Significantly, whatever Ql's relationship to Q2 and F Hamlet—whether Ql was itself reformed from an early version of the play and precedes Q2 or is a later version of the Q2 or F texts—an early modern audience would find little in Gertred's onstage words or actions to substantiate the prejudice against remarriage. So dependent is Gertred, Claudius's pale accessory and echo, that she appears foreordained to remarry. Her precipitate second marriage casts her as a lusty widow, but despite the stereotype, her speeches and actions are characterized almost exclusively by meekness and silence. For one thing, Gertred is neutralized politically, being largely overlooked by Claudius and slighted by Corambis.²⁶ Yet silence seems as much native to her as imposed by others' disregard. Gertrard/Gertrude's plea to Hamlet (Q2/F1TLN 248-53 and 255-56) to end his mourning does not appear in Ql;²⁷ Gertred speaks only two lines in the entire scene, begging Hamlet to stay (Q1CLN 194-95). Her words follow and summarize two longer speeches by Claudius in which he entreats Hamlet to remain in Denmark as "the Ioy and halfe heart of your mother" (Q1CLN 176), this phrase itself underlining Gertred's domestic, maternal role. Welcoming Rossencraft and Gilderstone, Gertred speaks but one line of thanks (Q1CLN 734), echoing Claudius; she greets Corambis's announcement that he has discovered the cause of Hamlet's madness with "God graunt he hath" (Q1CLN 746), a sentiment both exemplary and concise. She urges the same concision on Corambis—"Good my Lord be briefe" (Q1CLN 781)—and exits at his request (Q1CLN 833). When Claudius promises lasting thanks to Rossencraft and Gilderstone, thinking them responsible for Hamlet's high spirits, Gertred again ventures no more than a two-line echo (Q1CLN 1182-83). In another two lines she agrees to see the play, saying "it ioyes me at the soule / He is inclin'd to any kinde of mirth" (Q1CLN 1186-87). At Corambis's and Claudius's request, she also agrees to summon Hamlet and question him while Corambis eavesdrops on his reply: "With all my heart, soone will I send for him" (Q1CLN 1202). No small part of why Gertred impresses us as "a relatively passive mirror of events, a surface without independent motives for action,"²⁸ is her possessing in quantity the silence thought so proper to womankind: foremost among "The infallible markes of a vertuous woman," writes Barnabe Rich in 1613, are "bashfullnes, [and] silence … She must not bee a vaine talker."²⁹

In addition, Rich counsels the virtuous woman to be "tractable to her husband."³⁰ Her own subjectivity undeveloped, Gertred is scripted as tractable to everyone; she is a peacemaker as well. To placate Laertes, she tries to explain away Hamlet's behavior at Ofelia's grave; she concurs with Claudius's feigned desire that Laertes and Hamlet reconcile: "God grant they may" (Q1CLN 2082). She disobeys Claudius only as she attempts to protect him from Laertes. She does not disobey when she drinks from the poisoned cup; in Ql Gertred drinks before Claudius orders her not to:

Queene Here Hamlet, thy mother drinkes to
 thee.
                           Shee drinkes.
King Do not drinke Gertred: O t'is the
  poysned cup!
                                 (Q1CLN 2160-62)

Unlike Gertrard/Gertrude of Q2 and Fl, Gertred could never be construed as a conscious site of resistance to social expectations.³¹ She is not self-willed; she makes no suggestions; and she is quick to fall in with the plans of others. But so tractable a wife to her second husband logically must have been no less compliant as the widow of her first. The virtue of female submissiveness proves itself a two-edged sword when the ideological goal is marital fidelity undaunted by the husband's death. Gertred's behavior throughout the play beckons us to read her acquiescence to a questionable and sudden second marriage as the corollary of an otherwise praiseworthy habit of obedience to male authority.

Just as Gertred's actions are marked by compliance, so her language is informed by piety. She typically alludes to her prayers and her soul, invokes God and heaven, and makes sacred vows. Her protestation of innocence is an oath: "But as I haue a soule, I sweare by heauen, /I neuer knew of this most horride murder" (Q1CLN 1582-83). She calls on God (as Bel-imperia, from whom the lines are lifted, does not) to witness her loyalty to Hamlet:

           Hamlet, I vow by that maiesty,
That knowes our thoughts, and lookes into our
 hearts,
I will conceale, consent, and doe my best,
What stratagem soe're thou shalt deuise.
                               (Q1CLN 1594-97)

When Claudius hopes "to heare good newes from thence [England] ere long, / If euery thing fall out to our content" (Q1CLN 1678-79), Gertred devoutly observes, "God grant it may, heau'ns keep my Hamlet safe" (Q1CLN 1681). In fact, G. B. Shand observes that, "although her role is just over half the size of the Q2/F1 Gertrude, she has three times the number of references to God, heaven, her soul, and prayer, culminating in this vow to Hamlet [at CLN 1594-97]."³² All these iterations both sanitize Gertred and associate her with a comfit-maker's wife, making it difficult for an audience to believe that she would have committed adultery, and underscoring her innocence but for her misguided remarriage.

