Reading the Queen: Gertrude between Piety and Power

            Gertrude is one of Shakespeare’s most ambiguous queens. She is a role that compresses arguments about sexuality, maternal authority, dynastic legitimacy, and conscience into remarkably few lines. Yet her afterlives are abundant. Read alongside the chronicles that prefigure Hamlet (Saxo Grammaticus and François de Belleforest), Shakespeare’s queen stands at the junction of piety and power; read through Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film, she is reframed within an Oedipal optics; read through Howard Barker’s Gertrude – The Cry (2002), she becomes the sovereign of her own desire, a strategist who treats the bedchamber as a council room. This essay compares these four iterations to clarify how Gertrude’s agency, political motives, and religious self-understanding are alternately foregrounded, muted, or transformed across media and eras. Two through-lines organize the discussion. First, I keep the Shakespearean text distinct from adaptations that impose a psychosexual lens, attending to the play’s ethical vocabulary, especially the closet scene (3.4). Second, I track what is called the “death enigma”: the poisoned cup in 5.2, which can be played as accident, self-sacrifice, or suicide. Attending both to source traditions and to modern adaptations show how Gertrude’s meanings are produced at the crossing of religious codes and statecraft, and why productions repeatedly return to her as the hinge on which the drama’s moral argument swings.

            The Hamlet story enters European letters most influentially through Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum (early thirteenth century) and, later, François de Belleforest’s widely circulated Histories Tragiques (1570). Saxo’s chronicle registers the stakes of royal succession in a volatile court, where marriage functions as strategic instruments of rule; Belleforest intensifies the moral charge against Gertrude (or, Gurutha) by asserting that the queen committed adultery with her husband’s brother (Fengon) prior to the murder – in which she is a co-conspirator. That allegation front-loads onto the queen and recalibrates audience expectation about her knowledge and complicity (Internet Shakespeare Editions).

            Shakespeare inherits this dossier of motives and suspicions, but he does something theatrically canny with it through compressing Gertrude’s voice while keeping the most provocative question – what does she know and when does she know it? – productively unresolved. The compression matters because it shifts ethical labor onto performance and audience inference. In Saxo and Belleforest, narrative commentary tells us how to judge the woman’s sexuality and allegiance; in Shakespeare, silence and brief lines do the work.

            Most readers meet Gertrude in the council scene (1.2), which is not simply a family conversation but a public performance of authority by a fragile regime. Claudius speaks in a rhetoric of balance “With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage” and Gertrude’s earliest lines echo the court’s need for stability by urging her son to abandon excessive mourning: “Good Hamlet, cast thy nightly color off, / and let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. / Do not for ever with thy vailed lids / Seek for thy noble father in the dust” (Shakespeare 1.2.68-71). She follows with a question that steers perception from being to seeming: “If it be, / Why seems it so particular with thee?” (1.2.74-75). The phrasing has often been read as callous, but it can also be heard as political pedagogy: a queen educating a prince in the optics of rule, where private grief must be subordinated to public continuity.

            A second inheritance concerns religion. Belleforest writes in post-Tridentine environment of moralizing narrative, and the consanguineous marriage to a brother-in-law triggers strong scriptural anxiety (Leviticus 18). Shakespeare keeps that pressure alive not through doctrinal speeches but through Hamlet’s rhetoric, which casts the union as “incest” and “o’erhasty” (Shakespeare 2.2.57; 3.2.243-44).  Gertrude, significantly, does not argue theology; she speaks the language of household and state. The play thus erects two frames around the queen at once: the patriarchal religious code that judges her remarriage a sin and the pragmatic statecraft that normalizes remarriage as a mechanism of dynastic stability. Her meaning emerges in the tension between those frames.

            Finally, Shakespeare plants the seed for what later becomes the “death enigma.” The poisoned cup in 5.2, visually handled and verbally signposted by Claudius (“Gertrude, do not drink”), becomes a kind of interpretive stress test. When the queen replies, “I will, my lord; I pray you pardon me,” and drinks, the line can be read as compliance with festive ritual, as resistance to a controlling husband, or as a courageous interposition once she intuits danger. That ambiguity is not a gap to be filled by a single “correct” reading; it is a deliberate affordance that adaptations exploit, magnifying either a politics of accident (the courtly machine consumes her), a politics of self-sacrifice (the maternal body shields the prince), or the tragic possibility of suicide (a sovereign act of impossible agency within a collapsed court).  

