PROJECT-HAMLET.INFO: The Queen

Thoth Tarot (Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris):
The Empress
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Gertrude – The Queen – Susan Sarandon

[NOTE: If you haven't already read the disclaimer on this section's introductory page with regard to any and all actor names mentioned in this section of the website, please do so before proceeding here.]

"The mobled queen," someone in the far right corner of the first row sniggers, and he sounds a bit like Eric Porter's Polonius in the production of this play starring Sir Derek Jacobi.

I stifle the impulse to turn to the fellow and, like Sir Derek's Hamlet, simply respond with an imperious "Shshshshsh!!"

"No," I instead explain. "The "mobled queen" is Hecuba. And Hecuba is everything that Hamlet thinks his mother should be but is not: grief-stricken over her husband's brutal murder, loudly proclaiming the murderer's guilt for all of heaven and earth to hear, and indeed casting such a moving, dramatic figure that her appearance alone "would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven and passion in the gods."

So who then is Gertrude? An unfaithful wife? A woman even encouraging a Freudian relationship with her own son, as Ernest Jones and Sir Laurence Olivier would have us believe? (And boy, does Sir Laurence rub it in, with a camera trajectory expressly passing by Gertrude's bed, close-up and all, on the way from the platform on which the first scene takes place, to the hall of the state where we join the royal court on the occasion of Claudius's announcement of his and Gertrude's wedding; and a reverse run of that same trajectory at the end of the movie.) Or is Gertrude the Devil's ultimate tool – corrupted even before her first husband's murder, and with most wicked speed posting with dexterity to incestuous sheets with his murderer only a little month later, thus sanctifying the villain's unholy act by a marriage that cries foul and sacrilege to its very own most sacred meaning?

First and foremost, I think she is a very lonely woman; left alone way too often by a husband whose position as a sovereign and supreme commander must have brought about his absence from Elsinore as often as his presence there, and even when he was physically present, he can't have had all that much time to spend with her. For if you think in today's emancipated world a corporate CEO's wife is all too often neglected and reduced to trophy status – and I know that I, for one, wouldn't be able to take that kind of life for more than a few weeks, if that – think what it must have been like in the 15th and 16th century, when women, even those born to privilege, got stuck in (often arranged) marriages before they'd even fully outgrown their teenage years, and even as grown-ups, had decidedly fewer rights and opportunities to actively contribute to society – indeed, at every opportunity, they were made to feel its strictures.

I imagine that when Hamlet was younger, Gertrude at least still had her son to comfort her and keep her company, but now he, too, is grown up and off "to school," in other words to study, in Wittenberg. (And that experience, after all, is something Gertrude shares with almost every modern mother!) Thus, besides the Prince himself, Ophelia, and, of course, the Ghost, the Queen is the single loneliest person in the entire play, and that is probably her own greatest tragedy. Indeed, it strikes me as remarkable how lonely these four people are and how they, working together – but especially Hamlet, Gertrude and the Ghost – might have been able to expose Claudius for who he really is. And yet, even in that one moment when the "rightful" royal family is briefly reunited, when the Ghost intercedes in Hamlet's altercation with Gertrude after the play designed to "catch the conscience of the King," there is a near-complete failure of communication, in large part due to Gertrude's inability to see her former husband in his altered state. And unlike in the case of Hamlet and Polonius, where there is not even the sliver of a "what if" – not even in their very first direct interaction in the "fishmonger" scene – Hamlet and Gertrude once had, I think, a very close relationship; thus, Claudius's triumph lies not only in cutting off Gertrude's bond of loyalty to her first husband and in winning her at all – and very quickly at that – but moreover, although he doesn't also win Hamlet, in at least successfully stepping between the Prince and his mother.

"Aha," I hear from somewhere in the centre rows. "So you do buy into that Freudian concept of their relationship after all. When exactly did that change of mind come about?"

