Sexuality In Shakespeare's Hamlet

As well as resenting women for the allegedly brittle nature of their character and intellect, Hamlet is also shown to criticize women for their sexuality. This idea is communicated by Hamlet’s repulsion at the way in which his mother responded to her husband’s death with ‘such dexterity to incestuous sheets.’ Hamlet is not only revolted by his mother’s sex drives, but is enraged by with whom she chooses to fulfil them with. Bellowing at his mother that “at your age the heyday in the blood is tame”, Hamlet sees the desires for women to have sex as being another way in which they express neediness and fragility- he believes they are reliant solely upon their sexuality. Hamlet further associates such instincts with moral corruption, advising
his mother that she is living in the “rank sweat of an enseamed bed, stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty.” This thus demonstrates misogyny in it’s most blatant and extreme: While the noble male, Hamlet, responds to the death of his father with bereavement and sorrow, the weak and morally corrupt female, Gertrude, reacts merely by making love to his brother.