926 shakespeare, William
first love of young adulthood, love between friends,
the love of power, and the love of honor.
The customary love between children and their
parents is exemplified by Ophelia and Laertes’ love
for their father and Polonius’s love of them. In fuss-
ing over Laertes as he prepares to return to Paris,
Polonius displays a normal, if wordy, concern for
his son’s honorable conduct in the world. Simi-
larly, Polonius seems genuinely to want to protect
his daughter as he assesses her relationship with
Hamlet.
During the Renaissance, marriage among the
powerful was often simply a business transaction
intended to consolidate power, territory, and wealth.
It seems clear that Ophelia and Hamlet are in
love, but in the world of Elsinore, that may not be
enough. Had Ophelia married Hamlet in the best
of all possible worlds, eventually she would have
become his queen. But Hamlet has just lost succes-
sion to the throne because his uncle, Claudius, has
usurped it. Perhaps this political reality has stymied
Polonius’s ambitions for Ophelia: Since it is the
worst of all possible worlds, if she ties herself to
Hamlet, her future is now murky at best. On the one
hand, when Polonius cautions her to reject Hamlet,
surely he has her innocence in mind and wants to
protect her from the improper sexual transgressions
to which young lovers may be prone. On the other
hand, he may want to take time to evaluate his
daughter’s situation.
Finally, Ophelia and Laertes’ natural love for
their father is employed narratively by Shakespeare
when Hamlet mistakenly murders Polonius. Oph-
elia’s already aggrieved mental state is made worse by
mourning the death of her father at the hands of the
man she has loved. Her drowning, then, is a result
of her depression and a further impetus for Laertes
to avenge his father’s murder. Laertes’ love for his
sister and family honor is already the reason why he
has returned from France in a state of outrage. This
indignation, coupled with his grief when he learns
of his father’s death, and then of his sister’s death,
is the motive for him joining forces with Claudius
against Hamlet.
The love between children and their parents
is distorted in the case of Hamlet’s family due to
extreme circumstances. Had King Hamlet died
naturally of old age, the prince would have mourned
and recovered. Had a normal period of grieving
elapsed before Gertrude married Claudius, Ham-
let might have adjusted to the reorganization of
power and family relationships. Instead, escalating
problems are added to his heap of woes. The ghost
reveals the crime and asks for vengeance; Ophelia
rejects him; and Gertrude’s possible complicity with
Claudius contaminates Hamlet’s trust of Ophelia,
simply because she is a woman. Ultimately, though,
he yields to the ghost’s cry for justice because he
loves his father, and as a noble man of conscience, he
loves honor and must make things right.
Hamlet torments Gertrude about her involve-
ment because he loves her and wishes for her to be
innocent, but he cannot shake his suspicions. Per-
haps he loves her too much. As the play progresses,
he articulates increasingly rank and graphic images
of his mother coupled with Claudius in the conju-
gal bed that in act 3 he calls a “sty.” His ability to
envision his mother in the act of sex with his uncle
is sometimes understood by critics to be a sign of
Hamlet’s unnaturally strong psychological attach-
ment to his mother.
For Gertrude’s part, she clearly loves her son,
and she worries about his increasingly disturbed
appearance and behavior. Explaining to Laertes why
he has not yet punished Hamlet for killing Polonius,
Claudius says, “The queen his mother / Lives almost
by his looks” (4.7.11–12). The crazier Hamlet acts,
the more Gertrude defends him as simply being
mad. Even when Hamlet berates her, in the closet
scene, for having given herself to Claudius, “In the
rank sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stewed in corrup-
tion, honeying and making love,” Gertrude asks him
to stop, but calls him “sweet Hamlet” (3.4.92–97),
one could say that their extreme, reciprocal love for
one another is nearly incestuous, as is Gertrude’s
having married her husband’s brother.
One question that remains unanswered in the
play is whether Gertrude figured strongly in Claudi-
us’s decision to murder King Hamlet, if we are to
believe the ghost’s version of what happened. After
all, Claudius is no adolescent subject to the intoxica-
tions of first love. Yet when Claudius discusses with
Laertes Hamlet’s murder of Polonius, he explains
that he has not moved against Hamlet because Ger-