It didn't; and that doesn't even have anything to do with the fact that Sigmund Freud lived a few centuries after Shakespeare, so we don't even know whether the Bard would have been aware of all those psychological insights to which the rest of us only awoke during the last 100 years or so. In fact, there's little I would put past Old Will, in that as in many other departments. – But does every son who is an only child and whose mother – as I think is probable here – has raised him largely alone turn into Oedipus by virtue of that sole fact? For that matter, does every daughter fighting an overbearing father for independence and self-determination become Antigone? Psychologists may tell me that I am dead wrong here, but I honestly don't think so.

What does seem patently obvious to me is that, as explained in greater detail in this site's chapter on Hamlet and Women, to our Prince, like to most men of his time, a woman can only be either saint or sinner, either snow-white virgin or painted whore. So when Hamlet sees his mother, who not so long ago "would hang on [his own father] as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on," blithely permitting his uncle to court and eventually marry him – moreover, doing so at a time when by rights, decency and by virtue of her previously-professed feelings, she should still have been deeply in mourning – it doesn't even take him to know the full extent of Claudius's villainy to be profoundly disgusted, and for his mother to move from virtue to vice in his view then and there. Thus, when later confronting her over the full import of her consent to marry Claudius, of course he first and foremost reproaches her with having gone from a husband who was "a combination and a form indeed where every god did seem to set his seal to give the world assurance of a man" to "a mildew'd ear blasting his wholesome brother," and with having consummateded that second marriage "in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty": a most violent reproach indeed and, oh yes, also a confrontation with distinct overtones of rape. To me, however, this is all the more shocking and hard to take because until then there have not been any indications of a Freudian relationship between mother and son; at least the way I see their interactions. Now, granted, it's possible that we are meant to assume such a strong identification between Hamlet and his father that the very nature of the Prince's lavish praise of the murdered King (contrasted with his brutal description of Claudius and the nature of Gertrude's marriage to the latter) is also supposed to imply the existence of an, even if unavowed, Oedipean relationship between Hamlet and Gertrude. But Shakespeare was neither prudish nor a man to mince words, and if this had indeed been his intent, I'm sure he would have let us know so more directly. Moreover, if the relationship between mother and son were even remotely of this particular nature, I would expect there to be at least some hint of (suppressed) competition for Gertrude as a woman between father and son – there's no way the relationship between those two could in turn have been strong and stable if their respective roles had not been clearly defined as those of parent and child, and parent and child only. Yet, unlike Mr. Jones I don't read any part of his soliloquies as expressions of suppressed rebellion against an overbearing father, nor unadmitted relief over the elimination of a competitor; nor do I see any guilt or self-reproach in Hamlet's initial grief over his father's death. I'll freely grant that we do see him express plenty of guilt and self-loathing later in the play, of course, but those feelings only enter into the picture when he starts to grapple with the enormity of his father's legacy and charge; only when he begins to realise that he might prove a disappointment and a failure in the eyes of a father who so far was his key role model and frame of reference, and whose voice is, more and more, becoming that of his own conscience. Before encountering his father's Ghost for the first time, however, what we see is pure, unadulterated grief – indeed, Hamlet is the only person to show this kind of grief over the former King's, his father's death at all.

Then how did Claudius go about winning Gertrude? By exploiting her very loneliness and feeling of neglect, I think; but not, as this is sometimes portrayed, in an overly crude, carnal way. Oh, sure, he must have been assertive enough – to make his brother's loving wife completely overlook the suspicious circumstances of her first husband's death and then need no more than "a little month" to win her hand in marriage is a rare feat indeed under any circumstances – and Hamlet not only calls his uncle (among many other things) a "bloody bawdy ... lecherous, kindless villain;" his language in confronting his mother over her betrothal to his father's murderer also could hardly be any cruder. But here, as in the case of Polonius's character, I think we should use some caution before we buy too quickly and too easily into something the Prince says just because he happens to be our story's hero. Because Gertrude is not only the Queen and, by virtue of that position alone, used to considerable decorum; she is also of an age where, as Hamlet himself so cruelly reminds her, "the heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble, and waits upon the judgment" (wherefore the Prince even considers it impossible that what she feels for Claudius has anything to do with love at all – and truthfully, leaving aside that Hamlet's assumption, while a popular one with the men of his time, is of course flat-out wrong, can there be anything more brutal for a son to tell his own mother, any time, any place?) No: smooth operator that Claudius is, for all his Macchiavellian streak I think he realises that nothing is to be gained with a woman like Gertrude by mixing assertiveness with too open carnality. Thus, while there is probably a good deal of sexual energy between the two of them and Claudius is certainly relentless in his efforts, I would also expect him to be extremely chivalrous – and probably not just in public.

