Mourning, Misogyny, and the Monarchy
Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600-1607
Introduction
In 1597, André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, noted that while the English people still showed love for Queen Elizabeth, the nobility doubted they would submit to female rule again.
Upon Elizabeth's death, London celebrated with bonfires and cries of "We have a king!", indicating a shift in the body politic towards a male sovereign.
While there were eulogies for Elizabeth, her last years saw a resurgence of political misogyny.
Over the first decade of James's reign, an idealized image of Elizabeth as a capable ruler emerged, often as commentary on James's defects.
The cultural process of accommodating and revising Elizabeth's image involved an economy between mourning and misogyny.
The essay explores how male mourning in the Renaissance could be intertwined with misogyny, especially concerning a female ruler like Elizabeth.
Emotions are historically and culturally constructed, varying across different axes.
Analyzing past cultures through archives poses interpretive challenges, especially when examining emotions; even public expressions of emotions are difficult to interpret with certainty.
For example, a sixteenth-century Tupinamba covered their face and wept as a gesture of welcome, but the emotions expressed remain unknown.
Both mourning and misogyny in late-sixteenth-century England present unique interpretive challenges.
Misogyny was pervasive, making individual instances seem unemotional and rote.
Expressions of grief were less common, and personal diaries were rare.
Lawrence Stone suggested interpersonal relations were cold, leading him to believe major bereavements were not deeply felt.
Elizabeth provides a strategic focus for studying the interaction of affect, as she significantly impacted the nation's political life and cultural imagination.
Her final progress involved processing her age in the political unconscious, requiring inquiry beyond political history into the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage.
The resurgent political misogyny at Elizabeth's court coincided with increased misogyny on stage.
After her death, the popular stage manifested complex investment in reworking and resolving Elizabeth's reign.
The Popular Stage as a Resource
The popular stage is a unique historical resource for understanding the cultural construction of emotions, beyond merely recording structures of feeling.
The symbolic economy of English culture underwent significant transformation in the sixteenth century.
The English Reformation displaced the notion of the orthodox, leading to skepticism and relativism.
Individuals had increasing access to heterodox ideas through print culture and rising literacy.
Fears of an informed populace focused on those who could read; ideas spread through re-presentation in various forums.
The emergence of the popular stage caused an explosive expansion of the symbolic economy and the controversy provoked by the popular theater was largely ideological and political rather than aesthetic.
Public drama lacked the status of literature and the expansion of knowledge threatened to redefine its boundaries, forcing a transition from a closed system to a more open economy.
The Elizabethan public theater emerged from cultural fissures and contradictions, influenced by artisanal entrepreneurs and a diverse audience and unlike other expansions of the discursive domain, literacy was not the price of admission to the theater.
The stage was an affective forum, embodying ideas and ideologies through dramatic representation significantly departed from English dramatic tradition.
The shift from morality plays to affective characters demanded new powers of identification and apprehension in audiences, altering dramatic and self-representation.
The popular stage served as a unique force for representing, soliciting, shaping, and enacting affect, potentially reshaping the political, social, and psychological subject and functioning as a prominent arena for addressing cultural traumas, such as Elizabeth's death.
Misogyny rose in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean drama, intersecting with mourning in specific plays and genres.
Revenge tragedy became synonymous with stage misogyny and invested in Renaissance mourning processes, but mourning and misogyny are typically studied separately.
Late Elizabethan and early Jacobean revenge tragedy most fully engaged with Elizabeth's posthumous body, in an interplay of mourning, misogyny, revisionary desire, idealization, and travesty.
From 1600 to 1607, the queen's bodies progressed through visceral responses in popular theater.
The Aging Queen
In 1600, Queen Elizabeth was sixty-eight years old, with visible signs of aging.
The Rainbow Portrait circulated, presenting an unaging image of Gloriana.
The contradiction between Elizabeth's age and the sexualized image fueled by her cult required a full embodiment of this sovereign contradiction and presenting or representing her body necessitated a full and overdetermined embodiment of this sovereign contradiction.
Despite being past childbearing age, Elizabeth's aging was a sensitive political issue.
Elizabeth countered perceptions of her age, embodying alluring appeal; she was strangely attired, displaying her bosom, and her face appeared aged, with missing teeth.
Her behavior involved revealing her body, a complex register of cultural symbolism of the virgin-mother.
Cosmetics were used to lessen the incongruity in the public domain, but the line between image and reality was blurred; at Christmas, Elizabeth's face was painted "near half an inch thick," making her a canvas.
