Gertrude’s Moral Transgression in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”

In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Gertrude commits the moral transgression of marrying Claudius, her late husband’s brother, shortly after the King of Denmark’s death. Numerous references to her sin are made, and she is punished for it in the end with death.

Hamlet laments Gertrude’s hasty marriage to Claudius and considers Gertrude to have had base motivations for this decision when he states of his father, “But two months dead-nay, not so much, not two./ So excellent a king, that was to this/ Hyperion to a satyr,” (1.2.142-4), implying that Gertrude had forsaken her duty to mourn a morally admirable husband to wed a morally lax, licentious half-beast whom Hamlet considers Claudius to be.

Hamlet asserts that this decision was driven by sub-animal leanings in Gertrude, since “a beast that wants discourse of reason/ Would have mourned longer!” (1.2.154-5). Gertrude is easily seduced by Claudius’s bodily charm and is prepared to abandon all virtue and reverence as a result. Later on, she experiences deep sorrow for having undertaken such a decision, as, when Hamlet compares before her the portraits of her dead husband and Claudius, she is emotionally overcome and tells him, “These words like daggers enter in my ears./ No more, sweet Hamlet!” (3.4.108-9). Gertrude explicitly states the grave folly of her decision when she refers to her inner condition as her “sick soul (as sin’s true nature is)” (4.5.22).

By having characters as different in fundamental mindset as Hamlet and Gertrude come to similar conclusions about the sinful nature of Gertrude’s carnal attraction to Claudius, Shakespeare illustrates that Gertrude’s sin was indeed absolute and verifiable through multiple perceptions, as opposed to being merely a subjective notion on the part of one of the characters. Moreover, Gertrude suffers the consequences of her sinful disposition. At the end of the play, she is poisoned as a result of the actions of the very man in whose pursuit she had abandoned her mourning. In devising such an outcome, Shakespeare imbues Gertrude’s story with a certain poetic justice, as, absent Gertrude’s lust for Claudius, she would not have died in such a manner.

Gertrude’s lack of faithfulness to her late husband led her to hastily marry his murderer and to be killed by him in turn. Had Gertrude waited longer to make her decision and gathered more of the facts about her husband’s death, the tragic story of Hamlet need not have taken place.