Life, Crown, and Queen: Gertrude and the Theme of Sovereignty

Author(s): Manuel Aguirre

Source: The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 47, No. 186 (May, 1996), pp. 163-174
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/518100
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 LIFE, CROWN, AND QUEEN:
GERTRUDE AND THE THEME
OF SOVEREIGNTY

By MANUEL AGUIRRE

IN a short preliminarypaper1I sought to establishthe presencein

Hamlet of the traditionalsymbol of the Cup of Sovereignty.Briefly
the argumentwas this: when Hamletspeaksof the 'dramof evil' that
obscures a man's virtues (I. iv. 36-8), he is constructing a metaphor
for the cup Claudius drinks out of to celebratehis marriage,and
giving this vessel connotationswhich, on the moralplane, resemble
those found in the severalpoisonsused in the play: moralcorruption
is as inherent in that cup as physical infection is in Lucianus',
Laertes', or Claudius' poisons. The significance placed on this cup
seems out of all proportion to its apparent function in the play, until
we stop looking for a realistic explanation and recall that the cup was a
symbol for the transmission of Sovereignty in Celtic tales: when the
queen handed a vessel or otherwise offered drink to the hero she was
granting him her sexual favours and/or sovereignty over her territory.
No reader of Hamlet can fail to notice the analogy with Claudius' cup
in I. iv which symbolizes both his sexual union with Gertrude and his
accession to the Danish throne. The argument, then, claims a
traditional, non-realistic reading for this aspect of the play. The
present article seeks to delve further into the mythological status of
Gertrude and, beyond this, to explore the role, and the fate, of myth
in Hamlet. To forestall misunderstandings it will be expedient to state
here that this article does not make any pronouncements on woman,
her social status, her 'archetypal' nature, or her numinous qualities.
The point is worth some emphasis, if only because the border between
fact and fiction is often made to look so elusive nowadays. That
'Goddess' which has caught many a receptive imagination since the
1980s is none of my concern here; my goal is to explore Renaissance
changes in the application of a traditional literary metaphor. Nothing
is said about 'woman', much is claimed about a literary device.

1 M.
Aguirre, 'The Dram of Evil: Medieval Symbolism in Hamlet', Proceedings of the 2nd
InternationalSEDERIConference(Oviedo,Spain, 1992),23-7.
RES New Series, Vol. XLVII, No. 186 (1996) ? Oxford University Press 1996
164 AGUIRRE
1. Myth
Though more research has been done into the Celtic-especially
Irish-manifestations of the theme of Sovereignty,2 this theme is
equally widespread in Greek and Germanic myth; according to the
twelfth-century scholar Snorri Sturluson, the function of the
Valkyries was to serve the sacred mead in Val-hall;3 Brynhild's
acceptance of Sigurd was signalled by the rune-cup she handed him
after he woke her up on her flame-encircled mountain;4 in canto x of
The Odyssey Circe offered Odysseus' men a bowl containing food and
wine mixed with a drug that enslaved their minds and bodies to her
will. In all three cases the vessel is a token of acceptance or rejection,
of love or death. A variation on this symbol appears in the tale of
Hamlet's precursor, the hero Amleth whose exploits Saxo Grammati-
cus relates in his Historia.5 He was sent to England with two devious
friends bearing orders for his execution; once in England, all three
were invited by the king to a feast at which Amleth abstained from
eating and drinking; when asked why he had refrained from it all 'as if
it were poison', he replied that the bread, meat, and drink were tainted
with human blood, human flesh, and iron rust. As a result of these
revelations (which turned out to be true, thus proclaiming his
more-than-human wisdom), Amleth obtained the hand of the king's
daughter and the execution of his treacherous friends. Symbolically,
the feast was a test which his companions (like Odysseus' men before
Circe's drink) failed, but which Amleth (like Odysseus) passed. Loss
of life or loss of humanity is the penalty; the lady's favour, and
Sovereignty, the reward.
The cup is not the only symbol relevant to an understanding of
Hamlet; there is also the symbolism of water, which traditional myth
again significantly relates to the figure of an Otherworld woman. The
Irish Cuchulainn crosses the sea in search of the sorceress Scathach,
who will either kill him or teach him the craft of arms; eventually she
gives him her own daughter.6 The Welsh Macsen journeys from Rome
to Anglesey to meet the lady of his dream, Elen of the Hosts; she will
eventually help him to reconquer Rome.7 The Irish Conle, Bran, and
Mael Duin all put to sea to reach the Island of Women, where love and

