Gertrude and Dido – Traumatized Female Characters in Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s Plays

The focus of this paper is on the analysis of two female characters from Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s plays within the context of trauma studies. Queen Gertrude from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1609) and Queen Dido from Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594), can be taken as two examples of how women were portrayed within the context of the Renaissance writing in the Elizabethan England. The traumas that they share and the experiences that both of them had to endure bring us closer to understanding the overall traumas and conditions for women in Elizabethan England. The framework of trauma studies, relying on the research by Cathy Caruth (1996), Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub (1992) and others, offers a background upon which these two female characters are analyzed. Hopefully, this paper offers an insight into the minds of these two traumatized, female characters.