Silence, obedience, piety—such qualities become all Elizabethan women; when motherly concern and celibacy (a strong possibility for Gertred after the closet scene) are joined to these virtues, we confront the model Catholic widow, a "widow indeed." Gertred's bland words and actions are always decorous—she describes Ofelia's death with no unseemly references to "long Purples" or "liberall Shepheards" (Q2/F1TLN 3161-62)—and always maternal. Gertred stakes her only claim to importance on her position as Hamlet's mother. In her closet Gertred shows the first signs of self-regard when, in reply to Hamlet's stichomythic "Mother, you haue my father much offended," she demands, "How now boy?" (Q1CLN 1498-99). In other words, her sole demand for respect is for deference to her maternal authority. Again, while Gertred's account of the murder of Polonius is similar to that in Q2 and Fl, the unique lines "But then he throwes and tosses me about, / As one forgetting that I was his mother" (Q1CLN 1607-8) intimate astonishment that Hamlet could so disregard her parental status. When Hamlet returns to Denmark, she asks Horatio to "command me / A mothers care to him, bid him a while / Be wary of his presence, lest that he / Faile in that he goes about" (Q1CLN 1826-29).³³ When Gertred learns of the fate of Gilderstone and Rossencraft, she thanks heaven for preserving Hamlet, sending him "thowsand mothers blessings" (Q1CLN 1843). Offering Hamlet her napkin to wipe his sweaty face is another gesture of concern. Gertred toasts her son, saying "Here Hamlet, thy mother drinkes to thee" (Q1CLN 2160)—"thy mother" rather than "The Queene" (Q2/F1TLN 3758). Overall Ql presents a cohesive enough but neutral character who is neither temptress nor villain; she does and says what is expected of her and little more. In this regard Ql seems less misogynistic than Q2/F1, but because the price of being more "sympathetic" than her counterparts is a lack of vitality and distinctiveness, one might more accurately conclude that Ql merely wears its misogyny with a difference.

Gertred's behavior may be well intentioned and in keeping with Elizabethan social codes, but it is not entirely appropriate to a queen regnant. Pitying the mad Ofelia, "poore maide" (Q1CLN 1684), Gertred does not at first refuse to see her, as in Q2/F1, or stop to consider the political wisdom of seeing her, as in Fl; Gertred is both less tortured and less politically sophisticated than her counterparts. A significant discrepancy between Ql and Q2/F1 is Ql's omission of the speech in which Claudius describes Gertrude as "Th'Imperiall Ioyntresse of this warlike State" (Q2/ F1TLN 179-203), a queen he married while still in mourning but—he claims—with the consent of his advisers. Gertred's rank seems secondary rather than integral to her role; compared with the business of Norway, Claudius's marriage to Gertred seems inconsequential since undeserving of comment. Again, in Ql's prayer scene Claudius does not speak of murdering for "My Crowne, mine owne Ambition, and my Queene" (Q2/F1TLN 2331). Ql's audience would not likely conclude that longing for Gertred led Claudius to kill his brother; rather, she becomes a benefit incidental to the crown. Neither is Ql's Gertred "so coniunctiue [Q2 concliue] to my life and soule; / That as the Starre moues not but in his Sphere, / I could not but by her" (Q2/F1TLN 3022-24). In place of Gertrard/Gertrude's power over Claudius, Ql Hamlet's description of Claudius's villainous appearance intimates Claudius's power over Gertred: "A looke fit for a murder and a rape, / A dull dead hanging looke, and a hell-bred eie, / To affright children and amaze the world" (Q1CLN 1528-30). Hamlet believes that his mother was cozened by a devil (Q1CLN 1532).

