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Sihyun Kim
Dr. John Silva
English 266.0902
1 June 2006
Gertrude’s Sexuality: The Truth behind Hamlet’s Delay
In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the audience is introduced to a melancholic prince
who is entrusted with the straightforward task of revenge by the ghostly apparition of his father.
Nevertheless, for some mysterious reason, Hamlet fails to kill Claudius, the man who is
responsible for his father’s death, until the very last scene of the play. Given that the cause for
Hamlet’s delay lies neither in his incapacity for swift action nor in the overwhelming difficulty
of eliminating Claudius, the readers seem to have reached a frustrating dead end in their
understanding of Shakespeare’s greatest work. Fortunately for them, however, a psychoanalytic
reading of the play may provide the necessary means through which Hamlet’s seemingly
inexplicable behavior can be rationalized. For one thing, interpreting Hamlet’s unconscious
thoughts through his words and actions may give the readers some grounds in the assertion that
the Prince of Denmark is ultimately driven by the need to reform his mother’s rampant sexuality
rather than the thirst for revenge on his father’s behalf.
In his masterpiece Hamlet, Shakespeare wastes no time in ushering his audience into a
royal palace that is plagued with turmoil. The play’s fundamental theme of vengeance is quickly
established in 1.5 when the Prince of Denmark, Hamlet, learns from the ghostly apparition of his
father that the current king, Claudius, has risen to power through murder. Although he
wholeheartedly accepts his father’s plea for revenge, Hamlet inexplicably delays himself from
carrying out the mission. For instance, when he unexpectedly encounters his uncle praying in
solitude in 3.2, Hamlet decides against killing him after providing himself with the following
excuse: “Now might I do it pat, now ’a is a-praying; / And now I’ll do’t — and so ’a goes to
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heaven, / And so am I reveng’d. That would be scann’d: / A villain kills my father, and for that /
I, his sole son, do this same villain send / To heaven” (3.2.73-78). Certainly, Hamlet should be
able to realize that a more perfect opportunity to kill Claudius is not likely to arise in the near
future. Nevertheless, his needlessly excessive contemplations not only prevent him from finally
fulfilling the wishes of his father, but will also inadvertently lead to the deaths of seven people
(Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude, and himself) by the play’s end.
However, the audience should not so readily accept the conclusion that Hamlet’s delay is
ultimately caused by his tendencies to overtly meditate his actions. Indeed, apart from the main
task at hand, Hamlet is clearly a man who is capable of swift — it not downright rash — action.
According to Ernest Jones, one of the most influential followers of Sigmund Freud, “[Hamlet]
shows no trace of hesitation when he stabs the listener behind the curtain, when he makes his
violent onslaught on the pirates, leaps into the grave with Laertes or accepts his challenge to
what he must know was a duel, or when he follows his father’s spirit on the battlements” (37).
Despite his deep and pensive contemplations on life and the dire repercussions for ending it — as
it is made clear in 1.2 when Hamlet reveals in his first soliloquy that the only thing preventing
him from suicide is his fear of eternally damning himself (1.2.129-132) — Hamlet, in reality, has
no compunction whatsoever about murder (Jones 36). In short, Hamlet is far from being the
gentle Prince who is unfortunately faced with a task contrary to his moral beliefs. On the
contrary, if one were to assume that his ultimate agenda is merely that of eliminating the usurper
of the Danish throne, Hamlet should not be having any trouble in carrying out his mission.
