Gertrude is the beloved wife and mother in the play, Hamlet. Many say that she is
             responsible for Hamlet's agony in not being able to proceed with his revenge, and
             Claudius' hesitation to guard himself through the destruction of Hamlet. She is the woman
             who was "my virtue or my plague, be it either which," for both of her loves, and is herself
             a very ordinary person. Seemingly beautiful and warm-hearted, she has no mind of her
             own, and is vulnerable because she tends to be pulled by whatever force is the most
             powerfully aimed at her at any moment. Because of her character and personality, she
             turns to the "sunny side of life" and hates facing pain or any type of conflict. Also, the fact
             that Claudius carefully hid his crime of killing her husband from her shows her lack of
             criminal daring and his concern for her peace of mind. When things worked out so that she
             was able to marry her lover, however, she was happy and only wanted all the difficulties of
             Hamlet's refusal to forget the death of his father or to forgive her of incestuously
             remarrying Claudius are the only things that stop Gertrude from being perfectly happy;
             they remind her of the continuing difficulties of the position she is in, which, because of
             her incredible naiveté, she had hoped would end by changing the ordinarily accepted form
             of marriage. If she could only get Hamlet to accept her new husband as his new father,
             she could completely put away the past and start thinking about the present comfortably.
             She therefore begs him to remain at Elsinore so that this reconciliation can take
             place ("I pray thee, stay with us. Go not to Wittenberg." Act 1, scene 2, line 123). But as
             she watches her wonderful son only become more and more mentally deranged as the
             months pass by, and sees his offending behaviour beginning to disturb even the patience of
             Claudius, her happiness starts to wither. She hopes that Rosencrantz a...