Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Consider how the impulse behind male resistance to women’s suffrage may have also manifested itself in male scholarly bias about Ophelia and Gertrude. If one feels women are too emotional, not rational enough to deserve to vote, how might that color one’s reading of Ophelia’s madness and drowning, and of Gertrude’s decision to drink from what Claudius knows is a poison cup, intended for Hamlet?  Women were not admitted to study at Oxford until 1920, and did not get the vote in England until 1918. (In other words, women have only had the vote in the UK for 100 years, out of four centuries of Shakespeare; and the vote is only one of many possible indicators of male bias.) It is easy to imagine average male literary critics writing off Ophelia’s many lines in Act 4, scene 5, as simply mad ravings, rather than finding any method in her madness; easy to imagine them missing how she acts like a court fool [1], or like Hamlet’s promised, handfast wife and queen regent in his absence [2]...