Contrasting Gertrude and Ophelia in HamletQueen Gertrude and Ophelia, the main female characters in Shakespeare's dramatic tragedy Hamlet, have a variety of qualities and personal experiences contrasting or dissimilar. This essay, with the help of literary critics, will explore these differences. John Dover Wilson, in his book What Happens in Hamlet, discusses what is perhaps the biggest difference between Ophelia and Gertrude: their morality: Her [Hamlet's] mother is a criminal. , is guilty of a sin that erases his stars, makes life a bestial thing and even infects his blood. She committed incest. Modern readers, living in an age when marriage laws are freely discussed and a deceased wife's sister acts in accordance with the laws, can hardly be expected to enter fully into the sentiments of Hamlet on this question. Yet no one who reads the first soliloquy of the Second Quarto text, with its illuminating dramatic punctuation, can doubt for a moment that Shakespeare here wished to take full advantage of Gertrude's violation of ecclesiastical law and expected that her audience considers it. with as much aversion as the Athenians felt for what we should consider the most venial, because involuntary, crime of Sophocles' Oedipus (39). Opposing the criminality of the king's wife is the innocence of Ophelia, who might be called a "broken lily" (O'Donnell 241). In the Introduction to Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Hamlet, David Bevington enlightens the reader on this dissimilarity between the two ladies: The characters also serve as foils to each other as well as to Hamlet. Gertrude sees with hope in Ophelia the b...... middle of paper ......ffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968.Boklund, Gunnar. "Hamlet." Essays on Shakespeare. Ed. Gerald Chapman. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1965. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Lectures and notes on Shakspere and other English poets. London: George Bell and Sons, 1904. p. 342-368. http://ds.dial.pipex.com/thomas_larque/ham1-col.htmO'Donnell, Jessie F. “Ophelia.” The American Shakespeare Magazine, 3 (March 1897), 70-76. Rep. in Women Reading Shakespeare 1660-1900. Ed. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts. New York: Manchester University Press, 1997. Shakespeare, William. The tragedy of Hamlet, prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html No line nos.Wilson, John Dover. What happens in Hamlet. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.