Gertrude: in the Middle

Shakespeare created an interesting problem for himself with the character of Gertrude. As a dramatist, he needed to nourish the conflict between his characters in order to keep the heat and pressure up to the point where the action was ready to explode at any moment. At the same time, he created a character that sits in the middle of the conflict, and seems intent in defusing it at every turn. That character is Gertrude. She is both mother and peacemaker in a blended family that has just come into an unstable existence. When we first see her, she takes on the unofficial task of reconciling her new husband’s enthusiasm for his recent alliance with her son’s apparent mourning for his recently deceased father. One assumes that Claudius’ announcement in that scene that Hamlet is next in line for succession to the throne comes about as one of the terms of the agreement that created the alliance. It is certainly an expression of Claudius’ willingness to honor his new wife’s affection for her son.

Gertrude is thoughtful and sensitive in her attempts to intervene. She is not simply an unwitting victim of her circumstance, as some critics would have it.

Gertrude is wholly ignorant of Caludius' successful plot against her first husband and equally oblivious of Hamlet's protectively possessive feelings towards her. She finds his melancholic behaviour exasperating, and is unable to understand why he will not rejoice with the rest of the court at her marriage. She seems a kindly, slowwitted, rather self-indulgent woman, in no way the emotional or intellectual equal of her son. When Hamlet finally determines to make her see the ghastly error of her choice his cruelly-chosen words force her to feel guilty:

O Hamlet, speak no more.
Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul,
And there I see such balck and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct. (III,iv.88-91)

... He begs her not to sleep with Claudius again, but although she promises not to tell anyone what he has said, she avoids giving a direct answer. It may be that Gertrude is attempting a practical compromise: she wants to calm Hamlet but cannot bring herself to swear to something she will not be able to do. No clue as to her subsequent sexual relationship with Caludius is given.  - Angela Pitt, Shakespeare's Women, David and Charles, London, l981. p. 58f.

What sabotages Gertrude’s attempts to contain the conflict between Claudius and Hamlet is the fact that she is not entirely in the know. Claudius is not entirely forthcoming to Gertrude as a result of his deceit, whereas Hamlet is taciturn. The dramatic irony that increases the poignancy of her position has to do with the fact that we are continuously aware of covert actions against Hamlet that Claudius has kept from Gertrude: the intention to have the English execute Hamlet upon his arrival there, the baiting of Laertes’ foil with poison, etc. It is, in fact, one of these covert actions (as usual kept from Gertrude) that causes her undoing. In effect, Gertrude does not know what she has married, and the gradual realization provides one way to chart her trajectory through the action of the play. To begin with, there is the fact of Claudius’ role in her former husband’s demise. While it appears clear that Gertrude was not involved in the murder of the former king, the issue still seems to generate discussion. In particular, some argue that this was not Shakespeare’s original intention and that he waffles on the question.

One feels tempted to suppose that, when he wrote the ghost scene, Shakespeare meant her to have connived at least at her husband's death; that he afterwards changed his mind and thought of her as guilty only of adultery -- perhaps not even that; and that he failed to reconcile the two ideas on the final acting version of the play.  - G.F.Bradby, The Problems of "Hamlet, Haskell House, N.Y., 1965. p.21

Early feminist critics such as Linda Bamber argue that Gertrude's involvement in the death of the former King Hamlet is not really at issue at all. She focuses on Hamlet's fascination with what he imagines to be his mother's sex life.

Gertrude's innocence or guilt is not really an issue in the play. She, like Cleopatra, is a character of ambiguous morality whom we can never fully know; but whereas Antony and Cleopatra continually invites our judgment of Cleopatra, Hamlet continually deflects our impulse to judge Gertrude. First of all, we have no firsthand evidence. Although Hamlet sees his mother as a disgustingly sensual creature, the relationship that we see between Gertrude and Claudius is domestic and ceremonial, never sexual at all... The Gertrude that we see -- as opposed to the one that Hamlet imagines -- is her son's mother and a worried, affectionate partner to her husband, who happens to be going through a period of political danger.  - Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men, Stanford Univ. Press., Stanford, 1982. p.75

For interpreters such as Professor Bamber what is not included in the text does not exist. Directors, however, do not have that preoperative. Questions of the unseen have to be resolved for a performer to express the full humanity of their character. We can see this, for example, from the opening moments of Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 film version of Hamlet. In the burial scene, which he interposes at the beginning of the film, Franco Zeffirelli seeds suspicions of a preexisting affair between Gertrude and Claudius through an interplay of furtive glances between Gertrude, Claudius and Hamlet -- an interplay which continues throughout the first half of the production. Hamlet's statements regarding the haste with which the marriage follows the funeral are here dramatized by the fact that Zeffirelli cuts directly from the funeral scene to the announcement of the wedding.