As a result, given that Hamlet is fully capable of decisiveness, how is the audience then
supposed to rationalize his delay of killing Claudius? Is the task of eliminating his uncle so
overwhelmingly difficult for Hamlet that he could not have possibly done any better regardless
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of his drive for vengeance? According to Jones, the simple answer is “no.” His belief that
Claudius could have been overthrown with ease cannot be better demonstrated than through the
angry mob with which Laertes returns to Denmark upon hearing the news of his father’s sudden
death in 4.5:
Here the people, the false Danish dogs whose loyalty to Claudius were so
feather-light that they gladly hailed as king even Laertes, a man who had no sort
of claim on the throne, were ready enough to believe in the murderous guilt of
their monarch without any shred of supporting evidence, when the accusation
was not even true, and where no motive for murder could be discerned at all
approaching in weight to two powerful ones that had actually led him to kill his
brother. (Jones 43)
This dilemma in which Claudius finds himself seems to have been deliberately staged by
Shakespeare to show how a son should really deal with the murder of his father. Given that
Laertes came very close to staging a successful revolt against Claudius, it is not likely that
Hamlet, a man who is — according to his uncle — the darling of the people (4.7.16-18), would
have failed had he truly made the effort to fulfill his father’s wish (Jones 43). In other words, the
hypothesis that Hamlet fails to act because of the inordinate difficulty of his task simply cannot
be substantiated: Claudius’s episode with Laertes should help brush aside any doubt that the
authority with which he reigns is meager at best.
In essence, the unfortunate truth is that Hamlet never explicitly discloses the true reason
behind his delay in killing Claudius. In fact, Hamlet himself seems to be unaware of it when he
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laments in 4.4: “I do not know / Why yet I love to say, ‘This thing’s to do,’ / Sith I have cause,
and will, and strength, and means / To do’t” (4.4.43-46). If this is the case, how can the readers
judiciously draw any conclusion regarding Shakespeare’s ever elusive masterpiece?
According to Jones, a psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet may help them do just that:
If Hamlet was not aware of the nature of his inhibition, doubt may be felt
concerning the possibility of our penetrating to it . . . Fortunately for our
investigation, however, psycho-analytic studies have demonstrated beyond doubt
that mental trends hidden from the subject himself may come to external
expression in ways that reveal their nature to a trained observer, so that the
possibility of success is not to be thus excluded. (Jones 56)
In other words, the fact that Hamlet himself finds it impossible to understand his seeming
incapacity to act is irrelevant. His hesitancy to kill Claudius may not necessarily be conscious,
and, therefore, the readers should not expect to understand Hamlet’s delay by explicit means. On
the contrary, the truth may be deeply hidden in his unconscious mind.
Indeed, in accordance with classical Freudian and Oedipal studies, one of the most
striking aspects of Hamlet is the fact that he is immensely bothered by his mother’s sexuality. As
a matter of fact, according to Janet Adelman, an English professor at the University of California
at Berkeley, Gertrude’s sexuality is so rampant and out of control in Hamlet’s point of view that
he perceives it as the very cause of his father’s death (Adelman 268). This is especially made
clear through his staging of “The Murder of Gonzago,” a play that, because of its convenient
depiction of a murder within a family, Hamlet requests the traveling actors to perform in 2.2. The
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readers are given that he has added “some dozen . . . or sixteen lines” to the play (2.2.522), and
though they cannot specify them, some of the lines spoken by the characters seem to suspiciously
emphasize Gertrude’s — and less on Claudius’s — role in the murder of the king (Adelman
269). When Lucianus, who is obviously modeled on Claudius, carries the poison with which he
will kill his uncle, the Player King, he states: “Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected, /
With Hecate’s ban thrice blasted, thrice infected, / Thy natural magic and dire property / On
wholesome life usurps immediately” (3.2.241-245). Lucianus’s association of the poison with
weeds should, without a doubt, strike a chord to whoever paid close attention to Hamlet’s first
soliloquy in Act I, scene ii in which he contemplates suicide not because of his father’s sudden
death but because of his mother’s “unweeded garden / That [grew] to seed” after “things rank
and gross in nature / Possess[ed] it merely” (2.2.135-137). This imagery of weeds that Hamlet
has used in his reprobation of his mother’s contaminated body reemerges in the form of the
poison that Lucianus used, and, as a result, it can be interpreted that the staging of “The Murder
of Gonzago” is really Hamlet’s unconscious attempt at “catch[ing] the conscience” of Gertrude
rather than that of Claudius (Adelman 269). To Hamlet, the “poison” that ultimately killed his
father was not Claudius’s political ambitions but his mother’s insatiable sexuality. Thus, it is not
surprising that he cannot get his mind around his task. After all, if Gertrude is just as culpable, if
not more, as Claudius is in the murder of his father, Hamlet must, in a sense, punish his own
mother as well.
