Hamlet and his GertrudeHow regal is the current queen in Shakespeare's tragic drama Hamlet? Is she an unprincipled opportunist? A lover dominated by passion? First the wife and then the mother? We study his life in this play. Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks in "Making Mother Matter: Repression, Revision, and the Stakes of 'Reading Psychoanalysis Into' Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet," comment on the defilement of the queen in Shakespeare's Hamlet: Hamlet, a play centered on crisis of the male subject and his "radical confrontation with the sexualized maternal body", brings to the foreground male anxiety towards mothers, female sexuality and, therefore, sexuality itself. Obsessed with the corruption of the flesh, Hamlet is pathologically fixated on questions of his own origin and destination, questions that are activated by his irrepressible attraction to and disgust with his mother's "tainted" body. (1) At the beginning of the play, Hamlet's mother is apparently disturbed by the appearance of her son in solemn black at the court meeting, and asks him: Good Hamlet, throw away your night-colour, and let your eyes look a friend in Denmark. Do not forever search for your noble father in the dust with your veiled eyelids: you know it is common; everything that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity. (1.2) The queen obviously sees her son's despondency as a consequence of his father's death. He joins the king in asking Hamlet to stay in Elsinore rather than return to Wittenberg. Respectfully the prince replies, "I will obey you with all my best, madam." So at the beginning the audience notices a decided... middle of paper......ges.com/hamlet/other/burton-hamlet.htmColeridge, 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.htmJorgensen, Paul A. “Hamlet.” William Shakespeare: the tragedies. Boston: Twayne Publ., 1985. Page no. http://www.freehomepages.com/hamlet/other/jorg-hamlet.htmlLehmann, Courtney and Lisa S. Starks. "Making the Mother Matter: Repression, Revision, and the Stakes of 'Reading Psychoanalysis' in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet." Early Modern Literary Studies 6.1 (May 2000): 2.1-24.Shakespeare, William. The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html No line nn.