SHAKSPER 2003: "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's Adultery
From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@shaksper.net)
Date: 09/12/03
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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 14.1777 Friday, 12 September 2003
[1] From: David Cohen <dcohen@psyvax.psy.utexas.edu>
Date: Thursday, 11 Sep 2003 09:30:19 -0500
Subj: Re: SHK 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Adultery
[2] From: Geralyn Horton <g.l.horton@mindspring.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 10:54:57 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Adultery
[3] From: Steve Roth <steve@steve-roth.com>
Date: Thursday, 11 Sep 2003 08:01:21 -0700
Subj: Re: SHK 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Adultery
[4] From: Larry Weiss <larry@lweiss.net>
Date: Thursday, 11 Sep 2003 11:36:02 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Adultery
[5] From: Clifford Stetner <cstetner@worldnet.att.net>
Date: Thursday, 11 Sep 2003 12:18:54 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Adultery
[6] From: D Bloom <dbloom@asms.net>
Date: Thursday, 11 Sep 2003 15:21:19 -0500
Subj: Re: SHK 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Adultery
[7] From: Jay Feldman <JFEL873@aol.com>
Date: Thursday, 11 Sep 2003 19:09:15 EDT
Subj: Re: SHK 14.1765 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Adultery
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: David Cohen <dcohen@psyvax.psy.utexas.edu>
Date: Thursday, 11 Sep 2003 09:30:19 -0500
Subject: 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Comment: Re: SHK 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Adultery
I am grateful to Thomas Larque for so clarifying the Renaissance meaning
of "incest." I suspected as much but wasn't sure.
David Cohen
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Geralyn Horton <g.l.horton@mindspring.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 10:54:57 -0400
Subject: 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Comment: Re: SHK 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Adultery
>David Friedberg <hdf@comcast.net> wrote:
>Remember it is also illegal to marry your widow's sister.
Sorry-- I can't resist. It's not just illegal-- it's impossible.
Geralyn Horton, playwright
Newton, MA
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Steve Roth <steve@steve-roth.com>
Date: Thursday, 11 Sep 2003 08:01:21 -0700
Subject: 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Comment: Re: SHK 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Adultery
Re: Thomas Larque's comments on Elizabethan injunctions against
marriage, if Hardy doesn't mind I'll repeat an earlier post of mine,
from last March:
See David Cressy's Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the
Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. (*Great* book, by one of the
best historians of EME writing today, IMHO.)
He's got a section on "Prohibited Degrees" for marriage in Tudor and
Stuart England (pp. 313-315). Some excerpts:
"Near the beginning of Elizabeth's reign the Church of England set forth
its 'table of kindred and affinity' specifying which relations by blood
or by marriage a person was prohibited from marrying.... promulgated by
Archbishop Parker in 1560, and the further modified for general adoption
in 1563.... Every church was required to display this table, and its
restrictions were vigorously enforced.... a total of thirty
relationships which barred marriage.... [including a dead brother's
wife]
"...Reading the records of episcopal administration one might think that
the table of degrees of kindred and affinity was almost as important to
some bishops as the table of the ten commandments.... Bishops repeatedly
expressed frustration when parishes were inadequately equipped... in the
Diocese of Norwich in 1597 as many as 10 per cent of the parishes were
wanting."
That the same prohibition on marrying a brother's wife had long been
observed by Catholics is clear from Henry VIII's papal machinations for
his first marriage and divorce.
So to an Elizabethan or Stuart audience, Claudius and Gertrude's
marriage would have looked unequivocally incestuous.
Steve
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Larry Weiss <larry@lweiss.net>
Date: Thursday, 11 Sep 2003 11:36:02 -0400
Subject: 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Comment: Re: SHK 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Adultery
>Remember it is also illegal to marry your widow's sister.
Not in Utah.
[5]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Clifford Stetner <cstetner@worldnet.att.net>
Date: Thursday, 11 Sep 2003 12:18:54 -0400
Subject: 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Comment: Re: SHK 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Adultery
I don't see how seventeenth century English social mores have anything
to do with it. Both incest and adultery are taken from the eleventh
century Danish source in which there is no question but that Gertrude is
innocent of extramarital sex with either brother.
Saxo nevertheless states that Feng: "took the wife of the brother he had
butchered, capping unnatural murder with incest [Trucidati quoque
fratris uxore potitus. incestum parricidio adjecit]."
Hamlet harangues Gertrude in her "closet": "Most infamous of women! dost
thou seek with such lying lamentations to hide thy most heavy guilt?
