"My Most Seeming Virtuous Queen": Gertrude and the Manifestation of Aging Sexuality in Early Modern England
Stephany Fontanone
Rainbow Portrait (c. 1600)
Isaac Oliver
Reproduced courtesy of the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House
In 1600, the Virgin Queen was sixty-eight years old. In private, the signs of age in the queen's face were apparently unmasked by cosmetics, heightening the incongruity between advanced age and the exposed bosom of a maiden. In public, this incongruity was lessened and mystified to a certain degree by the way the queen presented herself. Anthony Rivers, a Jesuit priest, reported that during the Christmas celebrations of 1600, Elizabeth was painted in "some places near half an inch thick." It is interesting to note the queen's extensive use of cosmetics to portray an image in public-she herself was a painted image just like the portraits praising her. Shirley N. Garner presents a prominent opinion held by early modern society when she states that by painting [their faces], women seduce and lead astray; they evince pride as they make vain efforts to stave off old age. The use of cosmetics was thought to be the work of the devil, uniting so-called good women with whores.1 Queen Elizabeth's use of cosmetics, however, helped reduce societal anxieties about having an aging monarch on the throne as a new century approached.
Historical evidence places the first publication of Hamlet somewhere in the beginning of the seventeenth century, near the midpoint of Shakespeare's career as both a playwright and actor and at the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.2 As a result, Hamlet is a play keenly aware of its late Elizabethan status in which the impending transfer of power from one monarch to another had to be rethought in view of the aging body of the queen.3 The play marks the moment when, since the queen did not have an heir, the Elizabethan strategies for authorizing monarchy became problematic. The aging widow queen, Gertrude, resonates strongly with the aging virgin queen on the throne. Peter Erickson states that "Gertrude represents the convergence of three issues—sexuality, aging...and succession—that produced a sense of contradiction, even breakdown, in the cult of Elizabeth in the final years of her reign...The latent cultural fantasy in Hamlet is that Queen Gertrude functions as a degraded figure of Queen Elizabeth."4 Therefore, this conundrum of the aging female body, with its overly determined registers of sexuality and death, unites the actual and stage monarch. The play signifies that the society of early modern England was acknowledging the fact that their queen was approaching death.
At the same time the monarch was visibly aging, a new image of an unaging and youthful Elizabeth circulated—the "Rainbow" Portrait (1600) by Issac Oliver.5 Elizabeth Pomeroy states that "the face is imperviously young, and the Titian-colored hair falls around her shoulders like a maiden's."6 The portrait itself is rich in coppery hues, although the arc of color the queen holds in her hand is somewhat transparent and not nearly as bright or colorful as her hair and cloak. Her place at the top of the hierarchy is confirmed by her luminescence, which contrasts so vividly with this pale arc she holds in her hand. This contrast ultimately reflects Elizabeth's surpassing relative significance in relation to the natural world. Her grasp of the rainbow also emblematizes the symbolic union of Elizabeth's physical body with the divinity that authorizes it to represent the body politic. This echoes Francis Bacon's notion that "there is in the king not a body natural alone, nor a body politic alone, but a body natural and body politic together: corpus corporatum in corpore naturali, et corpus naturale in corpore corporato."7 The painted motto on the portrait is non sine sole iris—"no rainbow without the sun." This is a reference to the association between the queen and the sun: Elizabeth shines amongst her dominion. No rainbow shines because the queen outshines it with her own brilliance, her own surpassing light, and her incarnation of political will authorized by the divine. The word "iris" both denotes and connotes rainbow: it denotes the little arc visible in the queen's hand; it connotes all the metaphoric colorings of achievement made possible by the queen's brightness.8 Though it is tempting to say no rainbow really exists in the portrait, the politics of its representation as absence or presence have a great deal to do with how one reads its significance. It can be taken as either a referent for the decline of absolute power or as a mark of her overshadowing presence that obscures the many colors of the rainbow or transforms them into uniform light.