Elizabeth's erotic displays and painted selves were significant in maintaining the sovereign aura, an effort to imbue her natural body with the body politic's ageless aura and her attempt to reinvest her final years with the erotic dynamics of courtship was an effort to close the gap between the queen’s two bodies.
Thomas Tuke's "Treatise against Painting" described the painted woman as a parody of the monarchical body, violating gender and divine creation.
Cosmetics, containing mercury, symbolized a putrefying corpse.
The cosmetically enhanced visage becomes a memento mori and the painted lady does not disguise death, she embodies it.
Elizabeth's rule involved constructing ambiguous desire for her, not just as a monarch but as a woman and, even in later years, Elizabeth successfully constructed her subjects’ desires though an incident in 1600 shows some of the dangers involved as well.
Abraham Edwardes, a Kentish mariner, sent a passionate letter and drew his dagger in the presence chamber, but William Waad suggested he was transported by love rather than regicide.
Edwardes's act was a violation of the queen's presence, relating to Hamlet's need to control his violence toward Gertrude.
Edwardes's "humour of love" allows viewing Elizabeth through period eyes.
Hamlet is aware of its late Elizabethan status, with the impending transfer of power considered in view of the queen's aging body.
Hamlet and the Queen
Cecil followed Waad’s advice and Abraham Edwardes was confined as an antic lover, instead of being prosecuted as an attempted regicide.
Similarly, in Hamlet, regicide is displaced by the eroticized and aging figure of the queen.
Hamlet is first seen in mourning clothes, distanced from the court and styling his grief as that which "passes show."
Hamlet reveals his grief is supplanted by disgust over Gertrude’s sexual appetite and the incestuousness of the queen becomes a generalized sign of bestial inconstancy.
The Ghost digresses upon Gertrude's lust for which he calls garbage and the vengeful charge focuses on sexual transgression.
In the Mousetrap scene, Hamlet's attention is on Gertrude rather than Claudius and the Mousetrap scene functions to catch the conscience of the queen, not the king.
Long history of oedipal readings that view the play as one more family romance, only incidentally staged in terms of state hierarchies and monarchical sexuality.
Aging widowed queen resonates with the aging virgin queen on the throne as critics suggest Gertrude represents the convergence of sexuality, aging, and succession, mirroring Elizabeth.
Gertrude, as both widow and mother, strengthens the association and Elizabeth styled herself as the sovereign mother of her subjects.
Widows occupied an anomalous, threatening position, recovering power without parental constraints.
Remarriage raised fears of independence mixing economic and sexual hierarchies and Gertrude’s transgression distracts Hamlet from his purpose as her passion is a mutineer and a traitor.
Productions sometimes hide the transgression of aging sexuality, but it should not be exorcised from Hamlet’s mind.
Elizabethan theater heightens the incongruity of Gertrude’s figure the aging sexual body is theatrically embodied not through verisimilitude, but through homologous contradiction.
On the Elizabethan stage, a boy actor represents the skull beneath the painted skin.
According to Freud, melancholy is produced by an incapacity to acknowledge or properly mourn death and Abraham and Torok define incorporation as the sign of this interminable mourning.
English culture in the 16th century witnessed a Protestant campaign against expressing grief; treatises consider grief a sign of irrationality and impiety.
Manuals on grief counseled anger rather than sympathy, altering traditional bereavement and potentially resulting in socially induced melancholy.
Hamlet's melancholy is produced by Gertrude's vitality, not his father's death, a "prevented" mourning that results from this dilemma.
What is sexually vital becomes figured as death and, twice in the play, Hamlet configures signs of female sexuality-in-age as memento mori, registering not vitality but corruption and death.
To Ophelia, he castigates painted women as usurpers of divine creation and, in the graveyard scene, Yorick’s skull prompts a declaration of female mortality.
Hamlet’s move from Yorick’s skull to that of the painted lady is a displacement of grief with misogyny.
After this moment Gertrude is no longer vilified for her sexual transgression but is represented as the victim of Claudius’s lust.
The change is dramatic as she is a victim rather than an agent and Yorick gives Hamlet a subtle glimpse of successful mourning.
Hamlet's cynicism ceases when Yorick's skull makes present the living memory.
Successful mourning requires resolving contradictions and, rather than deny this, Hamlet projects living memory onto the skull and plants an imaginary kiss on the grotesque overlay.
The moment shifts to direct address and embodies the memory and is given life onstage, as Hamlet becomes Yorick.
