Discuss the representation of women in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

First of all, let's look at how many female characters there are in Shakespeare's tragedy; two. This is a play governed by men. Both Ophelia and Gertrude say very little, which adds to the overwhelming sense of male dominance.
As Gertrude and Ophelia say so little, we also fail to learn much about them in their own words; to put it another way, their characters are moulded by the men around them. Look at the nunnery scene and the closet scene; even before these two scenes, look to Hamlet's outcry of 'frailty, thy name is woman'. This is a tragedy with rigid views of women and femininity.
How do these women have a voice in a play in which their very selves are formed by the men around them? Does Shakespeare even given them a voice?
It could be argued that Gertrude's greatest expression of voice is in her silence. When she drinks the poisoned chalice at the play's denouement, we do not know her motives; does she know it's poisoned, or is she unaware? If she does indeed know of the lethal contents, does that make her actions heroic? And how does that respond to Hamlet's order to her to 'assume a virtue if you have it not'?
And what of Ophelia? It could be argued that she uses the overwhelmingly sexual rhetoric applied to her (and also to Gertrude) by the men to her own advantage when 'mad'. During her songs she delivers some stinging truths to men (such a men abandoning women after they have slept with them) that directors of both stage and screen adaptations have relished the chance to explore (see Kenneth Branagh's adaptation).