2
See e.g. G. Goetinck, Peredur: A Study of Welsh Tradition in the Grail Legends (Cardiff,
1975), and sources there given.
3 The Edda, tr. A. Faulkes (London, 1987), 31.
4 The Saga of the Volsungs, tr. J. L.
Byock (Berkeley, 1990), ch. 21.
5 See I. Gollancz (ed.), The Sources of Hamlet: Wlithan Essay On the Legend (Oxford,
1926).
6 The Tain Bo Cuailnge, tr. T. Kinsella (Oxford, 1982).
7 'The Dream of Macsen Wledig', in The Mabinogion, tr. G. and T. Jones (London, 1978).
 LIFE, CROWN, AND QUEEN 165

immortality await them.8 Like the Celtic fairy women, Circe,

Calypso, Nausicaa, and Penelope all live on islands towards which
Odysseus must sail. On reaching the Rubicon, Caesar sees a vision of
Rome personified as a mighty woman who mourns the coming civil
war and begs him not to cross the river.9 When Thomas Rymer was
led to Elfiand by a fairy queen,
He wade thro red blude to the knee,
And he saw neither sun nor moon,
But heard the roaring of the sea.10
Having sailed to England, Saxo's Amleth will marry the English king's
daughter; when Shakespeare's Hamlet is sent to England he under-
goes a change (similar to that mysterious 'sea-change' which is the
essence of The Tempest) and returns a new man to Denmark-to
witness (and here lies a fundamental difference) the burial of his lady
and, shortly after, the death of the Queen. Time and again, in Celtic,
Germanic, and classical myth, the hero's encounter with Woman,
whether Queen, Goddess, Fairy, or Sorceress, is made dependent on
his crossing a sea or river1 1-a voyage at the end of which she awaits in
majesty to bestow or withhold Sovereignty, or else to subjugate or
destroy him.
Woman is also the Spinner, the Great Weaver, the Embroiderer. As
the Greek Moirai and the Roman Parcae, she spins, measures, and
cuts the threads of human destinies; as the Queen of the Island of
Women, she retains Mael Duin with a magic ball of yarn which cleaves
to his palm; as Ariadne, she gives Theseus the thread that will allow
him to extricate himself from the Labyrinth; as Clytemnestra, she
casts a net over her husband Agamemnon so that he will be helpless
before the sword of her lover Aegistus; as Bertilak's wife, she gives
Gawain a magic girdle to protect himself from the Green Knight's
blow; as the giantess Grid she lends Thor a girdle of might to fight
Geirrod the giant.12 As Queen Gerutha in Saxo's tale, she spends a

8 'Echtra Condla', ed. and tr. H. P. A.

Oskamp, letudes Celtiques, 14 (1974), 207-28; The
Voyage of Bran Son of Febal to the Land of the Living, ed. and tr. K. Meyer (London, 1895);
'Immram Curaig Mailduin', ed. and tr. W. Stokes, Revue Celtique, 9 (1888), 452-95; 10 (1889),
50-95.
9 Lucan, The Civil War, tr. D. Duff
J. (London, 1877), 185 ff.
10 'Thomas
Rymer', in G. Grigson (ed.), The Penguin Book of Ballads (Harmondsworth,
1975).
11
Crossing a boundary, whether fence, threshold, mountain, river, or sea, traditionally
signals a journey into the Otherworld. See A. and B. Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in
Ireland and Wales (London, 1978); Aguirre, 'The Hero's Voyage in Immram Curaig Mailduin',
Etudes Celtiques, 27 (1990), 203-20.
12 See Aguirre, 'Weaving-Related Symbolism in Early European Literature', in N. Thomas
(ed.), Celtic and Germanic Themes in European Literature (Lampeter, 1994), 1-11.
166 AGUIRRE