Now, of course that alone doesn't excuse Gertrude's conduct and the way she blinds herself to the truth about her new husband; nor does it provide more than a partial explanation to consider that by marrying Claudius she may actually have been seeking to bring some stability to her country (even taking into account that, particularly given the threat of invasion brought about by Fortinbras, her fears of unrest after the former King's death may have had a certain amount of legitimacy). For all that, she is still an all too willing partner in the union with Claudius, regardless whether or not she actually realises the full scope of his guilt: not even Hamlet, after all, does so with certainty in the beginning, however indistinctly grave his suspicions may be. But Gertrude, like all the play's characters – and none more so than her son the Prince himself – is a profoundly flawed human being; not superwoman, nor certainly spotless saint, and all alone as she is left, without counsel or support from any well-meaning friend, simply unable to cope with the situation in which she suddenly finds herself.

Now, with that reading of the Queen's character, I simply cannot imagine anybody but Susan Sarandon in her role. This is not to say, of course, that British theatre doesn't have plenty of great actresses of its own; and indeed, with Claire Bloom and Julie Christie, two of the greatest did portray Gertrude in two of my all-time favourite enactments of the play. Claire Bloom's performance in particular is one I admire a lot: in all its troubled complexity it is also tremendously dignified, motherly and feminine, all at the same time. But this is exactly the point: for all her flaws, "my" Gertrude is also a woman of great dignity and warmth; endowed with a very acute sense of her own womanhood, which has (doubtlessly to her own greatest regret) gone neglected for a large part of her marriage, and which, moreover, has undergone significant changes over the course of time. And looking at the entirety of Ms. Sarandon's career, I just feel that like no other actress she brings together all these different and in part, seemingly so contradictory elements in truly poignant fashion. I obviously see quite a lot of Sally Matthews from "Atlantic City" and other women more or less like her, such as Nora Baker and Judith Singer from "White Palace" and "Compromising Positions," respectively, in Gertrude, as well as some of the suppressed motherhood of Thelma's friend Louise Sawyer, and of Reggie Love from "The Client." Then there's of course Jackie Harrison from "Stepmom," and maybe even a little left of the good-natured impulsiveness of Mary Beth in "The Great Waldo Pepper." And oh yes, there's even Sister Helen Prejean; and not just her motherly side, either. For remember that moment in "Dead Man Walking" where Matt Poncelet (Sean Penn), still "looking for loopholes" – looking for a fast way to salvation without having to own up to the horrors of his crime – makes a pass at Sister Helen? Then and there, and in the mere split second of her immediate reaction, Ms. Sarandon lets us (and him) know that, nun or not, she is absolutely woman enough to appreciate a compliment as a compliment if it is meant as such ... only this one isn't, and that's why she won't honour it. Only an actress as thoroughly "in touch" with her own femininity (for lack of a better expression, although I confess I hate this particular one) could have pulled off that one extraordinary moment, and it is precisely that sensitivity which is needed for Gertrude's part as well.

So: Gertrude – the Queen – Susan Sarandon. Not "mobled queen" but a noble, complex, and profoundly unhappy woman, desperately trying to cling to life and absolutely shattered by her son's revelations.