How Do You Feel About Gertrude? As A Character, As A Mom, As A Living And Breathing Human Being - However

how do you feel about gertrude? as a character, as a mom, as a living and breathing human being - however you want to answer it, it's up to you. i feel like she gets so little recognition even though she plays a biiig part in hamlet.

YEEEEEEEEES!! i agree with you 100% she's such an important character and she gets peanuts.

to answer your question simply: i love gertrude. i think she's such a wonderful character love or hate her.

she's a deeply flawed individual but so are the vast majority of the characters in the play! anything i say against her i think just enhances her as a character so don't think this is me "hating" her. i believe she truly loves hamlet but that she is a selfish person who becomes more concerned with her own happiness and how hamlet's mourning reflects on her which is amusingly hypocritical when you go by what hamlet says about his mother and uncle's partying, drinking, and blatant PDA.

the rest of this is headcanon but i think there was a time where she truly did love king hamlet and i believe she adores her son and does want him to be happy but that she got caught up in her own happiness and life when her son needed her the most. i think as time wore on king hamlet changed and became harsher towards her and young hamlet due in part to the strains of war. i think she fell out of love with him and there was claudius, ready to pick up the pieces.

i waffle on whether or not i think she conspired with claudius to kill king hamlet but it would be interesting if she did!! i absolutely believe she knew the cup was poisoned at the end of the play and drank it anyway to prove claudius' treachery and to save her son. her last act on earth is to warn hamlet and to try to protect him. imagine she did this not only to save him but to try and absolve herself for the crimes she committed against her first husband and, in hamlet's eyes, her son. idk it just makes me a bit feral.

gertrude makes me feral. i think she absolutely thinks she's doing her best and she's just not, at all. because she's human. and selfish and had the audacity to want to be happy and loved. i adore her. i adore a flawed, realistic character and gertrude is just that.

thank you so much for the ask!

Source details and larger version.

Much ado: vintage theatre imagery.

Today has been A Day so to cheer myself up, magic!Hamlet AU (and also a Faustus crossover because you can’t have magic Wittenberg without our favorite Master Doctor Faustus!)

-Wittenberg as a school of magic!!

-Hamlet and Horatio both study there (perhaps taught by a certain John Faustus…?)

-Ros & Guil also study magic but they’re not terribly committed (Ros would make an excellent bard if his parents would let him study that sort of thing)

-Powerful wizard Ham Sr uses the last of his life force to reconjure himself as a ghost

-Ophelia with healing magic who goes mad because she couldn’t get to Polonius in time to save him

-Horatio with healing magic and a history of using too much magic to the point that it’s dangerous for him so Hamlet, dying, realizing that to save his life, Horatio would put himself in danger and uses his last moments shutting him up with a kiss so he can’t say the words necessary for a spell.

-Hamlet and/or postcanon Horatio learning/attempting to learn necromancy (from Faustus??)

-(bonus: Mephistopheles being forced to drag Ham Sr out of purgatory so Hamlet can have a proper goodbye)

DAVID! WHAT HAS HAPPEN TO YOUR HAIR?!

i don't really go there because i've never seen the play in full, but i hope people in the a midsummer night's dream fandom use nick bottom for the appropriate smutfic tag comedy potential of having Bottom Bottom and Top Bottom tags. it's what shakespeare would have wanted

Uh. I went to the Oregon Shakespeare festival last week and saw five shows. I decided to draw a scene from each one we saw, so here they are. :]

My favorites are Lizard Boy and Macbeezy (if you know, you know).