year knitting a vast hanging to cover the walls of her palace; at the end
of the year, as a banquet is held in honour of dead Amleth, the hero
returns from England to everyone's confusion. He puts on a wild
disposition, takes up the office of drink-bearer and plies everyone with
drink; but when they are all drunk asleep he cuts down his mother's
hanging to immobilize the sleepers on the floor, and burns the hall
down on them. As both Gerutha and Gertrude, she hides a spying
courtier behind an arras (under a quilt in Saxo's and Belleforest's
versions), which will result in his death at the hands of her son; 'I took
thee for thy better', says Hamlet; and 'It had been so with us, had we
been there', confirms Claudius. And indeed, Polonius is a surrogate-
king, a stand-in for his better, King Claudius, and dies a king's
death-Agamemnon's. Time and again myths metaphorize fate as the
operations of a Woman who spins, knits, weaves, or embroiders men's
destinies; for whom yarns, webs, nets, and hangings are instruments
to entangle, protect, or extricate the seeker.13 Hamlet displays the
same metaphors in a conspicuous manner.
So cup, sea-voyage, and yarn or web or cloth are all symbols central
to the tale of the meeting between the hero and Sovereignty. Their
presence is amply evident in Saxo's story; I think I have shown that all
three are present in Shakespeare's, if under certain important modifi-
cations. Let me now formulate the idea as it applies to Shakespeare's
text: the cup is Gertrude's, not Claudius'; the Danish crown was not
his to take, it was hers to give; she it was who yielded Sovereignty to
him; and Claudius' own explanation of the event is hollow: he could
not have wedded Gertrude to save the unsettled orphan country
because that decision was not for him to make.

