Here are Queen Gertrude's first words in the play:
"Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted 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.
Thou know'st 'tis common. All that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity."
Aside from basically telling Hamlet to "just get over it," Gertrude says some interesting things about blindness and sight here. She establishes this by asking him to "look like a friend on Denmark," but chooses to insert "let thine eye" before it, syntactically distancing Hamlet from his own perception. She tells him he is looking "with thy vailed lids," which could mean "downcast", as it says in the footnotes, but could also mean veiled, implying not only that he is in mourning, thus the veil, but also that Hamlet's vision could be impaired or blocked by something. She tells him not to look for his father "in the dust," establishing a running theme throughout the play of the dead as dust, ashes, nothing.
She also comments on the inevitability of death with the lines "All that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity". These lines stood out to me because of their rhythm, especially when read aloud. "All that lives must die" is beautifully simple, just five monosyllabic words alternating in iambs, with an extra syllable (and emphasis) on "die". "Passing through nature to eternity" starts out almost dactylically, but "eternity" jumps right out of the flow, as if disrupting the cycle of life and death in the play. In the end, this raised many more questions than it could answer, especially considering that this is our first impression of Gertrude... and those questions raised more questions, which raised more questions. Fun stuff.
My (general) questions at the end of reading the book... any thoughts?
How does Gertrude reflect the play's varying attitudes on death? How does her own death relate to those attitudes?
Gertrude is a seemingly passive character... is she a pawn, or is she a manipulator?
When Hamlet equates Claudius with his mother by calling him "my mother," what are the implications of feminization? Of motherhood?
What's more important/impactful; big grand gestures, or small subtle ones (like Gertrude's)? Especially considering Hamlet's advice to the players?
What the heck is up with Ophelia's unstaged death and Gertrude's involvement as sole witness? Is that sketchy or what?!
I'm struck by the "look like a friend on Denmark" line. Is she telling him to act--to look "like" something? Or is she just telling him to look warmly upon Denmark? I think the simile is important here, especially because the word "look" is emphasized with a spondee (or a dactyl, depending on how you scan the line).
ReplyDeleteI agree that it is important that Gertrude is the sole witness to Ophelia's death. She is the one who relays the story to us first, and if you recall, she frames it as an accident, perhaps to ensure that O will receive a Christian funeral (we learn later from the Clowns that it was probably a suicide). She says that O "fell in the weeping brook," suggesting that it was an accident ("fell"), and she uses personification throughout the speech to place blame on inanimate objects. Here, we see Gertrude as an interpreter--she is literally interpreting the play's events, which gives her a certain kind of agency that many readers overlook.
G's own death is unique in the sense that 1) it takes so long (the others are pretty fast... think Polonius), and 2) we know before she does that she is going to die... and we know for a while. Her death is subsumed by all of the men on stage. But she *does* make sure that Hamlet (which Hamlet--her son or her husband?) knows that it was the poisoned cup that killed her. Her final line--"I am poisoned"--is also important because of her use of the "to be" verb. Is her soul poisoned? Should we read this as a final confession? She's obviously telling Hamlet that she was poisoned, but I think we could read the line as a confession as well.
I didn't even think of the second interpretation of "look like a friend on Denmark"! The choice to use "on" instead of some other preposition, say "in", "upon", or "at", makes that distinction even more vague. I think on the surface, she is telling him to look warmly upon Denmark, but that word choice suggests that she might be telling him to "look like a friend", maybe even TO Denmark. Either way, she's ordering him to change, or at least act differently. The second interpretation seems different to me mainly because it means she could be warning him of something... to look like a friend, or be in danger.
DeleteI dig the play on words with "nighted," because if you saw her speaking, you wouldn't be able to distinguish between "nighted" and "knighted". Not quite sure of the implications of a "knighted" color are, but I guess that's something to think about.
Gertrude's role as interpreter definitely gives her agency, which opens up all kinds of possibilities. She might be disguising Ophelia's death as accidental, possibly to hide the fact that it was suicide... but what about murder? I have yet to read closely enough to find evidence of this, but it sure is a possibility I want to explore in the essay.
Her death scene struck me especially because she repeats everything, including Hamlet's name, suggesting that she might be speaking to both her son and her husband.. or getting them confused in her last moments, which has both creepy and sad implications. And "I am poisoned"! Holy crap, that IS intense. If she'd said "I've been poisoned," for example, she would have been following her pattern of indirectness (as established especially with her narration of Ophelia's death). "I am poisoned" has an intensity through its brevity that, I agree, suggests a confession, if not just a change. And if it's a confession, of what? of being a pawn? a manipulator? a terrible, horrible person? or just a victim? She's finally taking direct agency here, what does that mean for her and the rest of the play?