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Elyse Williams

Mrs. Rogers

Hon English 11

15 December 2008

To be or not to be a Woman

That is the question which many speculate concerning William Shakespeare’s character

Prince Hamlet. This notion was first introduced by Edward P. Vining in 1881 with his book The

Mystery of Hamlet. He argued that: “This womanly man might be in very deed a woman,

desperately striving to fill a place for which she was by nature unfitted.” He furthered this

concept in his 1921 silent film adaption of Hamlet in which the prince’s role is played by Asta

Nielson, a woman of course. In this adaption of the play Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, gives birth

to a female child. Afraid that her husband will die in war and there will be no heir to the throne,

she claims that the child is a male in order to protect the succession. This film furthered the idea

of a women Hamlet in many minds and showed the play in a successful new light. It was not the

first time a woman portrayed the famous character. Sarah Bernhardt played the title part for

several years and would later act in another film adaption of the play. In 1889 she said, “I cannot

see Hamlet as a man. The things he says, his impulses, his actions entirely indicate to me that he

was a woman.” To this day woman often play the role of Hamlet and the belief in Hamlet the

woman continues to grow.

But what is it that people see in Hamlet that convinces them so entirely that this man is

yet a woman? Perhaps for women such as Bernhardt it is just the self identification with the

character that makes it seem so to them. But it is not just women who connect with Hamlet.

Actors, readers and speculators of the play have all, over the years, identified themselves with

Hamlet’s easily recognizable depth of humanity. One such person was none other then Sigmund

Freud. He did not believe that that Hamlet was a woman, however he believed that Hamlet was

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in love with his mother. Freud suggested that Shakespeare’s unconscious understood the

unconscious of the character Hamlet and thus gave breed to Hamlet’s Oedipus complex. In

saying that Hamlet has an unconscious it can also be said that Hamlet is “real” in a sense. But

can we analyze a character as if they are real and have history along with motives imitative of

reality. To truly understand Hamlet and his character we must begin to assume that he could be

real and could have these motives and history of a real person.

“Hamlet can seem an actual person who somehow has been caught inside a play and no

other single character in the plays not even Falstaff or Cleopatra, matches Hamlet’s infinite

reverberations.”(Bloom 384) Some believe that Hamlet is so unlike any other Shakespearian play

that it may not even have been written by him. But perhaps it is not because Shakespeare wasn’t

the author, but the fact that Hamlet is merely interpreted wrongly. What man in any other of his

plays have shown such remorse and second guessing of their evil actions as Hamlet has.However

there are examples of women who have shown these qualities of self blame, second guessing and

immense guilt. Ophelia is a great example of one who blames themselves for everything and is

driven mad by guilt. She believes herself to blame for not only Hamlet’s madness but her

father’s death. It is this that ultimately drives her to suicide. Hamlet also contemplates suicide in

his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy in Act 3 Scene 1 lines 57-91. He contemplates whether

it is better to end his suffering and kill himself, but also fears that if he were to commit suicide he

would go to hell and have eternal suffering for it is an act against Christianity to kill oneself.

Other notable characters who share these qualities are Gertrude, Desdemona in Othello and The

Duchess in Richard III.

Throughout the course of the play the character of Hamlet is often shown being cruel and

unforgiving of women, especially Ophelia. Hamlet keeps denying he is feminine in his dialogue

and many times is seen accusing himself of being a drab and a whore. He in fact hates femininity

in himself hates femininity in women. This could show that he does in actuality hate that he is

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a woman and wishes for it to be otherwise but knows that he can’t. In the play he is trying to live

up to a position that he isn’t by societies terms cut out for. He says “It is but foolery, but it is

such a kind of gains-giving as would perhaps trouble a woman.”(Act 5 Scene 2 203-04) He is

talking about how he has a strange feeling that he will lose the fencing match with Laertes that

will later end up killing him. He feels that he is being foolish by having this feeling since it is

womanly of him. In the first act of the play Hamlet claims, “Frailty, thy name is woman!” This

shows his great disdain for woman and their misgivings. It also again proves his self hatred and

wanting to live up to being a strong man, which he never seems to be able to do. This seems to

be the reason why he is so terrible to Ophelia and often his mother. He pains in seeing women

act frail because it reminds him of himself. He hates that his mother has married another and

cannot bear to even think about how she has betrayed his father and her weakness in doing so.

When Gertrude remarried to Hamlet’s uncle he hated his mother for doing so. But it

wasn’t until the ghost of his father appeared to him that he realized how much more terrible the

actions of his mother were. The ghost appears to Hamlet near the end of the first act to tell him a

about his death at the hands of his brother, Hamlet’s uncle and that he wants him to avenge his

death by killing his uncle. The interesting thing is that not once does the ghost refer to Hamlet as

son, which is strange of a Shakespearian play. In Richard III, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar the

ghosts refer to the characters directly. Another strange point is that whenever a ghost associates

with a character that person will later be killed in the play. Some think that Shakespeare never

intended for Hamlet to be a girl. Vining was among them, he said:

It is not claimed that Shakespeare ever fully intended to represent Hamlet as indeed

a woman. It is claimed that in the gradual evolution of the feminine element in Hamlet’s

character the time arrived when it occurred to the dramatist that so might a woman act

and feel, if educated from infancy to play a prince’s part.

But if Hamlet was never intended to be a woman as Vining claims then how would it be

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explained that the ghost never calls Hamlet his son. The apparition of the ghost is seen in the first

act which gives direct contradiction to Vining’s claim that the gender was never intended. If the

ghost had called Hamlet daughter then this would have brought danger to succession of Hamlet

as King. But also it would have taken the mystery out of the story entirely. Maybe Shakespeare

never intended for his audience to know that Hamlet was a man but to interpret this for

themselves.

With Shakespeare’s plays there is no set in stone story. Since they hail from a time when

words were merely spoken and not yet transcribed to paper it is impossible to get word for word

what was said by each character originally. It is also impossible to come to a conclusion about

what Shakespeare’s intentions for each play were. But it is not these intentions or exact wordings

that matter. It is quite simply our interpretation of them. The purpose of these plays was for the

entertainment of a people. Shakespeare wanted to arouse these people’s thoughts and provoke

their minds into more then just seeing the surface of a work. He wanted there to be a depth to

what you saw and more than meets the eye. It is this depth that makes his plays everlasting and

the interpretations of his plays infinite. Is the character of Hamlet a man, or a woman? The

answer is both because the answer lies within who we are and who we wish him to be.

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Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare and Modern Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008.

Shakespeare, William. No Fear Shakespeare: Hamlet. New York: Spark Publishing, 2003.