2. Gertrude
Several questions arise directly from the foregoing: (a) what is
Gertrude's status? (b) why did Gertrude give Sovereignty to
Claudius? And (c) that most vexed question: has the Queen
committed adultery?
To answer the first: Claudius refers to Gertrude in I. ii. 9 as 'Th'
imperial jointress to this warlike state'; Jenkins has pointed out that
From the reference to the Queen as 'jointress' Dover Wilson infers that
Gertrude had a life-interest in the crown, and it may be that Shakespearehad
in mind how in earlier versions of the story Hamlet's father acquired the
13 The function of these is not dissimilar from that of the
labyrinth: as the Theseus story
illustrates, yarn and labyrinth are merely two versions of one same symbol; like net and web, the
labyrinth-whether cave or catacomb, castle or ocean, forest, darkness, or riddle-is the great
symbol of the testing, wherein the seeker loses or finds the wielder of Sovereignty-and loses, or
finds, himself. See Aguirre, 'The Riddle of Sovereignty', MLR 88 (1993), 273-82.
 LIFE, CROWN, AND QUEEN 167
throne by marriage; but the rights he accords Gertrude as dowager he is
content not to define. What is clear is that Claudius became king before
taking her 'to wife' but consolidated his position by a prudent marriage.14
Actually it is not that simple. First, as to earlier versions of the
story: Saxo tells us that King Rorik of Denmark had appointed
Amleth's father, Horwendil, ruler of Jutland jointly with his brother
Feng. Horwendil 'held the monarchy for three years, and then, to win
the height of glory, devoted himself to roving'.15 We may presume
that, meanwhile, Feng stayed on as king, though Saxo does not tell us.
Then Horwendil slew King Koll, married Rorik's daughter Gerutha,
and was slain by Feng, who then wedded his brother's widow.
Belleforest adds that Fengon killed his brother 'craignant d'estre
depossede de sa part du gouvernement, ou plustost desirant destre
seul en la principaute';16 clearly, his Fengon had remained king all
along while Horwendil lived as a rover, and feared eviction once
Horwendil returned.17 Both brothers, therefore, were rulers before
they married Gerutha. Jenkins's statement that Hamlet's father
obtained the throne through marriage in earlier versions does not
agree with the story as told by Saxo and Belleforest.
And yet: it is not easy to dispel the impression that their wedding
does have something to do with their status as rulers. It is a matter of
immediacy: sexual union or sexual harassment of women are
mentioned immediately before or after the death of a ruler, or in
explicit juxtaposition to kingship. Both Saxo and Belleforest make the
point that Feng/Fengon's first concern after killing his brother was to
marry his widow; Belleforest furthermore states that Fengon wedded
'celle qu'il entretenoit execrablement, durant la vie du bon Horvven-
dille':18 he had already had sexual relations with her before her
husband's death. Saxo then tells us that when Wiglek succeeded Rorik
his first move was to harass Amleth's mother, why, we are not told;
further we learn that as soon as Amleth had been slain by Wiglek his
widow Hermutrude, again for no reason one can discern, 'yielded
herself up unasked to be the conqueror's spoil and bride'.19 All of this
goes beyond mere coincidence: while there is nowhere an indication to
the effect that marriage is a precondition for kingship, time after time
14 William
Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. H. Jenkins (London, 1990), 434.
15 See Gollancz, Sources Hamlet, 95.
of
16 Ibid. 184.
17 These two conform to a motif often found in Saxo, as in Snorri's Edda and other
Scandinavian texts, which involves the eternal alternation between a land-king and a sea-king. It
must be clear that Horwendil and Feng are alternate kings, much as Atreus and Thyestes are in
Seneca's tragedy-much as, in a more obscure way, Old Hamlet and Claudius are. This quality
reinforces the mythological status of Shakespeare's'characters'.
18 Gollancz, Sources of Hamlet, 188. 19 Ibid. 161.
168 AGUIRRE
we encounter an inevitable link between sexual union and sover-
eignty.20 The terse grammar of myth employs a paratactic structure
giving us little more than concomitancy; any connectives between the
three events (death, enthronement, sexual union) we have to make up,
but significance is of the essence.
If we read Gertrude's marriage as a sequel to Claudius' coronation,
