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; rea