But whether she was cozened or not, Hamlet's soliloquy over "this too much grieu'd and sallied flesh" (Q1CLN 202) and the Ghost's diatribe against his "most seeming vertuous Queene" (Q1CLN 516), although compressed, level every charge against Gertred that is found in the other Hamlet texts. Gertred was seduced not by Claudius's "wicked Wit" (Q2/F1TLN 731) but by his "wicked will," his desire—that "and gifts!" (Q1CLN 515). Yet what would a queen lack, what requirements of hers are we to imagine as having been in such short supply, that Claudius's gifts would so easily move her? Surely if we are to believe the Ghost's account of his brother's successful courtship, a courtship in which Claudius "bought" Gertred's love, it is important to note that the gifts in themselves could not matter except as signifiers of Claudius's desire, a reassurance to Gertred that she is not yet the "matron" (Q1CLN 1547; Q2/F1TLN 2458) that in all three texts Hamlet would have her be, whose "appetite … is in the waine," whose "blood runnes backeward now from whence it came" (Q1CLN 1544-45). But clinging to youth and marrying while newly bereft and most vulnerable to Claudius's will do not mitigate Gertred's fault. As in Q2 and Fl, she is likened to "Lust … [that would] prey on garbage" (Q1CLN 519-21). Only if Gertred assists Hamlet's vengeance can her "infamy" die with Claudius (Q1CLN 1593). Yet while the play's audience, familiar with the trope of the lusty widow and positioned to identify with the protagonist, may accede to the assessment of Gertred they hear from Hamlet and the Ghost, the queen they actually witness is apt to strike them as a basically decent, rather ordinary woman, able to accept guidance from her son and willing to mend her ways. In particular this latter response might well prevail with playgoers who—unlike us—do not already know the Gertrard/ Gertrude of Q2/F1 conflations.

Although the character of Gertred appears straightforwardly drawn when compared to the queens in Q2 and Fl, her representation is still complicated by underlying sexual issues. Was Gertred—however religious and domesticated—an adulteress? Although Ql's Ghost charges Claudius with "incestuous" acts (Q1CLN 514), he does not, like the Ghost in Q2/F1, immediately follow this adjective with "adulterate" (Q2/F1TLN 729). And yet in his soliloquy Claudius refers to "the adulterous fault I haue committed" (Q1CLN 1462). Does he mean that, as in Belleforest, he slept with the queen before killing his brother or that he merely wished to? Perhaps the king follows the notion of adultery expounded in Matthew 5:28: "But I say vnto you, y^t hosoeuer loketh on a woma[n] to lust after her, hathe cõmitted adulterie w^t her already in his heart."³⁴ Hamlet also admonishes Gertred to "Forbeare the adulterous bed to night" (Q1CLN 1589). This evidence suggests that the Ql text may be using adulterous inter-changeably with incestuous, an incestuous union being adulterous in the sense defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "spurious, counterfeit, adulterate" or in any way reprehensible.³⁵

There is also the question of whether Gertred sleeps with Claudius after the closet scene. Since the Hamlet texts don't provide a definitive answer, directors often signify their decisions through costuming; a high neck-line and somber gown make one point, décolletage another. Is Gertred, like Richard Ill's Anne, reluctantly flattered to think, whether rightly or not, that a man would kill her husband to gain her? Does Claudius please Gertred? Hamlet draws him as not only a moral but a physical monster yet insists that Gertred lives "in the incestuous pleasure of his bed" (Q1CLN 1535, my emphasis). The paradox is explicated by Steven Mullaney in his analysis of the mother/son dynamics of Q2/F1 Hamlet. Mullaney sees Hamlet as obsessively disgusted with "Gertrude's aging sexuality, conceived at times as a contradiction in terms, at times as a violation of [Gertrude's] own body akin in its unnaturalness to a rebellion in the body politic: hers is a passion that 'canst mutine in a matron's bones' … at once unimaginable and yet impossible not to imagine and visualize in graphic detail."³⁶ For Hamlet, in all three texts of the play, his mother's sexuality is perverse, hence her perverse pleasure in his monstrous uncle.

Gertred's integrity is also under assault from Ql's unique plot twist. In order to "conceale, consent, and doe my best, / What stratagem soe're thou [Hamlet] shalt deuise" (Q1CLN 1596-97), she must "soothe and please him [Claudius] for a time" (Q1CLN 1820). Compelled to dissimulate, she recalls Titus Andronicus's "High-witted Tamora," resolved "to gloze with all" (4.4.35), thus deceiving Titus: "For I can smooth and fill his aged ears / With golden promises" (11.96-97). In fact, Tamora and Cymbeline's wicked Queen are also remarried widows, reprehensible not least for dissimulating with their husbands in a patriarchal society, with their sovereigns in a monarchical one. Gertred undeniably has need of guile once she knows Claudius to be the murderer of his brother and the potential murderer of her son, but the hypocrisy to which she pledges herself is an unstable indicator of moral fiber. The action of Ql may be more straightforward than that of the other versions, the queen's role a main cause of Ql's direct telling of the story, but Gertred herself is not represented as direct; the plot allows her repentance but denies her full integrity. The fact that, despite her passivity and blandness, Gertred contains traces of the ambiguity associated with Gertrard/Gertrude demonstrates that the reformed lusty widow is a slippery role. Ql refuses to negotiate the ramifications of that role, but the tension between the Gertreds of the play's surface and subtext also reminds us that Ql is a palimpsest in which Hamlet's sources are written over but never entirely obscured.