The Contrast of Gertrude and Ophelia in Hamlet Queen Gertrude and Ophelia, the main female characters in Shakespeare's dramatic tragedy Hamlet, have a variety of qualities and experiences conflicting or dissimilar personalities. 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: His [Hamlet's] mother is a criminal. , has been guilty of a sin that darkens the stars, makes life beastly and infects even his own blood. He committed incest. Modern readers, living in an age where marriage laws are a matter of free discussion and with the deceased wife's sister acting according to the norms, cannot be expected to fully share Hamlet's feelings on this matter. Yet no one who reads the first soliloquy in the text of the Second Quarto, with its illuminating dramatic punctuation, can doubt for a moment that Shakespeare wanted here to make full use of Gertrude's violation of ecclesiastical law, and expected his audience to watch it . with the same horror that the Athenians felt for what we should consider the most venial, because unconscious, crime of Sophocles' Oedipus (39). In contrast to the criminality of the king's wife is the innocence of Ophelia, who could be called a “broken lily” (O'Donnell 241). In the Introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hamlet, David Bevington enlightens the reader regarding this dissimilarity between the two women: The characters also serve as contrasts to each other and to Hamlet. Gertrude longingly sees in Ophelia the b...... center of paper ......ffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968.Boklund, Gunnar. "Hamlet." Essays on Shakespeare. Ed. Gerald Chapmann. Princeton, NJ: 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. Rpt. 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 lines nn.Wilson, John Dover. What happens in Hamlet. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.