Gertrude

              "Do not for ever with thy vailed lids seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou know'st 'tis common. All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity." (I.2.24)
                And so just like her new husband has forgotten his brother's death, the mother has tried to forget it. This demonstrates her shallowness. Or at least it presents her attempt to be shallow since deep inside she knows that what she has done is wrong, and being in a shallow denial is all one can do at that point. She loved her old husband, but now she has a new one and tries to bury her guilt and shame with that dead man.

              "O Hamlet, speak no more! Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul, and there I see such black and grained spots as will not leave their tinct" (III.4.72)
               There! Now she has come face to face with the doubt that has festered inside her since the beginning. She realizes that what she has done is wrong. Hamlet has caused her to go on a retrospective tour of her heart and what she finds there is exactly what she had been dreading.           

               "Oh Hamlet, you’ve broken my heart in two!" (III.4.127)
                 Hamlet, has separated her from her present self to her past self. It is all a matter of where her loyalties lie, that is why she is divided in two. Half of her wants to be with Claudius and the other half knows it is wrong and knows she has betrayed her late husband.

              "I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife; I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid, and not have strew'd thy grave. (V.1.33)
               It seems like Gertrude is always the one in ignorance. She does not see that it was ultimately her own son that drove Ophelia to her death. She apparently like Ophelia which was a part that I did not know before. She looked forward to her and Hamlet getting married.

              "No, no! the drink, the drink! O my dear Hamlet! The drink, the drink! I am poison'd." (V.2.58)
                What is interesting here is that Gertrude cries out for Hamlet in the end, not Claudius. Now, the reader can finally take comfort in the fact that her loyalty lay in Hamlet. Her desperate scream for Hamlet is heart-breaking because it is as almost as if she knows that the poison was meant for Hamlet by the scheme of Claudius. Gertrude has always been in the crossfire this whole play and now it finally kills her.