we assign a very poor role to her: she becomes a helpless victim of
circumstances; she loses a husband, then a new king is elected with
little regard for her possible interest in the state as 'jointress', then she
is seduced by the new king, who finally weds her for political reasons.
It is doubtlessly part of the playwright's intention to present her in
this light (see below, p. 173), yet there is more to Gertrude in the
text. Something of the paratacticgrammar of myth has rubbed off on
Shakespeare. Laertes tells Claudius that he is there 'to show my duty
in your coronation'; Horatio tells Hamlet he came 'to see your father's
funeral'; Hamlet replies sarcastically it must have been 'to see my
mother's wedding'. All three statements are found in the same scene
(I. ii). We are not told which of the three events came first, which last,
though we infer from Claudius' speech in I. ii. 1ff. that the wedding
has just taken place. On this same critical day Hamlet mourns his
father's death: 'But two months dead-nay, not so much, not two';
seven lines later: 'within a month'; his pain makes his reckoning of
time unreliable, but if it is Gertrude's wedding that, as Claudius
seems to imply, has taken place on this day, when did the coronation
take place? If some time before the wedding, why is Laertes still in
Elsinore, seeing that he only came for the coronation? If Horatio came
to see the funeral, and 'has been a month and more in Denmark,
Hamlet would have been likely to know of his presence';21 yet the
latter greets him as if they had not seen each other all this time-in
fact, as if the funeral had only taken place yesterday (which is what a
grief-stricken Hamlet feels, anyway). Judging from each of the three
statements by Laertes, Horatio, and Hamlet, we feel they all bear the
same immediacy to the present. My argument is that reading the three
events in temporal succession yields serious inconsistencies, and that
this is not simply the result of carelessness on Shakespeare'spart but
arises from a conflict between a modern perspective and a traditional
20 A debased German redaction of
Shakespeare's play, the 18th-century Der Bestrafte
Brudermord ('Fratricide Punished'; in G. Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of
Shakespeare (London, 1975), vii. 128-58) explicitly adopts the traditional view: 'Alas, my only
son has entirely lost his reason! And I am much to blame for it! Had I not taken in marriagemy
brother-in-law, I should not have robbed my son of the crown of Denmark' (Der Bestrafte
Brudermord, IV. vi). There it is, in all its coarse simplification: the crown depends on the
queen's marriage, and it is her choice of husband that has led to the present state of affairs.
21 Hamlet, ed.
Jenkins, 191.
 LIFE, CROWN, AND QUEEN 169
theme. The modern view seeks linearity, temporal order, causality;
the traditional theme involves concomitancy, simultaneity, signifi-
cance. This is most clearly brought home by Old Hamlet in I. v.
74ff.: 'Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand, IOf life, of crown,
of queen at once dispatch'd'. At once, indeed: for the queen is the life
is the crown. Again, consider the following exchange (I. v. 39ff.):
Ghost. The serpentthat did sting thy father'slife
Now wearshis crown.
Hamlet. O my propheticsoul! My uncle!
Ghost. Ay, that incestuous,that adulteratebeast,
Withwitchcraftof his wit, with traitorousgifts-
-O wickedwit, andgifts that havethe power
So to seduce!-won to his shamefullust
The will of my most seeming-virtuousqueen.
The main statement in this five-line outburst is 'Ay, that beast won
the will of my queen'. Now this statement has nothing to do with the
ostensive meaning of the Ghost's previous lines: he was trying to
reveal his murderer to Hamlet, suddenly he raves off extempore about
how this murderer has seduced Gertrude. 'Ay' is meant to confirm
Hamlet's exclamation 'My uncle!', and thus to identify the killer; since
this 'Ay' is followed by a comma, it introduces what should by rights
contribute to the identification; a string of epithets would do; but
when they emerge they become the subject of a new sentence, one
which does not confirm anything said before but moves on to a
different track, yielding a logically incongruous sequence which could
be summarized as follows:
Ghost. My murdereris the presentking.
Hamlet. My uncle!
Ghost. Yes, he seducedmy wife.
Incongruous, indeed: unless the Queen's will does have a relevance
to life and crown.

