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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
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
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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
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
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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
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
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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.

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.