            Across three focal scenes – 1.2 (the council chamber), 3.4 (the closet), 5.2 (the duel) – Gertrude oscillates between political pragmatism and ethical self-scrutiny. In 1.2, as noted, she performs the optics of rule. The queen’s counsel to Hamlet is not devoid of feeling; it is calibrated for a court that has already suffered a destabilizing succession of shocks. Her diction “friend on Denmark,” “vailed lids” is public language. In this light, the oft-quoted line “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” (3.2.242) belongs not to a frivolous gossip but to a politically experienced woman who registers, with acid economy, how spectacle (the Player Queen’s overwrought vows) fails verisimilitude and thus fails as persuasion. She knows courts; she knows rhetoric.

            The closet scene (3.4) is the hinge on which ethical readings of Gertrude turn. Summoned by Hamlet for an intimate reckoning, the queen encounters not only her son’s rage but also a moral mirror. Hamlet’s words “You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you” (3.4.19-20) threaten exposure; her response marks a shift: “Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul; / And there I see such black and grained spots / as will not leave their tinct” (3.4.82-84). The diction of inwardness – soul, spots, tinct – is the play’s ethico-religious register rather than the secular vocabulary of state. For a moment, Gertrude adopts this register and performs penitential recognition. Crucially, that does not entail a confession of complicity in murder; it is remorse for what Hamlet names a sinful union. The distinction matters for not conflating Olivier’s later psychosexual framing with Shakespeare’s scene: the queen’s turn is toward conscience, not toward erotic disclosure with her son.

            Her death then in 5.2 gathers the earlier tensions into a single gesture with multiple plausible logics. The stage business is simple: the king offers a poisoned pearl; the queen drinks it. But the line “I will, my lord; I pray you pardon me” can be played as ritual compliance, as cheerful defiance (the independent queen refusing to be policed), or as deliberate interposition once she senses danger. The text does not authorize one reading conclusively; the ethics of the moment belong to staging. That openness is why productions turn the cup into a referendum on what kind of woman the queen “really” is. Is she an accidental casualty of a corrupt polity? A mother who sacrifices herself for her son? Or an agent who, in a final instance of sovereignty, chooses death to expose the king? The power of Shakespeare’s Gertrude lies in the way the play equips all three possibilities without collapsing them into a single doctrinal verdict.

Laurence Olivier’s film announces its programmatic difference from the play in its first minutes. Over a misted Elsinore, Olivier’s voice-over declares, “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” This line is not Shakespeare’s own and subject to criticism upon viewing – is this a story about a man who could not make up his mind? but the usage of this line in the adaptation signals psychological emphasis over the plot (Olivier). In the scenes with Gertrude (Eileen Herlie), The camera’s grammar manufactures enclosure and vertical dominance to suggest a bond freighted with Oedipal tension; Olivier localizes the closet scene unequivocally in a libidinous bedchamber with yonic symbolism to translate Freud’s theory into set and blocking (Donaldson). Herlie’s Gertrude who, is younger than Oliver’s Hamlet by a decade, meets the gaze through caressing touches culminating in a lingering mouth-to-mouth kiss. All of which are actions which visualize desire that Shakespeare’s text leaves in suspicion rather than in action (Leonard). Commentators have described Oliver’s film as a kind of Oedipal cine-poem in which the maternal body is framed as erotically legible to the son (Bazzani). Where Shakespeare writes a turn to conscience “Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul” Olivier frames physical closeness and caress as the primary medium of meaning, exteriorizing the repressed into visual emphasis: post-war British cinema absorbed psychoanalysis as lingua franca for interior conflict, and Oliver used the tools of film, i.e., framing, focal length, blocking, etc. to make the subtext text (Kinghorn).

