Stanton, Kay. “Hamlet’s Whores.” New Essays on Hamlet. Ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning. Hamlet Collection 1. New York: AMS, 1994. 167-88.

FEMINISM / GERTRUDE / HAMLET / LAERTES / OPHELIA

This interpretation explores all the variations of whore-dom in Hamlet. The women are not the only ones prostituted. Like Ophelia, Hamlet is “‘whored’ by the father”: “The older generation incestuously prostitutes the innocence of the younger” (169). Further examples include Polonius prostituting Laertes and Reynaldo with plans of spying and Claudius, the “symbolic father,” similarly misusing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (169). But the victims are not entirely innocent either. Hamlet “whores” the theater and its actors—“his great love”—by perverting artistic purpose and integrity (173), and the play-within-the-play “whores him as he has whored it, making him no longer one of the innocent, but one of the ‘guilty creatures’ at and in the play” (185). Laertes misuses his favorite pastime, fencing, to destroy his perceived enemy (180). The duel, “a gruesome perversion of the sex act” complete with phalluses and pudendum (181), leaves a dying Hamlet to whore Horatio, Fortinbras to whore Hamlet’s story, and a new “bawd” to reestablish the patriarchy (182). Because these males insist on a binary opposition between genders, ever fearing womanly characteristics within themselves, they project their “whorishness” onto female targets, covering over masculine violence (178). The closet scene exemplifies this technique: after Hamlet murders Polonius, Gertrude’s “supposed sin is made to overshadow his actual sin and somehow to justify it” (179). Only in death does Ophelia escape the whore image, but she becomes the “worshipped Madonna as Hamlet and Laertes can then safely whore their own self-constructed images of pure love for her as rationale for violence against each other” (179). The whoring consumes the play, as Hamlet “‘whores’ Hamlet the prince to be the organ for its art” (183).

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