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.
Therefore, marrying Claudius was possibly the only way for Gertrude to keep the crown in the same family and give Hamlet a chance to be a king but also delay his ascension to the throne. This scheme works only with the assumption that Gertrude loves her son.
A Marriage Built upon Lust
Gertrude marries Claudius two months after the death of her husband.
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.
We know from the speech in Act One, Scene Two of Hamlet, that two months have passed between the death of old Hamlet and the events of the play, with Gertrude's marriage to Claudius taking place “within a month” (I. ii. 145) of that death.
In the final Act she is blissfully ignorant of her husband's plot to poison her son, and her death is merely one of the many that populate the play and provide a gory backdrop to Hamlet and Claudius's rivalry.
Hamlet feels betrayed and irritated by his mother. He is upset because she married his late father's brother Claudius. Hamlet thinks that remarriage in such circumstances is unacceptable. Through Hamlet's disappointment with his mother, his anger is increased towards Claudius.
Though Claudius professes love and admiration for Gertrude, he never confides to anyone the extent of their relationship. Gertrude describes her love for Hamlet when she asks him not to return to Wittenberg.
Nothing in this scene nor in any other casts a belief that Hamlet was intimate with Gertrude. It is true that Hamlet shows an unhealthy interest in her sex life but that is a separate issue from having sex with her.
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.
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.
Even though Hamlet lashes out at her with all the rage he can muster, Gertrude remains faithful to him, protecting him fron the King. And, although her love for Claudius is wrong by moral standards, she is now his queen, and remains loyal to him.
Gertrude dies on-stage, accidentally poisoned by Claudius. Laertes dies on-stage, stabbed by his own poisoned blade.
Claudius explains that he and Gertrude have chosen to marry immediately after his brother's death because, in light of the encroaching Danish army, the court could not afford excessive grief lest young Fortinbras mistake their mourning for weakness.
The rest of the soliloquy is about what is agonizing to him: his mother's marriage. She married less than two months after the death of Old Hamlet.
While she lives in the same patriarchal society that demands that she subjugate herself to her father and her brother until she is married, Ophelia has fallen in love with Prince Hamlet. There is strong evidence that she has even had sexual relations with him.
Laertes must have been clued in to Ophelia's pregnancy. Polonius inadvertently admits to such a claim. Polonius's knowledge is revealed when Hamlet discloses that he knows Ophelia, his lady love might be pregnant. Check out the words that Hamlet uses when he confronts Polonious.
Ophelia is the daughter of Polonius, and Laertes's sister, who lives with her father at Elsinore. She is in love with Hamlet.
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.
Gertrude and Ophelia Relationship
Gertrude makes it apparent that she carries a fondness for Ophelia.
Also, Gertrude reports Ophelia's death in one of the most lovely, poignant, poetic speeches in all of Shakespeare. She uses nature, water, and flower imagery to show how she is now free of the cruel human world.
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.
Gertrude is vital in fuelling Hamlet's hatred of women as well as his drive for revenge. Her remarriage also causes Hamlet to sink into melancholy as Bradley states it provided a 'violent shock to his moral being'. Gertrude's remarriage for Hamlet is seen as the root cause of the corruption and decay of Denmark.
Hamlet does love his mother. He feels betrayed by her, but he does not wish to hurt her. Hamlet keeps her out of his plans when he decides to kill Claudius, trying to protect her.
Describe Gertrude's sickness. She is morally corrupt. She makes and sells liquor, lives with prostitutes (and we assume she is one), and she has been in prison. It is not a physical sickness that attracts Msimangu's attention, but a moral one.