Because film is a medium of the face and the glance, Oliver’s choices powerfully reshape what spectators can attend to. The ceremonial politics of 1.2 recede into stylized tableaux; Herlie’s Gertrude is constructed less as a public actor than as the pivot of the prince’s crisis. The religious register, Hamlet’s language of sin and “incest”, is present as text but marginalized toward psychosexual reading by the mis-en-scéne (Leonard). Importantly, the film does not simply deny Gertrude’s political intelligence; rather, it trades the public queen for an intimate mother. In doing so, it narrows the field of interpretive play that Shakespeare cultivates. If Shakespeare’s Gertrude lives between piety and power, Oliver’s lives between eros and maternity. That narrowing is aesthetically coherent. Indeed, the film’s power derives from the consistency of its visual argument but the cost is the relative muting of the queen as a strategist of state.

In Olivier’s poisoned cup sequence, the mechanism and possibilities of the camera permit a degree of psychologization and motive recognition that would have been impossible prior to the 20^th century. In tight close-up he holds on to Gertrude as she weighs the goblet, letting Eileen Herlie’s micro-expressions (an eye-flick towards Hamlet, a factional intake of breath, the tight setting of her lips) register her private calculus before she says, “I will, my lord; I pray you pardon me.” The shot-reverse-shot pattern briefly recenters point of view from the duel to the queen’s interiority. Here hesitation becomes legible as possible resolve rather than mere ritual compliance. By isolating her face and the delayment of the sip, the film manufactures an interval in which spectators can project potential motives whether it be maternal interposition or fatal misreading. This translation of the play’s staged ambiguity into a psychological legibility without closing interpretation (Olivier; Leonard) The choice exemplifies how cinema can make though-process time read as visible when done through close-ups, eyeline matches, and sound shaping. All this while preserving the multivalence of Shakespeare’s line. It makes the argument clearly, medium matters. Olivier’s camera curates’ ambiguity, by modulating audiences towards a particular reading of Gertrude’s final act without definitively adjudicating them.

Made in 1948, Hamlet arrives after Oliver’s patriotic Henry V (1944), when British screen Shakespeares were entangled with national morale and identity; where Henry V faced outward toward nation and war, Hamlet faces inward toward psyche and authority (Young; Fattough). The choice to strip or compress the geopolitical architecture – the Fortinbras subplot above all – folds the world’s conflict into a domestic, dynastic chamber, mirroring a society moving from wartime mobilization to post-war austerity, the coronation-like processionals and throne-room tableaux, and the final relocation of emphasis to Horatio’s farewell (rather than Fortinbras’s accession) preserve monarchy as spectacle while deflecting the transfer of power that closes Shakespeare’s play (Criterion; Young). In this historical light, the film’s Oedipal grammar does cultural work by relocating collecting trauma into family romance and translating national crisis into psychic crisis and thereby producing a Hamlet for a Britain negotiating fatigue, loss and the re-legitimation of authority (Young; Criterion).

If Oliver narrows Gertrude to the maternal-erotic, Barker explodes her into a Sovereign principle. Gertrude – The Cry recenters the story by placing the queen at the origin of action and the apex of decision making. Barker’s dramaturgy treats desire as an instrument of statecraft: the bedchamber is not a retreat from politics but its engine. Where Shakespeare’s queen performs ambiguity and penitence, Barker’s declares appetite and power. Critics have read this as an anti-patriarchal counter-tradition: the woman whose motives were historically moralized now speaks her own grammar of rule (Akdoğan). The ethical vocabulary shifts accordingly. Religious frames are minimized or ironized; instead of “black and grained spots” on the soul, the play speaks of intensity, cruelty, and pleasure. The queen is no longer an index of the prince’s crisis but an author of the court’s catastrophe and its temporary coherences (Fakhrkonandeh).

