Female Relationships in Hamlet

I've had some difficulty trying to expand the flurry of fragments that intrigued me in Hamlet into a full blog. To finally take a stab at it, I was considering the way Shakespeare portrays relationships between women, starting from the relationship between Gertrude and Ophelia. Gertrude is the one to break the news that Opehlia has died, "There is a willow grows aslant a brook...therewith fantastic garlands did she make...till that her garments, heavy with their drink, pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death" (4.7, 139). Gertrude mourns Ophelia, yet it seems to me that Gertrude is another character who failed Ophelia by not reaching out to her before it was too late.

Both Gertrude and Ophelia had received harsh treatment from the males of the play, namely Hamlet, who viciously ridiculed Ophelia to "join a nunnery" (ie, "You're a skank.") and equivalently insulted Gertrude, "As bad as kill a king and marry his brother" (3.4, 25). Gertrude and Ophelia have been name-called and overpowered by their male counterparts comparably. However, there are fewer scenes of the two women commiserating with one another or sharing their woes, as Desdemona and her attendant, Emilia, would discuss their theories of vexing husbands and men in Desdemona's bed chamber.
Gertrude may have been honestly oblivious to Ophelia's plight and grieving, for Gertrude admitted that she was expecting to lay flowers at Ophelia's bridal bed but surely not at her funeral. Even so, I am disappointed in the lack of camaraderie between the two women- they could have formed an alliance that would have strengthened them both.

Picking up on Shakespearean References
In my English Literature II class we are onto the modernist period of writing and just finished reading T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". In one of the poem's, "A Game of Chess", the barroom scene of a labor-class woman insensitively revealing the private life of her friend, Lil. The narrator divulges extremely personal details of Lil's disjointed marraige,
but get to my Shakespearean point, the poem concludes with the narrator and girlfriends departing with "good byes" which echo Ophelia's farewell prior to her suicide, "good night, ladies, good night sweet ladies, good night, good night."
In the context of the poem, Eliot was drawing from the emotionally-charged scene of "Hamlet" in order to convey his own female characters in a bleak and dire world.

What stood out to me was the opportunity to see Shakespeare through the eyes of another writer. The in-depth analysis of Shakespeare's works that comes from our class I consider invaluable, but within a Shakespeare-concentrated class I sometimes forget how far reaching Shakespeare's characters and themes touched others besides myself and how often he is echoed in subsequent great works literature for centuries after.