What is so intriguing about the "Rainbow" Portrait, more than the metaphoric symbols the portrait suggests, is that it was published so late in Elizabeth's reign yet she seems remarkably young. This portrayal is not a coincidence; Elizabeth's throne was never truly secure, and in her old age, representing herself as a strong and vital queen was more important. In 1597 she stated, "I think not to die so soon...and am not so old as they think."9 Her declaration confirms that her use of cosmetics to conceal her age was an effort to keep her public intrigued by her beauty and to keep them subservient to her power. If her public thought her too old to rule, it would have threatened both her ability and status as a monarch. Therefore, Elizabeth's erotic displays and painted selves where not mere vanity, given all that was at stake in the sovereign aura. Marie Axton contends that they were efforts "to imbue the aging natural body of the monarch with the ageless aura of the body politic which was supposed to be contained within the natural body of the queen."10 These erotic dynamics of Elizabethan rule had always entailed a certain ambivalence and danger, involving as they did, the construction of ambiguous desire for the queen, not as a monarch, but as a woman. It is important to note that Elizabeth's use of cosmetics was a tactic she used to present herself as a marriageable maiden, despite being well beyond the childbearing age. What is so intriguing is that society—whether mystified by her aura or loyal to her cult—went along with it.
Elizabeth was always preoccupied with the way she was represented to her subjects and the way in which she represented herself. She was so obsessed with her presentation of self that she would use cosmetics dramatically. This is continuously noted by several foreign visitors, specifically the French ambassador André Hurault-Sieur de Maisse. De Maisse had recorded in journal entries from several occasions some of Elizabeth's efforts to counter the opinion of her public and everyone with whom she came in contact. De Maisse reports from his first audience with Elizabeth in 1600:
She was strangely attired in a dress of sliver cloth, white and crimson...She kept the front of her dress open, and one could see the whole of her bosom [gorge], and passing low, and often she would open the front of this robe with her hands as if she was too hot...On her head she wore a garland of the same material and beneath it a great reddish-coloured wig... Her bosom is somewhat wrinkled as well as the collar that she wears round her neck, but lower down the flesh is exceeding white and delicate, so far as one could see. As for her face, it is and appears to be very aged. It is long and thin, and her teeth are very yellow and unequal, compared with what they were formerly, so they say, and on the left side less than on the right. Many of them are missing so that one cannot under stand her easily when she speaks quickly. Her figure is fair and tall and graceful in whatever she does; so far as may be she keeps her dignity, yet humbly and graciously withal.11
It is apparent from this account that Elizabeth continued to attempt to embody an alluring and captivating appeal, despite her age. De Maisse comments that Elizabeth's flesh is "white and delicate so far as one could see"; this shows that Elizabeth represented herself in such a fashion so that her power would never be in jeopardy. This correlates with her erotic displays, since she is essentially attracting men to notice her bosom. The phrase "so far as one could see" is especially important, since it clearly states that Elizabeth was fashioning herself purposely. He notes that Elizabeth's bosom was uncovered, as all the English women had it until they married. This display of her bosom is a complex register of cultural and sumptuary symbolism; it reconfirms her status both as a marriageable maiden and as the nurturing and bountiful mother of England. She achieves this by masking her old age by use of cosmetics.
It is apparent that the queen's appearance and dignity intrigued De Maisse and that he was very much biased on behalf of the queen. As the French ambassador insinuates, these conspicuous self-displays were also a kind of erotic-provocation.12 In these provocations, Elizabeth succeeded in having her beauty and appeal serve as integral parts of her continuing domination over all who beheld her, since "her figure is fair and tall and graceful in whatever she does." In the process of describing the queen's preoccupation with the impact of her appearance upon her beholders, De Maisse demonstrates its impact upon himself, thus epitomizing the ideas of the Elizabethan cult.
This concept of subjects becoming preoccupied with the aged beauty of the queen or, moreover, the obsession men develop concerning women's aging sexuality is a prevalent theme in Hamlet. Shakespearean critics often present the death of his father as the sole reason for Hamlet's dissonance and grief, when it is in fact a combination of grief and mislaid indignation stemming from his mother's sexual vitality. Furthermore, regicide is displaced from both Hamlet's and the audience's attention by the eroticized figure of Queen Gertrude, who serves as an analogue to Queen Elizabeth.