Motifs that in Shakespeare are ambiguous become weapons in Barker. The gaze, for instance, whose visual economy Oliver marshals to create Oedipal intimacy, becomes in Barker a means of domination and humiliation. Poison, too, migrates from emblem of a corrupt court to a marker of deliberate orchestration. The bed, finally, becomes not the occasion for moral judgement but the literal space of policy. Barker unifies Shakespeare’s Gertrude with Belleforest’s Gerutha, positioning his Queen as co-conspirator in the murder of Old Hamlet, while intensifying Hamlet’s moral revulsion into a constant excoriation which challenges Gertrude to choose between familial, political, and libidinal needs. In so doing, Barker affords Gertrude greater shares of guilt and understanding in equal measure. That does not mean that Barker “solves” Gertrude. Rather, he inverts the enigma. The question is not whether the queen is innocent or guilty but how sovereignty, once allocated to a woman’s desiring body, reorganizes the political world of the play. In this sense, Barker’s work is not just an adaptation but theory-in-practice, a critique of the historical tendency to make the queen readable only through male crisis narratives (Fakhrkonandeh).

Gertrude – The Cry appears in the early 2000s under the New Labour’s communitarian, managerial consensus. Scholarship on Barker reads his “amoral” theater as opposing didactic uplift; his insistence on eros as a disruptive ethic can be read as a critique of Blair-era norms that prioritized social cohesion of individual liberty (Akdoğan; Daker). One study explicitly links the play’s sovereign erotic will to New Labour Policing tools (e.g., ASBOs) and to Blair’s public defense of preventive regulation as “freedom from harm by others,” positioning Barker’s Gertrude as counter-imaginary to managerial moralism (Özmen 3-9). Situating the play against new Labour clarifies why Barker eclipses penitence with appetite: he writes a queen who refuses the language of consensual virtue that dominated Blair’s Britain (Daker). 

Consider a recurrent public reading of Melania Trump with specific regard to her curated appearances, strategic scarcity, and cultivated opacity. Scholars of media and gender have shown that First Ladies’ fashion and choreographed presence often function as visual rhetoric; in Melania Trump’s case, specific garments (the much-discussed 2016 pussy-bow blouse, the 2018 white pantsuit, even the “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” jacket) were read as messages of alignment or distance (wiedlack 1113-14; McMillan 2-4, 13-16, 18-22). In such media economy, the gaze itself becomes a political technique. Opacity accrues power because it compels interpretation. Barker’s Gertrude weaponizes precisely this interplay of spectacle and scarcity. The look, the staging of the body, the refusal to supply a single motive all coalesce into a fulcrum point. The analogy has limits however, Melania’s brand often trades on distance and non-discloser, whereas Barker’s queen is declarative, but both figures demonstrate how audiences process a consort’s power through visual rhetoric as much as articulated policy (Wiedlack 1113-14).

Reading across these versions clarifies six axes along which Gertrude is made and remade: (A) agency; (B) religious/ethical frame; (E) maternal versus erotic functioning; and (F) the construction of death. Along the agency axis, Shakespeare offers a queen whose power is legible in rhetorical economy and influence rather than in soliloquy. Oliver shifts agency to the prince’s psychodrama, reducing the visibility of the queen’s public calculus. Barker amplifies her agency to the point that desire itself becomes governance. On knowledge, Shakespeare withholds a definitive answer: the text neither proves nor disproves her complicity. Olivier implies ignorance but emotional centrality; Barker tends to endow knowledge as a corollary of sovereignty. As to a political motive, Shakespeare keeps the remarriage legible as statecraft (however ethically fraught) while allowing the prince to condemn it; Olivier foregrounds maternal mediation; Barker reconfigures motive as the will to rule through pleasure and force.

The religious axis is decisive for separating Shakespeare from Olivier. In the play, Hamlet’s indictment mobilizes a scriptural language of sin and incest; Gertrude’s closet-scene turn adopts that language long enough to register penitence, not confession to regicide. In the film, that register is absorbed into a psychosexual economy. Barker, finally, sidelines religious accounting in favor of a tragic politics of appetite. The maternal/erotic axis then looks different in each case: maternal authority in Shakespeare is entwined with queenship; maternal intimacy in Oliver is eroticized; erotic sovereignty in Barker obliterates maternal piety as a controlling metaphor.

