I hate those hamlet polls going around asking, for example, “was Gertrude unfaithful to king hamlet?” because I can’t just pick “yes” or “no.” Truthfully I think both are true. Something I love about Hamlet is that there are so many ways to read and understand it. I cannot definitely say one reading is correct over another (albeit with some exceptions) because each production that does something unique with the reading has something different to say and I love that! Maybe in one production Hamlet really loves Ophelia, maybe in another she really wasn’t all that important to him. Maybe in one production Gertrude cheated on King Hamlet, maybe in another she really did love him.
Theatre is versatile like that and it’s part of what makes it so special
and if Gertrude was cheating on King Hamlet, I’d want it to have been going on for long enough for Hamlet to have to question whether Claudius could be his biological father
just for an extra layer of drama and complication in the Drama And Complications Play