‘The women in Hamlet prove to be little more than weak victims in the struggle between far more dramatically important males.’ Does this view support your own reading of the play? How far might an Elizabethan audience agree with this view?

It is a controversial statement to compare a woman to a ‘weak victim’; a statement that would open a vast range of varying arguments. There are two female characters in the great play write William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’; Gertrude the widow of Old Hamlet, and the new wife of Claudius, and Ophelia; daughter of Polonius and lover of young Hamlet.
I will analyse this suggested hypothesis of women and contemporise both sides of the argument, also considering to what extent an Elizabethan audience may agree with the view that the females in the play are nothing but weak victims caught in the struggle between far more important males.

Hamlet was written in the very early 17th Century under the rule of Elizabeth 1st. It was a very patriarchal society meaning that men considered themselves to be leaders and women their inferiors. Women were regarded as the “weaker sex” not only in terms of physical strength but emotional stability as well. It was believed that women always needed someone to look after them, that they were not capable of leading independent lives. If a woman was single her father or brother would be expected to take care of her; quite like Ophelia’s situation and the naïve dependency on her father.
As Queen Elizabeth was head of the monarchy, this play would have been shown to her with a dependency on her approval. Shakespeare would have been conscious of this fact whilst writing, especially when writing for Gertrude and the perception of her personality as she too was Queen (in the play), and he would not have wanted to offend Queen Elizabeth.
Patricia Parker says “Women are words, men deeds” in her book Literary Fat Ladies. This was a perfect summarisation of the personas of women in the Elizabethan era, as they were considered to be all talk and no action so to speak, where as men would act upon thought and ‘sort things out’ if they went wrong.