Hamlet's Hereditary Queen: Performing Shakespeare's Silent Female Power by Kerrie Roberts, and: Performing Restoration Shakespeare ed. by Amanda Eubanks Winkler (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Hamlet's Hereditary Queen: Performing Shakespeare's Silent Female Power by Kerrie Roberts, and: Performing Restoration Shakespeare ed. by Amanda Eubanks Winkler
• Hugh K. Long

HAMLET'S HEREDITARY QUEEN: PERFORMING SHAKESPEARE'S SILENT FEMALE POWER. By Kerrie Roberts. Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies Series. Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2023; pp. 210. PERFORMING RESTORATION SHAKESPEARE. Edited by Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Claude Fretz, and Richard Schoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023; pp. 220.

Recently, Shakespearean scholarship has embraced performance-based research approaches, which have invigorated academic inquiry into the physical, spatial, and collaborative elements of live theatrical events. This understanding of Shakespeare's works not as purely literary texts, but instead as pretexts toward performance, has afforded scholar-practitioners greater opportunities to contribute to scholarly writing. Two recent contributions to this field, Hamlet's Hereditary Queen by Kerrie Roberts and Performing Restoration Shakespeare, edited by Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Claude Fretz, and Richard Schoch, each provide compelling templates for engaging with Shakespeare's work as a living, breathing performance tradition rather than as static dramatic literature. Through their respective lenses, these books invite a reconsideration of how we study, stage, and experience Shakespeare, pushing the boundaries of what performance-based, or practice-based, research can achieve.

In Hamlet's Hereditary Queen, Kerrie Roberts presents a refreshing scholarly approach, combining feminist theory and her subjective acting experience to explore one of Shakespeare's often overlooked female characters, Queen Gertrude from The Tragedy of Hamlet. In her chapter "Not Representing Gertrude," Roberts notes, "While Hamlet himself has been played white, black, straight, gay, male, and female, in my experience, most productions of the play still barely nod to Gertrude's existence, let alone address her as heroine of her own narrative" (17). Roberts shares with readers how her curiosity about Hamlet's Gertrude began after she was cast to play the role in several scenes for film students in Canberra, Australia, in 2007. She admitted to having a difficult time embracing the character, primarily because of assumptions made by directors, and conversely herself: that Gertrude was merely a minor character defined only by her new marriage to her former brother-in-law, Claudius, or in her relationship to her son, Hamlet. This latter relationship is often depicted as either a sexualized one or one marked by an understanding that her son is an insane murderer. Roberts expresses how [End Page 588] these assumptions prevent Gertrude from having her own agency, which should include "more complex motivations and objectives than those of a token mother" (2).

Roberts's thorough exploration of Gertrude began in earnest after her discovery of one key fact regarding the historical figure of Gerutha, who was the mother of Amleth (Hamlet), the prince of Denmark on whom Shakespeare's eponymous character is based. As documented by Saxo Grammaticus, the twelfth-century Danish historian, in his Gesta Danorum (Deeds of the Danes), Gerutha was also the daughter of Rørik, the King of Denmark who married her to a Viking named Horwendil, after he slayed the King of Norway (93). This revelation triggered a recognition in Roberts that Gerutha/Gertrude was in fact the hereditary Queen of Denmark, as she was the lineage of the royal blood line whose marriage to Horwendil (King Hamlet) secured for him the throne. This acknowledgment that Gerutha/Gertrude was the hereditary Queen of Denmark assisted Roberts in her own performance of the character, allowing her to "tap into" a deeper understanding of the Queen, whom she had previously found difficulty accessing. Roberts notes the importance of Gertrude's heritage stating, "Gerutha is thus not only royal, but divine, closely descended, at least in literary terms, from the Norse gods" (94).

This concept of the blood royal Queen was especially influential in Roberts's feminist critique of Hamlet, which culminated in her 2011 adaptation titled Gertrude's Hamlet, which she directed at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre in Canberra (4). Traditionally, in both production and scholarship, Gertrude is overlooked as merely a maternal archetype, frequently reduced to an adulterous figure or Freudian object of Hamlet's Oedipus complex. In this interpretation, Gertrude is defined through the lens of the male gaze, rather than as an individual with...