The event that has the greater impact on Hamlet is not that his uncle killed his father, but rather that his mother is now sharing the marital bed with his uncle. When first introduced, Hamlet gives the appearance of being grief-stricken as he is adorned in mourning clothes; this is noted by Gertrude:"[G]ood Hamlet, cast they nighted color off/ [a]nd let thine eye look like a friend in Denmark" (I. ii. 68-9). However, when alone onstage, he immediately reveals all is not as it seems and that his grief has been displaced by anger towards his mother:
Fie on't, ah fie, tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead—nay, not so much, not two. (I. ii. 135-8)
In this passage, the grief over his father's death is overlaid and supplanted by obsessive disgust over what has failed to die, here figured as the "unweeded garden" of Gertrude's sexual appetite.
Gertrude's sexual vitality is the source of Hamlet's lament. This is apparent in Hamlet's first soliloquy, even before he learns of the regicide:
Frailty thy name is woman!
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father's body . . .
Within a month, ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married—O most wicked speed: to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets,
It is not, nor it cannot come to good. (I. ii. 146-59)
Hamlet's great cry of pain in this first soliloquy—as he muses on his mother's sexual insatiability and over-hasty remarriage—is the most important aspect of the scene. It reveals displacement of Hamlet's grief over his father's death by anger about his mother's sexuality. The ghost also alludes to Gertrude's shame when it tells Hamlet how Claudius had lured her to his bed:
Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wits, with traitorous gifts—
O wicked with and gifts that have the power
So to seduce!—won to his shameful lust
The will of my most seeming virtuous queen. (I. v. 42-6)
Here, the ghost refers to Gertrude as "my most seeming virtuous queen." With the use of "seeming," the ghost reveals that he is not truly convinced of Gertrude's innocence and places further ill thoughts about Gertrude into Hamlet's head. Hamlet can infer that Gertrude's sexuality was a motive for Claudius' actions and that had his mother not been so appealing to his uncle, his father would still be alive. This same idea of "seeming" is also evident throughout Elizabeth's reign. She manipulates her sexuality and the fact that she is a woman to her advantage. She fashions herself as a "weak and feeble"13 woman so skillfully that she literally has the lives of men at her disposal.
As this scene progresses, the ghost neglects his purpose to further digress upon Gertrude's "lust," her "lewdness," and her taste for "garbage" (I. v. 54-6). It is "the scent of morning air" that reminds the ghost his time is short and he has yet to inform Hamlet of the details of Claudius' crime. The ghost's vengeful charge focuses not on the past crime of regicide, but rather the ongoing sexual transgression:
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
But howsoever thou pursues this act,
Taint not thy mind, no let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her. (I. v. 82-8)
The ghost tells Hamlet not to seek vengeance on his mother, inadvertantly fueling Hamlet's misogynistic rant. It follows then that Hamlet's initial response to what the ghost has just told him is primarily a reflection on his mother rather than Claudius: "O most pernicious woman! / O villain, villain, smiling damned villain!" (I. v. 105). It is fascinating that Hamlet refers to his mother as the wicked one when it was his uncle who poisoned his father.
In Gertrude's chamber, Hamlet continues to bewail his mother's sensuality and lust, the motives for her marriage to his father's murderer:
O shame! Where is thy blush?
Rebellious hell...
