Claudius has corrupted Denmark and corrupted Gertrude, having taken her from the pure love of her first marriage and seduced her in the foul lust of their incestuous union.
What does the ghost of King Hamlet say about Gertrude, his wife? He warns Hamlet to be afraid of her.