Wantoning like a harlot, thou hast entered a wicked and abominable state
of wedlock, embracing with incestuous bosom thy husband's slayer, and
wheedling with filthy lures of blandishment him who had slain the father
of thy son. This, forsooth, is the way that the mares couple with the
vanquishers of their mates; for brute beasts are naturally incited to
pair indiscriminately...
And later to the Danish lords: "Disdain the dust of him who slew his
brother, and defiled his brother's queen with infamous desecration, who
outraged his sovereign ...and crowned fratricide with incest [incesto
parricidium cumulavit].
If that's not enough of a hint, Hamlet has rendered on his shield (not
pornographically I trust) "Fengonis cum incestu parricidium." At this
point Shakespeare is more or less obliged to include it.
Regarding adultery, the Englished Belleforest has: "The [Scottish]
queen, who was named Hermutrude [said, ironically while seducing
Hamlet, who was in Scotland on a Tristram/Suffolk/Warwick wife getting
errand for his father-in-law the king of England, into bigamously
marrying her himself ] that Feng had deserved his punishment, and that
the unfathomable wit of Amleth had accomplished a deed past all human
estimation; seeing that...his impenetrable depth devised a mode of
revenging his father's death and his mother's adultery..."
That Gertrude is guilty of incest then seems to be a medieval Danish
scruple and adultery, ancient Scottish. The culture shock experienced by
modern readers may therefore be intentional.
Clifford Stetner
CUNY
http://phoenixandturtle.net
[6]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: D Bloom <dbloom@asms.net>
Date: Thursday, 11 Sep 2003 15:21:19 -0500
Subject: 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Comment: Re: SHK 14.1770 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Adultery
Thomas Larque in his otherwise very lucid explication of the divorce (or
rather nullity) crisis, says rather flatly
>. . .To show that Julius had no
>power to grant this dispensation, Henry would have had to show that
>marriage with a deceased brother's wife was contrary to divine law.
>Obviously it is not; and his only hope, therefore, was to show that the
>dispensation was invalid, through some irregularity of form.
At the risk of an accusation of picking nits (ugly concept that), I
would say that Leviticus 18, 16 pretty clearly forbids marrying your
sister-in-law: "You shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother's
wife; it is your brother's nakedness." At least, that is how it is
customarily been interpreted, and how it served as the basis for 16th
Century Anglican incest proscriptions
The problem is not that Leviticus is not clear, but that so is
Deuteronomy 25, 5: "When brothers reside together, and one of them dies
and has no son, the wife of the deceased shall not be married outside
the family to a stranger. Her husband's brother shall go in to her,
taking her in marriage, and performing the duty of a husband's brother
to her . . ."
I realize that we've been over this ground before but new people come on
board all the time and the Divorce Crisis is a wonderful topic -- with
great relevance to WS. The Catholics generally maintained that Elizabeth
was a bastard since her father's true wife was still living when she was
born. For their part, the Protestants maintained that Mary was a bastard
since her mother could never have been her father's true wife because of
Lev 18. If the Catholics were correct, however, then Elizabeth was a
usurper and the rightful queen of England was Mary of Scotland.
Of course, all this had faded into the background by the time S's
*Hamlet* appeared -- Mary was dead, executed in 1587 for her complicity
in one or more of the numberless plots against her cousin; while
Elizabeth was evidently never going to marry, or at least never produce
an heir -- which probably allowed S to use the point. A decade earlier
it would likely have been too hot a potato.
It's worth noting, by the way, that there are works circulating out
there that pretend to offer critical assessments of *Hamlet* whose
authors don't even know this much about the Divorce and the scriptural
basis of incest prohibitions. It's a little like writing on *Huckleberry
Finn* without knowing about the Fugitive Slave Law.
Cheers,
don
[7]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Jay Feldman <JFEL873@aol.com>
Date: Thursday, 11 Sep 2003 19:09:15 EDT
Subject: 14.1765 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Comment: Re: SHK 14.1765 "My crown ... and my queen" - Gertrude's
Adultery
Abigail Quart:
>BTW, isn't it cute how Ghosty doesn't have a problem appearing to
>the soldiers, and Horatio as well as Hamlet, but Gertrude? Nuh uh
>again.
I have always felt that this was Shakespeare's decision, not the
ghost's. After all, imagine the complexity of dialogue and oblique
direction the plot might take should Gertrude get a glimpse of her
former husband's ghostly presence.
Sincerely,
Jay Feldman
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Hardy M. Cook, editor@shaksper.net
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