...Proclaim no shame
When the compulsive ardure gives the charge,
Since frost itself as actively doth burn,
And reason [panders] will. (III. iv. 81-4)
There are many intriguing aspects of this scene, as it takes place in Gertrude's closet. The closet should be a sacred place for a Renaissance woman, however it is subject to blasphemy in Hamlet. Gertrude's closet entertains several men, who are all competing for her personal attention. On different occasions, Hamlet further corrupts his mother's chamber by killing Polonius, who is hiding behind a curtain in the very room. Alongside the body of Polonius and the distressed person of her son, the physical attributes of two husbands are vividly conjured since the ghost appears where Claudius sleeps. In the innermost space of the erotic and potentially carnal, Hamlet's accusation— "O Shame, where is thy blush"—elicits the contrast between these two consorts. The excessiveness in this chamber is the presence of all these men, together with the withholding of a promise of emotional, or possibly erotic, satisfaction. Much action occurs in a location which ideally should be private. Furthermore, the audience witnesses Gertrude's promiscuous entertaining of too many men in her chamber and her reluctance to commit to her loyalties except under emotional duress.
Furthermore, the notion of incestuous behavior is also evident when Hamlet reproaches his mother in her bedchamber. He addresses her incestuous liaison with Claudius, and she at once tells him, "thou hast thy father much offended" (III. iv. 9). Hamlet retorts, "Mother, you have my father much offended" (III. iv. 10). Hamlet then reinforces the confusion and corruption his mother's sexuality has caused by mixing and polluting his father's flesh and blood with his uncle's flesh when he tells her, "You are the queene, your Husbands Brothers wife, / But would you were not so, you are my mother" (l. 15-16). Hamlet means that he believes his father King Hamlet is still Gertrude's husband.
Hamlet cannot exorcise his thoughts that Gertrude embodies a passion that "canst mutine in a matron's bones" (III. iv. 83) and that she lives "in the rank of an enseamed bed, stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty" (III. iv. 92-4). Sickened with his mother's actions, Hamlet refers to her as a pig living and "making love" amongst disgust, in an "enseamed bed, stew'd in corruption."
There are several other scenes in the play that also exemplify Hamlet's displaced obsession. For instance, during the player king and queen's prologue of the "mousetrap scene," Gertrude rather than Claudius is the center of Hamlet's attention:
Hamlet: Madam, how like you this play?
Gertrude: The lady doth protest too much, me thinks.
Hamlet: O but she'll keep her word. (III. ii. 229-30)
This part of the "play within a play" functions to capture the conscience of the queen rather than that of the king. Gertrude's transgression is not just against her first husband but also the laws of nature. Steven Mullaney argues that "what distracts Hamlet from his almost blunted purpose is Gertrude's aging sexuality, conceived at times as a contradiction in terms, at times as a violation of her own body akin in its unnaturalness to a rebellion in the body politic."14 This correlates to Elizabeth in her old age in that by masking her age with cosmetics, Elizabeth is also defying the same laws of nature as Gertrude. Both queens, despite their age, are defying the norms of society by indulging in a sense of sexual vitality, whether by using cosmetics or hasty re-marriages.
Although an adulteress in Hamlet's mind, Gertrude may redeem herself if she avoids the marriage bed. Hamlet explicitly instructs his mother to reform herself in the shape of a virgin:
Mother, for love of grace...
That not your trespass but my madness speak...
Confess yourself to heaven,
Repent what's past, avoid what is to come,
And do not spread the compost on the weeds
To make them ranker...
O, throw away the worser part of it,
And [live] the purer with the other half.
Good night, but go not to my uncle's bed—
Assume a virtue, if you have it not...(III. iv. 114-60)
To allay Hamlet's misogynist suspicions and anxieties, in order to not be a whore, Gertrude must throw away the "worser part," here symbolized by her sexuality, and assume celibacy, an appropriate response to Hamlet's call for virtue. Hamlet desires his mother to cease her sexual life and reform to follow values which he esteems morally correct.
