Gertrude’s Transformations: Against Patriarchal Authority
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gertrude’s characterization in Hamlet is extensively analyzed with regard to her infidelity, promiscuity, and ostensibly virtuous nature. Further, much criticism on Gertrude is based on the content of Hamlet and the Ghost’s parlance which is male-oriented in perspective. Within the domain of revisioning literature, Gertrude and the characters who have assumed a role resembling that of Gertrude have been subject to a variety of transformations. The present article intends to explore these transformations in two twenty-first century novels: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski (2009) and The Dead Fathers Club by Matt Haig (2006). Gertrude’s new characterization is analyzed with regard to three features: ecstasy, motherhood, and agency. Whereas Gertrude’s agency in Hamlet is conjectural and though her soundness of mind and her personality as a responsible mother are questioned in the play, the two female characters in these two novels reveal new dimensions which starkly distinguish them from Gertrude’s Shaksepearean characterization. Further, it is argued that these new revisionings of Hamlet should not be construed as mere responses to the original text, but also to the idea that Shakespeare has provided the ultimate representations of humanity. As such, the new characterization of Gertrude is subversive of both the patriarchal voice within the Shakespearean text and some portion of the contemporary social text which believes in the superiority of Shakespeare’s thought.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.064 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".