If one were then to accept Hamlet’s unconscious belief that Gertrude rather than Claudius
is to be blamed for the murder, the late King Hamlet’s wish for his son not to “let [his] soul
contrive / Against [his] mother aught” may seem too forgiving (1.5.85-87). Indeed, according to
Adelman, it is this reason why Hamlet at times seems much more eager to reprimand his mother
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than he is with the fulfillment of his father’s wish of vengeance:
This shift — from avenging the father to saving the mother —accounts in part
for certain peculiarities about this play as a revenge play: why, for example, the
murder is given so little attention in the device ostensibly designed to catch his
conscience, why the confrontation of Hamlet with Gertrude in the closet scene
seems much more central, much more vivid, than any confrontation between
Hamlet and Claudius. (Adelman 275)
In many ways, the closet scene (3.4) in which Hamlet traps her mother with biting rebukes can
be seen as the climax of the play. It is here that Hamlet finally unleashes his wrath upon his
mother, reprimanding her with piercing words such as: “Confess yourself to heaven, / Repent
what’s past, avoid what is to come, / And do not spread the compost on the weeds / To make
them ranker” (3.4.149-152). This confrontation with Gertrude follows “The Murder of Gonzago”
so naturally — Hamlet once again has drawn upon the imagery of the weeds in his verbal assault
— that there should be no doubt that the play was in fact staged by him to corner his mother with
her guilty conscience (Adelman 276). According to Adelman, it is this shift in priorities that
ultimately prevents Hamlet from killing Claudius in the preceding scene:
. . . Shakespeare stages 3.3 very much as an interruption: Hamlet comes upon
Claudius praying as he is on his way to his mother’s closet, worrying about the
extent to which he can repudiate the Nero in himself; and we come upon
Claudius unexpectedly in the same way. That is: the moment that should be the
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apex of the revenge plot — the potential confrontation alone of the avenger and
his prey — becomes for the audience and for the avenger himself a lapse, an
interlude that must be gotten over before the real business can be attended to.
(276)
Had Hamlet committed murder before he saw his mother, he certainly would have lost the drive
that he needed in order to carry out his more fundamental task. Thus, it should not be surprising
that Hamlet is reluctant to carry out the revenge until the very last scene of the play. Because
reforming his mother then is no longer an issue — she dies after having drunk a poisoned cup of
wine — Hamlet can finally allow himself to embark upon the next mission in his agenda: kill
Claudius.
Of course, to conclude that this particular approach in the understanding of Hamlet’s
delay provides the “end all” solution to the mystery would be quite premature. After all, how
well can an analytical technique that was developed by Sigmund Freud’s followers three hundred
years after Shakespeare wrote Hamlet apply to the work? In turn, what one has to realize is that
examining Hamlet’s motives through his unconscious thoughts can only provide us with one way
of viewing him. But ultimately, why should one be so concerned with finding the “true reading”
of Hamlet? Isn’t the fact that Hamlet consistently surprises the readers even after they have gone
through multiple readings of the text the greatest gift an author could ever give? In short, the fact
that Hamlet may forever be enshrouded in ambiguities should not be seen as a curse but rather as
a blessing.
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Works Cited
Adelman, Janet. “‘Man and Wife Is One Flesh’: Hamlet and the Confrontation with the Maternal
Body.” Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press,
1994. 256-282.
Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus: A classic study in the psychoanalysis of literature. New
York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s
Press, 1994.