『햄릿』: 왕조 교체기 정치극
Hamlet: A Political Drama at the Change of the English Dynasty
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Queen Elizabeth I established the strategy to rule by turning the political weakness of her gender to an advantage as soon as she came to the throne. She openly declared that she would not get married for her entire life and avowed herself to be the Virgin-Mother of her people. Moreover she established the strong image of her kingship by combining the womanly frailty of her natural body and the masculine strength of the body politic. But considering her situation within the patriarchal society, her rule might have made her subjects, who were mostly male, feel frustrated and degraded to serve a female prince. Furthermore, Queen Elizabeth displayed and kept her power through an erotic strategy as well as a maternal strategy using her sexuality as an instrument. Such an erotic strategy of Elizabethan rule was dangerous since it provoked an ambiguous desire for the queen not as a monarch but as a woman. By the end of her reign, the gap between her natural body and the body politic was apparent, and the physical condition of the heirless queen made it necessary to reconsider the relation between her aging body and the political strength of England. Facing the danger of equating her body with the body politic, the playwrights of the day reflected the effort to demystify the queen’s body in their works. Hamlet is one of the plays which appeared during the time when people were finding it necessary to reconsider the Elizabethan display to prepare for the impending death of the queen and the accession of a male monarch. In Hamlet, Queen Gertrude functions as a degraded figure of Queen Elizabeth. She shares aging sexuality with Queen Elizabeth. Gertrude disrupts the continuity of Denmark’s monarchy and authorizes Claudius’s usurpation by second marriage. By doing so, she becomes the illegitimate source of political authority. In this sense, the final deprivation of Gertrude’s sexuality and her death means the domestication of the woman in power within the patriarchy. Finally, this political misogyny reflects the contemporary desire to be free from female rule and anticipates the coming Jacobean rule.
Abstract
Queen Elizabeth I established the strategy to rule by turning the political weakness of her gender to an advantage as soon as she came to the throne. She openly declared that she would not get married for her entire life and avowed herself to be the Virgin-Mother of her people. Moreover she established the strong image of her kingship by combining the womanly frailty of her natural body and the masculine strength of the body politic. But considering her situation within the patriarchal society, her rule might have made her subjects, who were mostly male, feel frustrated and degraded to serve a female prince. Furthermore, Queen Elizabeth displayed and kept her power through an erotic strategy as well as a maternal strategy using her sexuality as an instrument. Such an erotic strategy of Elizabethan rule was dangerous since it provoked an ambiguous desire for the queen not as a monarch but as a woman. By the end of her reign, the gap between her natural body and the body politic was apparent, and the physical condition of the heirless queen made it necessary to reconsider the relation between her aging body and the political strength of England. Facing the danger of equating her body with the body politic, the playwrights of the day reflected the effort to demystify the queen’s body in their works. Hamlet is one of the plays which appeared during the time when people were finding it necessary to reconsider the Elizabethan display to prepare for the impending death of the queen and the accession of a male monarch. In Hamlet, Queen Gertrude functions as a degraded figure of Queen Elizabeth. She shares aging sexuality with Queen Elizabeth. Gertrude disrupts the continuity of Denmark’s monarchy and authorizes Claudius’s usurpation by second marriage. By doing so, she becomes the illegitimate source of political authority. In this sense, the final deprivation of Gertrude’s sexuality and her death means the domestication of the woman in power within the patriarchy. Finally, this political misogyny reflects the contemporary desire to be free from female rule and anticipates the coming Jacobean rule.
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