3. The Queen's Will

For us it would be a simple matter to read here that the Queen is
guilty, or at least hopelessly weak; that she has conspired or connived
in the King's murder; that, being of a fickle will, she has let herself be
seduced, and proven frail and inconstant, if not treacherous. For the
more traditional, mythical mind, on the other hand, the Queen simply
exercises a prerogative, and it is her deliberate choice that results in a
king's death and another man's enthronement: the Queen is indeed
the life is the crown. Now, Shakespeare'stext stands half-way between
170 AGUIRRE
these two readings; it contains a persistent if subdued association of
the Queen with 'life and crown' as well as several important
ingredients of the traditional theme of Sovereignty, but for Hamlet
they are no longer intelligible, even though he, like Claudius, dimly
recognizes their import. And so he is outraged by his mother's deed, a
deed which he, like ourselves, must interpret in a 'realistic' way and
therefore without the frameworkof myth to justify it.
Nor is this such a far-fetched notion. Our contemporary, 'post-
modernist' literature is currently dealing with its exact opposite: for it
exploits our absolute faith in realism and startles or thrills us with the
sight of a charactercaught out of his reality: we feel puzzled or amused
when an author intrudes into the story to tell his creation what's what,
when the immutable frame of reality-in-the-novel breaks down and
characters become suddenly conscious of their fictional status.22 But
what happens when a creature of myth comes, quite possibly in spite
of himself, to believe in a reality divested of symbolic qualities? What
should we say of a character who gets trapped into a pitilessly real
space and becomes unable to explain his world because he no longer
has the wider reference frameworkof myth to validate it? Elsewhere I
have used the expression 'the closure of the world' to identify the
process whereby an increasing realism shuts the Renaissance culture
against the world of the non-rational, the world of Numens,
archetypes, and myths, with the resulting loss of meaning for the
inhabitants of the human world.23 Hamlet, one such victim of this
closure, vainly tries to understand by means of reason what is in effect
a mythical deed; he rejects much that goes on in Elsinore; but most he
rages at his mother's choice. With 'a scholar's tongue' he runs through
all the human faculties, senses, and emotions which might have been
responsible for Gertrude's inexplicable act; he concludes that the
operations of memory, love, judgement, sense, and shame must have
been suspended at the time; even reason must have been perverted,
for 'reason panders will'. This, an incomprehensible will which he can
only see as perverse, is all that remains after such an analysis.
And the will is the key to the problem. In the context, the word will
may signify sexual desire, or passion generally, but it cannot be
reduced to either; the word is contrasted with 'conscience', 'thought'
(III. i), 'reflection', 'reason' (III. iv): a contrast central not only to
Hamlet but also to a proper understanding of the Renaissance.
Medieval Christianity had always emphasized the will, whether in a
22
Metalepsis, the violation of narrativelevels, is rife in post-modernism; for discussion see B.
McHale, PostmodernistFiction (New York, 1987).
23 See
Aguirre, The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism (Manchester,
1990), esp. ch. 3.
 LIFE, CROWN, AND QUEEN 171
literature of action or in its religious concern with free will. On the
other hand, ever since the Renaissance our culture has stressed con-
sciousness, while placing a lavish emphasis upon the evils of the will.
The myths of Faustus and Don Juan, of Macbeth and Satan, Don
Quixote's rashness and Hamlet's indecision, all point to a new under-
standing of the will as an evil or ineffective faculty whose operations
are to be mistrusted. The rise of Elizabethan drama and the birth of
the picaresque novel signal a new type of writing which stresses the
ubiquitousness of deception, the importance of mistrust, the need to
reflect before acting. The modernity breeds a literature of reflection in
which the world is no longer the known arena where the central
question was whether to follow one or the other of two well-
understood courses of action; but a bewildering realm where the
question is ratherwhether to act at all, given our uncertainty about the
motives, means, and outcome of action.24
As the Queen carries out her one mythical deed, on which the whole
play depends, the new hero ponders its import, agonizes over his own
response, and endlessly reflects about motives and consequences; in
his eyes her will becomes an evil faculty unchecked by reflection. Her
choice of consort should be understood in symbolic- terms-but a
'realist'son finds it meaningless and outrageous; it should be seen as a
manifestation of the theme of Sovereignty-but without the dignity of
myth, it becomes a mere case of adultery.
4. Adultery
Do not weep, kindcuckold,takecomfort,man,thy bettershavebeenbeccos:
AgamemnonEmperorof all the merry Greeks, that tickled all the true
Troyans,wasa cornuto;PrinceArthur,thatcut off twelvekings'beards,was
a cornuto;Hercules,whosebackboreup heaven,andgot fortywencheswith
child in one night . . . yet was a cornuto.
(Marston,TheMalcontent,iv. v. 54ff.)25
This is the 'realist', cynical view; unwittingly, however, it once again
looks back to myths. All three heroes mentioned by Marston perished
as a result of their wives' infidelity or involvement with another man.
Both Agamemnon and Hercules died much like Polonius when
covered with a fateful piece of clothing (net, shirt) woven by their
wives. As for Arthur, we learn from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History
that, 'at the beginning of August', he left for Rome, delegating 'the
task of defending Britain to his nephew Mordred and to his Queen,
24 See
