Hamlet and Queen Elizabeth
Hamlet and Queen Elizabeth
Otto Rank mentions Hamlet as an example of the heroic archetype: “The fable of Shakespeare’s Hamlet also permits of a similar interpretation… mythological investigators bring the Hamlet legend from entirely different viewpoints into the correlation of the circle of myths.” Rank’s remarks on Hamlet are of interest:
It seems to me not improbable that the inspired poet portrayed himself in the Danish prince, so that he might with impunity utter high treason . . . the participation of Hamlet in his entrapping play might be explained from the fact that powerful opponents of Elizabeth did really use the poet as a means to attack her and stir her conscience. In this case, we should have a reflection, in Hamlet’s editing of the “play,” of the part important friends of the poet actually had in his work.[1]
Rank voiced doubts over the attribution of the canon: “we know so little of his actual life and even doubt his authorship. Shakespeare’s work and the biographical material that has been gathered about the Stratford butcher’s son have just as much psychological connection as have the Homeric poems and our scanty information about the blind Ionian singer.”[2]
Hamlet enters print in the early Jacobean moment, immediately after the death of Elizabeth in 1603. During her lifetime, Elizabeth was not merely a monarch but a sacralized political symbol: the Virgin Queen, the body politic itself, the “Great Mother” of England. To stage a tragedy in which the queen-mother is morally compromised, sexually suspect, and implicated in the corruption of the realm would have been extraordinarily sensitive while Elizabeth lived. After her death, that symbolic restraint loosens.
Read in that light, Gertrude’s sudden centrality in Hamlet is striking. She is not a passive background figure; the moral problem of the play runs through her body. Hamlet’s revulsion is not primarily directed at Claudius’s crime (regicide is almost taken for granted in revenge tragedy), but at Gertrude’s remarriage, her sexuality, her apparent lack of discernment, her failure to mourn “with the constancy of nature.” This aligns uncannily with long-suppressed cultural anxieties surrounding Elizabeth: her refusal to marry, the obsessive scrutiny of her body, rumors of illicit intimacy (Leicester, Essex), and the sense that the fate of the realm was bound to the queen’s sexual and maternal status. Gertrude becomes, in effect, the dramatized site where those anxieties can finally be spoken.
What makes the parallel sharper is that Hamlet is not an allegory of succession politics in the abstract; it is a meditation on a realm poisoned at its maternal source. Denmark is “an unweeded garden” not simply because a king was murdered, but because the queen’s desire has short-circuited lawful order. That emphasis resonates with post-Elizabethan retrospection: once the Virgin Queen is gone, her symbolic immunity evaporates, and the culture can begin to re-imagine the maternal sovereign as fallible, opaque, even culpable. Gertrude is not Elizabeth as she was, but Elizabeth as she could now be thought, no longer protected by living majesty.
This also explains why Hamlet is so uniquely modern: he is the son of a mythic political mother, suddenly forced to see her as human, sexual, compromised. That psychic rupture mirrors England’s own transition from the long Elizabethan stasis into the uncertain Jacobean present. The play’s appearance after Elizabeth’s death is therefore not merely chronological convenience; it marks a release. The maternal body of the state can finally be interrogated, and the cost of that interrogation—melancholy, paralysis, moral hyper-consciousness—is dramatized in Hamlet himself.
Within this framework, Polonius stands out as the clearest historical analogue. His resemblance to William Cecil, Elizabeth’s principal counselor for four decades, is widely acknowledged, even within orthodox scholarship. Polonius’s habits of surveillance, his prolix moralizing, his use of children as political instruments, and his belief that stability is preserved through information control closely mirror Cecil’s governing style and reputation. Gertrude’s relation to Elizabeth, by contrast, is less biographical than symbolic. She represents Elizabeth not as a person, but as a problem of sovereignty: a queen whose body, marriage, and sexuality are inseparable from the fate of the state.
Although Hamlet enters the historical record in print only in 1603, the evidence is overwhelming that it circulated in manuscript for several years before the death of Elizabeth. The so-called “Bad Quarto” of 1603 (Q1), far from being an embarrassment, is the clearest proof of this pre-1603 life. Its shortened length, paraphrased speeches, rearranged scenes, and simplified language are characteristic of memorial reconstruction, most plausibly by an actor who had performed the play repeatedly. A text of this kind presupposes an already established performance history: lines spoken often enough to be half-remembered, scenes vivid enough to be recalled in outline, but not yet fixed in authoritative literary form. In other words, Hamlet did not suddenly appear after Elizabeth’s death; it had already been living on the stage during her final years, circulating orally and theatrically rather than textually.
This chronology is crucial for interpretation. During Elizabeth’s lifetime, the play seems to have existed in a state of deliberate instability, performed publicly but not fully released into print. Only after her death in March 1603 does Hamlet break into textual circulation, first in damaged form (Q1), then in the expansive and philosophically dense second quarto of 1604–05. Such a sequence strongly suggests political and symbolic constraint. A tragedy centrally preoccupied with a morally compromised queen-mother, her sexuality, her remarriage, and her implication in the sickness of the body politic would have been extraordinarily sensitive while the Virgin Queen herself still embodied the state. The play could be performed, absorbed as drama, but not yet fixed, authorized, or stabilized as text. Once Elizabeth was gone, that restraint loosened. The maternal figure at the heart of the realm could finally be interrogated, and Hamlet could emerge fully into print. This historical pattern strengthens the case for reading Gertrude not as a casual character flaw, but as a dramatized site where long-suppressed anxieties about Elizabeth’s body, authority, and symbolic motherhood could at last be explored.
[1] Rank, Otto. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings. New York: Vintage 1959 p. 237
[2] Ibid., p. 199