SOURCE: “Life, Crown, and Queen: Gertrude and the Theme of Sovereignty,” in The Review of English Studies, Vol. 47, No. 186, May, 1996, pp. 163-74.

[In the following essay, Aguirre examines the symbol of the cup from which Gertrude drinks in the play's final scene, and attempts to “delve further into the mythological status of Gertrude and, beyond this, to explore the role, and the fate, of myth in Hamlet.”]

In a short preliminary paper¹ I sought to establish the presence in Hamlet of the traditional symbol of the Cup of Sovereignty. Briefly the argument was this: when Hamlet speaks of the ‘dram of evil’ that obscures a man's virtues (I. iv. 36-8), he is constructing a metaphor for the cup Claudius drinks out of to celebrate his marriage, and giving this vessel connotations which, on the moral plane, resemble those found in the several poisons used in the play: moral corruption 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. 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 Grammaticus 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 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 Elfland 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 undergoes a change (similar to that mysterious ‘seachange’ 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 river¹¹ - 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 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 modifications. 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 1. 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 Shakespeare had in mind how in earlier versions of the story Hamlet's father acquired the 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 Horvvendille’: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 we encounter an inevitable link between sexual union and sovereignty.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 …, yet there is more to Gertrude in the text. Something of the paratactic grammar 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. 1 ff. 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's part but arises from a conflict between a modern perspective and a traditional theme. The modern view seeks linearity, temporal order, causality; the traditional theme involves concomitancy, simultaneity, significance. This is most clearly brought home by Old Hamlet in I. v. 74ff.: ‘Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand,| Of 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 serpent that did sting thy father's life
Now wears his crown.
Hamlet. O my prophetic soul! My uncle!
Ghost. Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts—
O wicked wit, and gifts that have the power
So to seduce!—won to his shameful lust
The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen.

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 murderer is the present king
Hamlet. My uncle!
Ghost. Yes, he seduced my 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's text stands half-way between 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 framework of 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 character caught 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 framework of 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 literature of action or in its religious concern with free will. On the other hand, ever since the Renaissance our culture has stressed consciousness, 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 understanding 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 rather whether 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, kind cuckold, take comfort, man, thy betters have been beccos: Agamemnon Emperor of all the merry Greeks, that tickled all the true Troyans, was a cornuto; Prince Arthur, that cut off twelve kings' beards, was a cornuto; Hercules, whose back bore up heaven, and got forty wenches with child in one night … yet was a cornuto.

(Marston, The Malcontent, 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, 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’.²⁶ The 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’.²⁷ Blodeuwedd and her lover planned to slay her husband, the Welsh hero Lleu 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.²⁸ The 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.

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 much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears; but yet
It is our trick; nature her custom holds,
Let shame say what it will. When these are gone,
The woman will be out. Adieu, my lord,
I have a speech o' fire that fain would blaze
But that this folly drownes it.

(Hamlet, IV. vii. 184 ff.)

The concepts Laertes is contrasting can be summarized thus:

Man shame (honour) fire blazing speech

Woman nature tears, water drowning 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 patriarchal culture 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.

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.

Notes

1. M. Aguirre, ‘The Dram of Evil: Medieval Symbolism in Hamlet’, Proceedings of the 2nd International SEDERI Conference (Oviedo, Spain, 1992), 23-7.

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: With an 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).

8. ‘Echtra Condla’, ed. and tr. H.P.A. Oskamp, Etudes 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. J.D. Duff (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.

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.

14. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. H. Jenkins (London, 1990), 434.

15. See Gollancz, Sources of Hamlet, 95.

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.

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 marriage my 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.

22. Metalepsis, the violation of narrative levels, is rife in post-modernism; for discussion see B. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York, 1987).

23. See Aguirre, The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism (Manchester, 1990), esp. ch. 3.

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).

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).