            The death enigma concentrates these differences. In Shakespeare, the line “I will, my lord; I pray you pardon me” preserves the range of possible meanings: ritual compliance (accident), cheerful defiance (an assertion of queenly independence that triggers accident), or intuitive interposition (self-sacrifice). A bolder production can even play the moment as suicide. An extreme, but conceptually coherent choice that reads the cup as Gertrude’s final act of sovereignty once she perceives the rot of the state and the danger to Hamlet. Oliver’s film, by structuring attention around the prince’s crisis, tends to make her death feel like collateral damage in his tragedy. Barker, by contrast, often stages death as the logical terminus of a politics of desire, a consequence of the queen’s own calculus rather than a punishment delivered by male designs. None of these readings exhausts Gertrude; together, they expose how different media make different kinds of ethical knowledge available to the audience.

            Gertrude’s afterlives remind us that adaptation is not merely a matter of updating plot but of reallocating ethical and political attention. The chronicles moralize and politicize the queen in advance. Shakespeare compresses her speech but multiplies her meanings, staging a turn to conscience in 3.4 and leaving the cup as interpretive trail in 5.2. Olivier answers the play with an Oedipal visual grammar that narrows the queen toward the intimate and the erotic, teaching mid-century audiences to read Shakespeare through psychoanalysis. Barker, finally, builds a counter-tradition in which Gertrude’s desire and power are central premises rather than problems. Keeping Shakespeare’s religious codes distinct from Olivier’s psychosexual overlay allows us to see how the queen’s political motives and ethical self-understanding are rebalanced across time. That is why Gertrude remains compelling: she is not a riddle to be solved once and for all but a site where cultures negotiate the meanings of queenship, sexuality, motherhood, and the sacred.

Works Cited

Akdoğan, Özlem Özmen. “Challenging Hamlet: Erotic Representation of Gertrude in Howard Barker’s Gertrude—The Cry.” Conference paper, Inter-Disciplinary Prague, 2014. PDF.

Barker, Howard. Gertrude—The Cry. Oberon Books, 2002.

Bazzani, Laura. The Oedipus Complex in “Hamlet”: Laertes as Counterpart. University of Padua, 2024. PDF.

Criterion Collection. “Hamlet (1948).” The Current, 18 Sept. 2000.

Daker, Rebecca Kate. “Theatre and the Political in Blair’s ‘Golden Age’.” PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2016. PDF.

Desta, Yohana. “The Northman: Let’s Talk About That Bonkers Nicole Kidman Scene.” Vanity Fair, 26 Apr. 2022.

Eggers, Robert, director. The Northman. Focus Features, 2022. Film.

Fakhrkonandeh, Alireza. “The Acousmatic Voice as the Chiasmatic Flesh: An Analysis of Howard Barker’s Gertrude—The Cry.” symplokē, vol. 22, nos. 1–2, 2014, pp. 301–17.

Fattouh, E. “Hamlet on the Screen.” Saudi Journal of Language and Literature, 2020, pp. 91–100. PDF.

Internet Shakespeare Editions. “Hamlet: Sources.” University of Victoria.

Kinghorn, K. “Hamlet in Cinema: Oedipus Lives On—Psychoanalysis and Screen Adaptations.” BYU ScholarsArchive, 2023. PDF.

Leonard, Philip. “Male Aurality as a Controlling Element in Olivier’s Hamlet.” Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, University of Nottingham, 2009. PDF.

McMillan, Katie. “A Case Study Analysis Examining the Visual Rhetoric of First Ladies: Melania Trump.” 2021. PDF.

Özmen, Özlem. “Howard Barker’s Gertrude—The Cry: Sexual and Gender Politics in Hamlet.” Damascus University, Faculty of Arts, c. 2020. PDF.

Olivier, Laurence, director. Hamlet. J. Arthur Rank, 1948. Film.

Paiella, Gabriella. “How The Northman’s Naked Volcano Fight Scene Came Together.” GQ, 22 Apr. 2022.

Romano, Nick. “The Northman Director Breaks Down the Finale’s Nude Volcano Brawl.” Entertainment Weekly, 24 Apr. 2022.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series, Bloomsbury, 2006.

Wiedlack, Katharina. “In/visibly Different: Melania Trump and the Othering of Eastern European Women in US Culture.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 19, no. 8, 2019, pp. 1113–29.

Young, Daniel G. Hamlet in the Cinema. 2007. Thesis.