The audience pronounces Gertrude as guilty not as judgment on her actions but as a condition of her presence in the play in relation to Hamlet. There is not actual evidence that Gertrude is what Hamlet assumes her to be, both an adulteress and an accomplice to murder. If his judgment of his mother is based solely on a textual analysis of her lines, Gertrude is, presumably, innocent. Gertrude is guilty only of being oblivious to what occurs and displaying a sexual self in her old age. For instance, the play-within-the play elicits from Claudius the evidence Hamlet needs to confirm the ghost's report, but its effect upon Gertrude is, at best, superficial. The play irritates her because it offends her current husband, but the dramatization of regicide does not affect her at all. From her reaction, or rather lack of, it is obvious that she does not perceive the connection between the play and reality. Her innocence in King Hamlet's death is once again confirmed when Hamlet levels the explicit charge of regicide—"almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king, and marry with his brother" (III. iv. 29-30). Her astonishment at "kill a king" is so patently innocent that Hamlet never again suspects her of complicity in the crime.
The beginning of the play also reflects Gertrude's integrity when she tells Claudius she believes Hamlet's dissonance to be a result of "his father's death and our o'erhasty marriage" (II. ii. 56-7). Gertrude's innocence is further epitomized when she drinks the poisoned wine in Act V. ii. Claudius advises Gertrude: "do not drink" (l. 290); her unsuspecting reply is "I will my lord, I pray you pardon me" (l. 291). Claudius blames the blood spill for Gertrude's malady, however Hamlet is aware the drink is to blame as he claims "O villainy! Ho, let the door be lock'd! / Treachery! Seek it out" (l. 313). Hamlet realizes the queen's innocence when it is too late.
When faced with the impossibility of resolving the uncertainties of his father's death, Hamlet turns his attention upon his mother. Hamlet is perplexed as to how he could avenge his father; he therefore misplaces his anger onto his mother's sexuality and as a result becomes preoccupied with Gertrude's sexual vitality. This is a common theme in much Renaissance and especially Jacobean drama, where women become the focal point of all wrongdoing. The use of cosmetics was severely condemned by society since it was viewed as the work of the devil. In his A Discourse Against the Painting and Tincturing of Women (1616), Thomas Tuke articulates these "abominable sinnes of murther and poysoning, pride and ambition, adultery and witchcraft"15 which are associated with the use of cosmetics. He also discusses the whorish and seductively evil attributes and character of a painted woman.
These harsh views on the use of cosmetics are rampant in early modern English society. When he comes to face a woman, Hamlet focuses not on her mind but the sins she has committed onto her body, "now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come" (V. I. 192-5). Hamlet delivers these lines during the graveyard scene towards the end of the play. This direct reference to cosmetics while in the graveyard gives affirmation to the notion that women were seen as momento mori (reminders of death) while masked with their beautiful facades.
If women were to serve as reminders of man's mortality, it would stem back to Eve being the cause of all of man's woe. Therefore, it is no wonder women went to such great lengths to paint themselves "an inch thick," not only to appease the misogynistic society around them, but also, as in the case of Queen Elizabeth I, to confirm their own power.
Notes
- Shirley Nelson Garner, "'Let Her Paint an Inch Thick:' Painted Ladies in Renaissance Drama and Society," Renaissance Drama (1989): 133.
- Russ McDonald, ed., The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, 2d ed. (Boston: Bedford, 2001), 19.
- Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genre (New York: Metheun, 1986), 85.
- Peter Erickson, Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley: University of California, Berkely Press, 1998), 83-86.
- Isaac Oliver. "Rainbow Portrait" (1600). In the collection of the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.
- Elizabeth Pomeroy, Reading the Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Hamden: Archon Books, 1989), 65.
- Francis Bacon, In Felicium Memoriam Elizabethae: The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Speeding (Boston: 1860), 447.
- Pomeroy, 70.
- André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, Journal. Edited by G.B. Harrison and R.A Jones (Bloomsburg: 1931), 82.
- Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Meuthen, 1977), 26.
- Hurault, 84.
- Louis Adrian Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," Representations 44, no. 2 (1983), 64.
- Elizabeth I, Queen of England, "Speech to the Troops at Tilbury" (1588), Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Edited by Leah A. Marcus, et. al (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 326.
- Steven Mullaney, "Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy, and The Final Progress of Elizabeth I 1600-1607," Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 151.
- Thomas Tuke, A Discourse on the Tincturing and Painting of Women (London, 1615).
Bibliography
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