Exhumation of Yorick's skull is accompanied by dates; not only the concurrence of Hamlet’s birth, Fortinbras's death, and the sexton’s entrance, but also the number of years Yorick has laid in the grave.
Hamlet is 30, Yorick has been in the grave for 23 years and the reference alludes to the breeching age, of seven, when the boys transition from childhood to youth.
The Winter's Tale repeats this, with Leontes recalling an early modern pre-oedipal phase 23 years before.
Hamlet is recalling himself, unbreeched and this is not just about mourning but also about passage into the gendered world of sexuality and passage into the gendered world of sexuality, also being mourned, is effaced, since adult sexuality can be misrecognized.
Judith Butler suggests gender identity is a melancholic structure, with the taboo being homosexuality rather than heterosexuality.
The breeching age constituted a moment of gender formation, crucial to the gendered codification of the cultural and political subject.
Renaissance England’s patriarchal hierarchy was grounded in an ideology of male supremacy, however, this autonomy was contradicted and misogyny is an aggressive expression of contradiction.
The death of an influential woman would mark this ambivalence, with male autonomy exposed as male dependency.
If Hamlet regressed beyond the breeching age he would resolve the contradiction, However, this is impossible, and this god is the ultimate patriarch.
Hamlet achieves a resolution of patriarchy's contradictions by constructing a world free from gender differentiation.
The Revenger's Tragedy
Vindice declares in The Revenger's Tragedy, that woman is all male (2.1.111).
Elizabeth styled herself as both, but Cecil complained she was "more than a man, and sometime less than a woman."
The Revenger's Tragedy clarifies the Elizabethan undertones in Hamlet, processing Elizabeth through the figure of the sovereign and remarried widow.
The play opens with a revenger musing on mortality with a skull, as in the graveyard scene of Hamlet.
The object of mourning, put off for some nine years, is a woman who out of love of the protagonist and was poisoned for spurning the Duke.
Vindice holds her skull, withholding her name, and as he begins he addresses it as a purity and chastity icon.
Seeking terms for praising her beauty, Vindice recasts them as contradictions and says so beautiful she could make the uprightest man sin; Vindice cannot talk about her chaste beauty (which made her so unique) without turning beauty into a contradiction in terms.
Peter Stallybrass notes Vindice's praise undoes itself, making it clear she is only beyond artificial shine in death and Vindice is deaf to his entanglements of mourning and misogyny.
Vindice easily makes Hamlet sound like a proto-feminist: Women have permeable bodies (all male is one whom none can enter).
Vindice echoes: women, their bodies, and hence their characters are commonly described as "leaky vessels."
Editors of modern texts are reluctant to gloss these lines relating to Vindice's gross talk and genitalia, seeds planted in the ear, in a leaky vessel so she can “piss away” his secret.
When the skull returns in Act 3 he had applied cosmetics to it; His lover is costumed as a whore for the revenge scheme.
The beauty of his lover leads him to this act of violence and revenge. His chaste lover is used as stage prop to carry out his own revenge.
His real desire is to murder the person who requested the “prop,” his lover.
His lover is fully made up again, the way the offender desired her to be.
His lover becomes a parody. Vindice most strongly recalls Hamlet in the graveyard; there. Hamlet reinvested Yorick, he literalizes this to reproduce a theatrically viable spectacle.
Within the play, making his chaste lover the vehicle of her own revenge means subjecting her to the fate she died to avoid which is: to become the painted lady, the courtesan, the whore; unlike Hamlet's kiss, hers will be literalized here, the kiss is refused to the Duke in life and will now be granted to him death.
In one case the person imagines life, in the other, vindictive, life is literalized.
As previously said, the ideal lover and the painted lady are one, both male constructions.
Unlike the first play we discussed, men create/ construct the idea; there is no memory here, nor a desire, nor is the desire for life at all; to die, he paints the woman and she who was beyond this thing
Vindice's revenge of his dead lover has become a travesty of her chastity.
As the skull of Gloriana, the travesty extends to Elizabeth, however during her reign Elizabeth was the primary actor in the cult of Gloriana.
Vindice's travesty turns those poetics radically, returning her to the Petrarchan lady and in Elizabeth’s memory she becomes an object of male desire.
Gloriana is now a property, a stage prop; not even the boy-actor can peep through because sovereign sexuality is mastered and violated.
The violation is arguably a climactic moment, and there is no posthumous recovery here.
In the travesty of Gloriana, the dead queen is proved