Gertrude The Cry Analysis

Neela Ketan Pandya,

Assistant Professor,

M.V. M. Science and Home Science College, Rajkot

Howard Barker 's Gertrude, the Cry: An Alternative Reading of Shakespeare 's Hamlet

Abstract:

Hamlet in Shakespeare is a hero torn between Middle Ages and Renaissance and struggles to reveal the truth of his father’s murder by his uncle Claudius. Hamlet in Gertrude, the Cry by Howard Barker is relegated to second level and no longer a central character. In Barker’s play, as its title suggests, Gertrude is the central character. Barker has placed her at centre stage with spanking new interpretation of her action and attitude. In this new world of Elsinore, Howard Barker defends Hamlet 's despised mother who has an adulterous affair with Claudius.

Even his moral conduct is also questioned. The transparency desired by Hamlet in Shakespeare and Barker does not have the same function. In Elizabethan Play, there may be a way to reach to revelation, while in this Barkerian play, it may be means to control behaviour and create an obstacle to revelation. In both Plays, Hamlet desires to bring transparency. In Shakespeare, it must restore justice, while in Baker, transparency will bring no more truth, and there is a question of saying the truth what is obvious. In Shakespeare, good and moral are taken into account and defended by the character, a phenomenon that does not need to be in the theatre of the Catastrophe.

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Introducton: Howard Barker is considered as one of the major British playwrights and theatre director and runs his own theatrical company , ‘the Wrestling School’. He wrote this play Gertrude , the Cry in 2002 and staged in the same year at Elsinore in Dublin at theatre

The modern times, the plays are written for theatres and not for people. Barker as a theatre director knows the play ‘Hamletmachine’ by Heiner Muller. In 1977, a German Playwright and theatre director, Heiner Muller wrote a play ‘Hamletmachine’ originally titled as ‘Da Hamletmaschine’ where the play is not cbased ‘on conventional plot but partially connects through sequences of monologues, where the protagonist leaves his role and reflects on being actor.’ (Wikipedia) In this loosely arranged scenes of the play Muller seems to show the roles of intellectuals in interpreting the characters, feminism and ecology movement during the East German Communism area. In Muller’s play Hamlet is an intellectual from the East who knows that bomb will not improve the situation of the country and will not bring about more justice. He does not know what to do to change he things. His violence turns against himself. All that remains is All say... but to whom? because in 1977, the plays are written for theatre and not for public. Parrhesia is not the problem, as Foucault has defined the term. Foucault says, ‘there is parressia when the truth-word is said in such conditions as the fact of telling the truth and having it or may or must result in costly consequences for those who have spoken the truth.’ (Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, op. Cit., P.