Gertrude

Play

Hamlet

Summary

Queen of Denmark and Hamlet's mother, Gertrude married Claudius with unseemly haste after her first husband's death — an act Hamlet finds almost as monstrous as the murder itself. One of Shakespeare's most deliberately ambiguous characters, the text leaves open whether she was complicit in the murder, whether she truly loves Claudius, and how fully she understands her son's suffering; she dies drinking the poisoned cup Claudius prepared for Hamlet, in an act that reads as either accident or sacrifice.

Notable Quotations

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks." *(3.2)*

"There is a willow grows aslant a brook / That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream; / There with fantastic garlands did she come..." *(4.7 — her account of Ophelia's drowning)*

Cross-references

• Hamlet — the play
• Tragedies
• character_hamlet — her son
• character_claudius — her second husband
• character_ophelia — her son's beloved, whose death she narrates