Hamlet's Women: Evil and Skanky.

There are only two female characters in Hamlet, Gertrude and Ophelia.  While both women are not blatantly mistreated in the play, they are not treated with respect.  This is clear in how all the men refer to women as either evil, whorish, and/or stupid.

Gertrude, the queen and Hamlet's mother, is never by herself, she is either with Claudius or Hamlet; therefore it is implied that she does not have a thought of her own.  Hamlet sees his mother as a slut for marrying his uncle so soon after his father's death.  Not only did Gertrude move on quickly from his father, she is basically committing incest by marrying her dead husband's brother.  Claudius and Hamlet both view her as a pawn, just an uneducated woman that knows nothing of political affairs.

Ophelia is introduced as a young and flirtatious girl, innocent and usable.  She is specifically used by her family and the king and queen to see if Hamlet is really crazy in Act III, scene i, where everyone observes her and Hamlet's conversation.  When Ophelia ends things with Hamlet, he takes back all his feelings for her and calls her a sinner and a whore.  He begins to view her as and evil, wonton girl that uses make-up and pretty words to cover up the reality of the situation.  Ophelia's brother, Lartes, also believes that she is a silly, slutty girl.  Before he leaves for France, he asks her to stop her foolish behavior, controlling the way she acts.

Both women are small pieces in the larger political puzzle.  Hamlet sees them as impure and wonton; sinners that do nothing to stop the evilness around them.  In the end, both women die without proper Christian rights (confessing and last rights), which is the whole reason the ghost from earlier is in purgatory.  Both women die as sinners without the chance of redemption, which strengthens Hamlet's view of the women.

Hamlet: Emo? Crazy? Both?

A reoccurring plot through out Hamlet is Hamlet's intensifying madness.  Hamlet is emotional and depressed because of his father's death and his mother's apparent betrayal by marrying Hamlet's Uncle. While Hamlet is nearly middle-aged, he acts like a troubled teen through out the play.  He goes on tangents and is seriously depressed.  He curses his mother because her new marriage is disgusting to him.  His mother betrayed him by marrying his father's brother soon after the King's death.

Hamlet leaps from depressed and emotional to possibly crazy after he "sees" his father's ghost.   He speaks in ways that don;t make sense, but is being critical of everyone around him.  He pursues Ophelia, but goes behind her father's back, and sneaks to her room one night, frightening her.  Hardly the way a normal guy would try and date a girl!  Hamlet is the only that can see the ghost while in the closet with his mother, which leads us to believe more in his insanity.  However, Hamlet himself implies that his crazy rants are just acting, and that he has another motive for acting the way he does.  While he is confusing with his words, Hamlet is always making a point to the person he is talking to.  He questions them using round about ways, but is successful in doing so because he gets his point across.

While Hamlet feigns madness while speaking with others, his actions can be construed as mad.  While Hamlet is acting crazy, he is also dealing with the loss of his father and the betrayal of his mother.  Under this emotional stress, Hamlet begins to slip from faking madness to acting truly mad, killing Polonius which does not prove his sanity to those around him.  Hamlet starts to slip deeper and deeper into madness, but continues to critique the world around him showing us that he may still have some sanity driving his speech and actions.

Julius Caesar and the Supernatural

There is an element of the supernatural in just about all of Shakespeare's work, and Julius Caesar is no different.  There are omens or signs that Shakespeare uses as foreshadowing to Caesar's murder that the characters all misinterpret as good signs.
In Act I, scene iii, a terrible storm is the backdrop for Cassius' and Casca's conversation.  Cassius compares Caesar to to the storm, calling him dark and terrified as the storm.  Cassius sees the storm as a bad omen for Caesars coronation, that his promotion will lead to bad things for the state.  Cassius does not see that the storm is used to reveal his own darkness and plots.  Casca warns him not t walk in the storm, but Cassius ignores him saying that there is not difficulty for honest men, though this aligns Cassius with the evilness of the storm and his own plots.

Caesar's wife, Calpurnia experiences the next omen. In Act II scene iii, Calpurnia dreams of Caesars statue with holes in it and blood pouring out from those holes.  She believes that she is seeing signs of her husband's murder and begs him not to go to the senate meeting.  She also dreams of dead people walking in the streets, ghosts, a lioness giving birth, and a terrible storm.  Caesar heeds her warnings by seeing to an animal sacrifice so the augers may read the entrails.  Upon doing this, they cannot find the animal's heart, a very bad sign.  Caesar does not believe that the gods bode ill of him, so he ignores his wife and goes to the senate.

Act IV scene ii ends with Brutus seeing the ghost of Caesar, who tells him that he will see Brutus in Philippi.  Shakespeare uses the ghost as a symbol and as foreshadowing because Brutus dies at Philippi.  The ghost is used to symbolize Brutus' guilt from the murder of his friend in cold blood.