Aguirre, 'A Literature of Reflection', Forum For Modern Language Studies, 29 (1993),
193-202.
25 Jacobean Tragedies, ed. A. H. Gomme
(Oxford, 1982).
172 AGUIRRE
Guinevere'. A year later, 'when summer came', he learned 'that his
nephew Mordred, in whose care he had left Britain, had placed the
crown upon his own head. What is more, this treacherous tyrant was
living adulterously and out of wedlock with Queen Guinevere, who
had broken the vows of her earlier marriage'.26The resemblance to
Hamlet is noteworthy; but here the presence of myth is much more
obvious. The summer king leaves, a new summer comes; usurpation
of kingship is simultaneous with usurpation of the king's marital
rights. Geoffrey, of course, lays part of the blame on Guinevere, like
his contemporary Saxo does on Queen Hermutrude: woman is
inconstant. But both authors preserve glimpses of an older tradition,
and other myths allow us to uncover its pattern. King Cormac dreamt
that his wife Ethne slept with Eochu Gunnat, after which she went
back to her husband; when asking his druid for an interpretation, he
was told: 'thy kingship will sleep with him, and he will be but one year
in the kingship of Tara'.27Blodeuwedd and her lover planned to slay
her husband, the Welsh hero Lieu Llaw Gyffes; but he could only be
killed by a spear forged 'in a year of Sundays'; and so Lleu was struck
down exactly one year after the plan was conceived.28The death of the
year equates the death of the husband; either event signals (or is
signalled by) the Queen's or Lady's attachment to another man.
The drift of my argument is that we have to do with ritual. I do not
mean this in any anthropological sense, the sort of ritual at which, as
Robert Graves29 tells us, the Queen rid herself of a Yearly or
Half-Yearly King in a bloody sacrifice. Rather I mean mythic,
ultimately literary ritual. From the point of view of literary analysis,
the entire concept of Sovereignty and its transmission must be seen as
a stupendous metaphor devised to convey the basic rhythm of earth
and seasons. The metaphor is presented in a variety of images centred
around Woman which include the Voyage, the Test, the Cup, the
Yarn or Net or woven garment; abduction, hierogamy, and adultery;
deliverance and bondage; betrayal, death, and renewal. It is because
these are all metaphors for a sacred round-it is because they are
transcendent images-that they are used by traditional cultures. The
general principle, of which adultery constitutes a special case, is
renewal, and in the mythic heart of medieval Europe this principle is
still strong enough to assert itself from behind the growing realism of
its literature.
26 The History of the Kings of Britain, tr. L. Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1982), vII. x.
27 'Cormac's Dream', retold in P. MacCana,
'Aspects of the Theme of King and Goddess in
Irish Literature', Etudes Celtiques, 7 (1955-6), 76ff., 356 ff.; 8 (1958-9), 59 ff.
28 'Math Son of
Mathonwy', in The Mabinogion.
29 Graves, The Greek
Myths (Harmondsworth, 1960).
 LIFE, CROWN, AND QUEEN 173
And so when we come to the Renaissance we find the theme of
Sovereignty still very much a literary issue; but instead of asserting
the theme, the literature of the new age questions it, literalizes and
plays down its mythic import. In the metaphor of earth and seasons,
woman was nature and her behaviour was therefore predictable in a
mythic, cyclic-as opposed to linear-view of time. Take this myth
away, and woman's behaviour will appear incomprehensible and
therefore perverse; it is then but inevitable that this perversion should
attach to the metaphor itself, to all female symbols of nature. At this
point, Laertes' speech on learning of Ophelia's death sums up the
whole issue:
Too muchof waterhastthou, poorOphelia,
And thereforeI forbidmy tears;but yet
It is our trick;natureher customholds,
Let shamesaywhatit will. Whenthesearegone,
The womanwill be out. Adieu, my lord,
I havea speecho' firethat fainwouldblaze
But that this folly drownesit.
(Hamlet, Iv. vii. 184 ff.)
The concepts Laertes is contrasting can be summarized thus:
Man Woman
shame (honour) nature
fire tears, water
blazing drowning
speech folly
'The woman will be out.' This is the unconscious goal towards which
the new culture strives: the eradication of the significant presence of
the feminine principle from the Western definition of the universe.
She is water that has to be opposed with fire; she is folly that has to be
mastered with that most rational faculty, speech; she is shameless
nature that has to be restrained by a manly sense of honour; she stands
for myth that must be replaced with a realistic view of things. But she
is also strong: too strong for the patriarchalculture to destroy her; she
may be outrageously unintelligible, but her folly can yet drown a
speech of fire. The only way to defeat her age-old power is to get the
imagery to shortcircuit itself, as it were: the metaphor implodes, and
Woman drowns in the very water she symbolized; it implodes again,
and she dies of the very drink that was her most sacred prerogative.
With the deaths of Ophelia and, especially, Gertrude, the traditional
concept of Sovereignty passes from woman's hands, and a decisive
step is taken towards the Modernity.
174 AGUIRRE: LIFE, CROWN, AND QUEEN
To conclude, then, Hamlet does not just express the new point of
view concerning woman's Sovereignty, but presents the conflict itself
between the old and the new as embodied in a modern hero's
confrontation with an ancient myth. Shakespeare does not limit
himself to the use of traditional material to convey a present-day
concern; he seems rather to have realized that this is precisely the root
of the problem-that the spirit of the modernity is ill at ease with
traditional modes of expression, that the new man must come to terms
with the loss of the old frameworks; ultimately, that there is no place
in the new ideology for the traditional metaphors, though these cannot
be lightly abandoned.