Comparing Gertrude and Ohpelia

             It is the emotion that will eventually weaken every heart. "A lame doe is preyed upon by a wolf that senses her weakness; a human is destroyed by something that finds theirs. A disease can find its way through a hole in a fragile immune system like man uses any flaw in a coat of armour to get in his blow. If you do not love, then you have a better chance of getting somewhere in life. No disease of the heart will make you infirm, powerless, or dead, for that matter. You can achieve your ambitions by hook, crook, or trick, and never once think about the opinion of another on what you did. Freedom from love is freedom to do whatever you want; however you want." In the play Hamlet, Shakespeare uses the two women, Gertrude and Ophelia, demonstrate that eventually love weakens people and destroys them, and perhaps this could be their greatest weakness of all.
             In Elizabethan times, men always dominated over women. Women were not allowed to perform on stage, which meant that female characters in Shakespeare's plays were always played by boys dressed up as women. The boys were young of course, without the years of acting training or experience of much older adult actors. So female parts are almost always relatively small, and some of the female characters might be less developed than Shakespeare might ideally wanted to make them. This is why the women in Shakespeare's Hamlet, are more often than not, dominated by the men, which we can clearly see happening in the roles of Gertrude and Ophelia. Gertrude however, does not let other people, especially men, overrule her too much, which makes her quite different from most other women. She basically stands up for herself quite like Queen Elizabeth I did in some respects.
             Gertrude is, more so than any other character in Hamlet, the antithesis of her son. Hamlet is a scholar and a brave man, even said to be by many critics some sought of "tragic hero".