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Act 1, Scene 2
Frailty, thy name is Woman!
Hamlet begins the play extremely upset by his mother’s remarriage: in his first soliloquy in Act 1, Scene 2, he unleashes contempt on his mother, and he extends that contempt to all women. Here he blames the “frailty” of women for his mother’s decision. As the play progresses, Hamlet reveals his obsession with a specific form of what he sees as female frailty: his mother’s vulnerability to sexual temptation. When Hamlet finally confronts his mother in Act 3, Scene 4, her sexuality is what seems to offend him. He accuses her of “honeying and making love/Over the nasty sty.”
Act 3, Scene 1
If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry. Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go. Farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go, and quickly too. Farewell.
In Act 3, Scene 1, Hamlet and Ophelia (whose father has told her to break off her relationship with Hamlet) have a tense encounter in which she attempts to return gifts he had given her. Hamlet’s response to Ophelia is extremely vituperative and includes these stinging lines in which he besmirches her character and her virtue and urges her to stop looking for a husband but instead go to a “nunnery.” In Shakespeare’s day that word meant both “convent” and “brothel,” and here it could mean either (or both). While it can be argued that these stinging comments reflect Hamlet being upset with Ophelia breaking up with him rather than him being misogynistic in general, it’s worth considering that the play offers clear instances of Hamlet disparaging the character of both his mother and Ophelia but has no examples of him saying anything positive about any women.
I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God has given you one face and you make yourselves another. You jig and amble, and you lisp, you nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on ’t. It hath made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages. Those that are married already, all but one, shall live. The rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go.
As Hamlet continues his angry tirade against Ophelia in Act 3, Scene 1, he blames his madness on women—specifically on what he sees as women’s habit of disguising themselves with make-up and feminine behavior. Hamlet often struggles with the difficulty of separating disguises from reality, but he also seems obsessed with female sexuality. (He tells Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery” or some variation of that four separate times in Act 3, Scene 1.) Although it’s impossible to pin down the exact nature of Hamlet’s unstable behavior, his misogynistic outbursts suggest that his feelings about women play an important role in it. It also seems likely that his misogyny existed prior to the events depicted in the play.
Act 3, Scene 2
HAMLET: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
OPHELIA: No, my lord….
HAMLET: Do you think I meant country matters?
OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord.
HAMLET: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
Hamlet carries over his misogynistic behavior towards Ophelia from the prior scene to this exchange from Act 3, Scene 2, but this time he uses crude sexual innuendos to debase the former object of his affections. One thing that makes his crude sexual jokes at Ophelia’s expense seem even more shocking is that he isn’t making them surrounded by other men in a tavern, but rather, he is at the royal court in the company of King Claudius, Queen Gertrude, and Ophelia’s father, Polonius.