Franco Zeffirelli stages the shots which contain both Gertrude and Caludius (Glenn Close and Alan Bates) in such a way that Gertrude always appears to be looking over Claudius' shoulder. The viewer's surmise is that she is looking for Hamlet; trying to assess where she and Claudius stand in relationship to her son. This stresses Gertrude's role throughout as a mother who is trying to reconfigure her family around her new husband. She tries to pull Hamlet in and to smooth over any rupture that might exist. It also becomes Gertrude's role to paint the verbal portrait of Ophelia's death and to deliver an elegy for her.

Sweets to the sweet! Farewell. [Scatters flowers.]
I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife.
I thought thy bride bed to have decked, sweet maid,
And not have strewed thy grave.

It is cynical to doubt the sincerity of her feelings for Ophelia. The two of them seem assigned to the role of safeguarding the feminine heritage of the play, and with the loss of her potential daughter-in-law, that heritage is sadly terminated. Zeffirelli's Gertrude is clearly a peacemaker. In an early sequence, Franco Zeffirelli has Gertrude abruptly leave off kissing Claudius to go look for Hamlet (to Claudius' evident dismay) and then leave off kissing Hamlet to go join Claudius (also to Hamlet's dismay).

This interplay continues in the film until the closet scene (Act III, scene iv). The change that takes place after that scene can be interpreted as suggesting that Gertrude takes Hamlet's stern message to heart.

A lot rests on the director's view of Gertrude's sexuality. For Linda Bamber, the focus is on Hamlet's assumed fascination with Gertrude's sexual behavior (which she refers to as "sex nausea"). In order to hilite his pornographic imagination, it is essential that his view be incorrect. Director Tony Richardson, however, presents a Gertrude who justifies Hamlet's portrayal of the relationship. He even goes so far as to have Claudius and Gertrude (Judy Parfitt and Anthony Hopkins) conducting matters of state from their bed. Richardson seems to give credence to Hamlet's accusations:

              Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty.... (III.iv.92-95)

Hamlet does not survive on the back of the relationsip between Gertrude and Claudius, but the nature of that relationship is a functional contributor to the marvelous complexity of the play. In the closet scene, Hamlet implores Gertrude to discontinue sexual relations with Claudius. Her response to his urgings would then color her (and Claudius') behavior for the rest of the play. In some productions (Laurence Olivier's, for example), it is clearly the case that Gertrude has headed Hamlet's plea and has rejected Claudius' affections. The strain that this puts on their marriage is visible in the subsequent scenes and contributes to the growing dramatic pressure of the play.

Gertrude's demise offers directors a final chance to bring her internal drama to full resolution. Both Laurence Oliver and Michael Almereydra (1999) seize this opportunity by having Gertrude recognize that the drink that kills her is poisoned prior to her consuming it. In a startling act of defiance, she challenges Claudius by giving him a chance to admit to his duplicity, and when he fails to do so, she commits an act which is sure to expose his covert actions against Hamlet. Her willful suicide also dramatizes the fact that she has failed in her role as peacemaker - not through her own doing, but because Claudius has sabotaged the entire process. In effect, the duplicity of which she has become aware, has also undermined her purpose in the drama, and made her very existence problematic.

A century after Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalytic critic, Jacques Lacan talks about another form of repression which affects Gertrude as well as Hamlet. This is the repression of the process of mourning.

From one end of Hamlet to the other, all anyone talks about is mourning.

Mourning is what makes the marriage of Hamlet's mother so scandalous. In her eagerness to know the cause of her beloved son's "distemper," she herself says: "I doubt it is no other but the main,/ His father's death and our o'erhasty marriage."...

Nor can we fail to be struck by the fact that in all the instances of mourning in Hamlet, one element is always present: the rites have been cut short and performed in secret.

For political reasons, Polonius is buried secretly, without ceremony, posthaste. And you remember the whole business of Ophelia's burial. There is the discussion of how it is that Ophelia, having most probably committed suicide -- this is at least the common belief -- still is buried on Christian ground. ...  - Jacques Lacan, "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet," in Shoshana Felman, Literature and Psychoanalysis, Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1982. pp.38ff.

The Freudian assumption (for Oedipus Rex as well as for Hamlet) is that the repression of mourning has a psychological effect which will eventually find expression.

What I have just said about mourning in Hamlet must not obscure the fact that at the bottom of this mourning, in Hamlet as in Oedipus, there is crime. Up to a certain point, the whole rapid succession, one instance of mourning after another, can be seen as consequences of the initial crime. It is in this sense that Hamlet is an Oedipal drama, one that we can read as a second Oedipus Rex and locate at the same functional level in the genealogy of tragedy. This is also what put Freud, and his disciples after him, onto the importance of Hamlet.  - Jacques Lacan,. p.41f.

Throughout the drama, Gertrude is constantly there, attempting to maintain the home base. From even before the drama starts, her sorrows come, "not single spies but in battalions," and one by one, she is forced to repress her grief in favor of maintaining an appropriate front. Contrary to diminishing the likelihood of a collapse of the established order, this sequence of events increases it. It becomes certain that this edifice will crumble at some time to reveal the emptiness behind it. Each grief is denied its appropriate response in favor of political necessity. The human cost is considerable.