Hamlet's Mother

Michael Pennington and Barbara Leigh-Hunt
Royal Shakespeare Company
John Barton, Director
1980

Killing your father and sex with your mother: of the two, the Freudians believed that the latter produced the greatest feelings of guilt and repulsion.

Feelings which once, in the infancy of long ago, were pleasurable desires can now, because of his repressions, only fill him with repulsion...  - Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus, W.W.Norton, NY 1976. p.82.

Ernest Jones then goes on to postulate that Hamlet's sexual repression leads to hostile, misogynist behavior regardless of whether the woman is perceived to be virtuous or lascivious.

When sexual repression is highly pronounced, as with Hamlet, then both types of women are felt to be hostile: the pure one out of resentment at her repulses, the sensual one out of the temptation she offers to plunge into guiltiness. Misogyny, as in the play, is the inevitable result.  - Jones. p. 86.


It's interesting to note that twentieth-century directors who are more inclined to accept the Freudian interpretation of Hamlet, usually make what they consider to be covert overt in the scene in Gertrude's closet (Act III, Scene iv). Here are a couple examples.

[clips from Zeffirelli and the BBC production]