Poison cups and Martyrs: Gertrude, Medea, and Matt 20:20-24

Shakespeare was a thief of plot elements and tropes, like other playwrights of his time. Given that the original tale on which Hamlet is based doesn’t include a poison cup from a step-parent, secretly intended for the prince, but taken instead by the queen, where might that have come from? What uses of such a trope might have inspired Shakespeare? [1]

Shakespeare was familiar with Ovid’s Metamorphosis from Latin school and from Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation. This included tales of Medea in Book VII.

These include a story about a poison cup that Medea intends for her stepson Theseus, but which is knocked from his hand at the last moment by his father, king Aegeus, who recognizes his son. This may have informed Shakespeare’s use of the poison cup theme in Hamlet.

But Shakespeare switches the roles of the step-mother-poisoner and the father-savior so that it’s the stepfather Claudius who intends to poison his stepson, and the mother, Gertrude, who buys her son time by drinking from the cup intended for Hamlet.[2]

[IMAGE 1: In the 1832 painting (shown) by Antoine-Placide Gibert, the poisoner is the step-mother, Medea (far right), and the the father, Aegeus (center) is ready to knock the cup from the hand of Theseus, the son he recognizes. / In Hamlet, the Medea-like poisoner is the step-father, Claudius, and intentionally or not, Gertrude momentarily saves her son Hamlet, as Aegeus did Theseus.]

From Wikipedia:

“Medea fled to Athens, where she met and married Aegeus. They had one son, Medus. [...] Her domestic bliss was [...] shattered by the arrival of Aegeus's long-lost son, Theseus. Determined to preserve her own son's inheritance, Medea convinced her husband that Theseus was a imposter, making him a threat and that he needed to be disposed of. To do this, Medea was planning on poisoning him as she previously had other victims. As Medea handed Theseus a cup of poison, Aegeus recognized the young man's sword as his own, which he had left behind many years previously for his newborn son as soon as he came of age. Knocking the cup from Medea's hand, Aegeus embraced Theseus as his own.” [3]

See also page 147 of Arthur Golding's translation:
 Shakespeare's Ovid : being Arthur Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses
Rouse, W. H. D. (William Henry Denham), De La More Press, 1904:
https://archive.org/details/cu31924026559777/page/n172/mode/1up
Digitized via version from Cornell University Library.

[IMAGE 2: In another 1832 painting (by Hippolyte Flandrin), Aegeus and Theseus are near the center, with Aegeus on the left, stooping, looking up at Theseus to the right, the tallest figure in the painting. The cup is spilled on the table, between the right arm of Aegeus and the seated man in yellow in the lower left. The step-mother, Medea, is on the far left, as if trying to escape the scene.]

[IMAGE 3: In this 1912 painting/illustration by William Russell Flint, Medea (left) is herself offering the cup actively to Theseus, while Aegeus and Theseus are reclining, and it seems the father has not yet recognized the son, and/or the artist wishes to emphasize the beauty and power of the poisoning female more than the recognition and saving of the son by the father.]

But in the Metamorphosis, one parent does not drink from the cup intended for the son-victim. What texts was Shakespeare familiar with in which a cup was associated with deadly effects, with a mother, and with something like martyrdom?

In the gospel of Matthew (20:20-24), the mother of the sons of Zebedee asks Jesus a favor: for her sons to be at Jesus’ right and left hand when he comes into his power (thinking he would be a new king of Israel). Jesus asks the men if they can drink from the same cup from which he will drink. He is speaking of his own death, but they don’t fully understand. They claim they can; Jesus tells them that in fact they will (they will be martyred), but only the Father decides who sits on Jesus’ right and left hand.

Shakespeare not only switched roles of step-mother Medea and father Aegeus,[4] but also seems to have adapted elements from Matthew 20:20-24, including a mother advocating for sons, and the idea of willingly drinking a cup as indicating a path of martyrdom, as with both the Sons of Zebedee, and perhaps Gertrude.

Might this insight be a game-changer for some?

[Postscript 1: Merely because it's clear that Shakespeare would have studied Ovid in Latin school, and would most probably have been familiar with a popular translation of the Metamorphosis, which contained the tale about a poison cup, these only prove that it was *a possibility* that they influenced his writing of Hamlet, and not that they were definitely his sources for the poison cup theme, etc.

These are important distinctions - because from this distance in time and culture, given what little we know of Shakespeare, it is perhaps far too easy to entertain such conjectures, which are very limited in their ability to achieve any certitude regarding his actual process of writing...

Postscript 2: If Gertrude suspects the cup *may* be poison, she also resembles Alcestis, who was willing to die in place of her husband; in that tale, Hercules goes to rescue Alcestis from the underworld; we should note that Hamlet is not a Hercules, but goes to his mother's closet to scold her, and - he believes - to save her soul by helping divide her from his murderous uncle. She agrees to keep his secret. ]

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NOTES:
[1] See also “FOR MORE READING” below on more knowledgeable sources exploring Shakespeare’s use of classical texts.

[2] Regarding the switching of genders in traditional stories, we know that many critics and scholars have recognized the scene in King Lear, where Lear holds the dead body of his daughter Cordelia, as a reverse-gender Pieta (instead of Mary holding the corpse of Jesus). So it's not too much of a stretch to say that Shakespeare changes genders in in taking some of the key ideas from the Medea tale to and adapting them for Hamlet. 

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea#Jason_and_Medea

[4] If we interpret the play in the context of Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Medea tradition, Gertrude saves her son, at least for a while. I think this reading should be preferred based on the evidence of the text.

Otherwise we favor sexist, patriarchal, misogynist scholarship that prefers to view Gertrude and all women as inferior to men, and Gertrude unable to control herself because perhaps she is an alcoholic (although there is no other evidence of this in the play). This risks distorting our understanding of the play because it requires ignoring the Ovid/Medea tradition.

Shakespeare often portrayed female figures more favorably than males… and Gertrude is no Lady Macbeth.

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IMAGE 1: Antoine-Placide Gibert (1806-1875), Theseus Recognised by his Father (1832), oil, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, France. Image by VladoubidoOo, via Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Antoine_Placide_Gibert_Th%C3%A9s%C3%A9e_reconnu_par_son_p%C3%A8re.JPG

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IMAGE 2 of this scene, from 1932:
Hippolyte Flandrin (1809–1864) Thésée reconnu par son père (Theseus Recognized by his Father) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hippolyte_Flandrin_-_Theseus_Recognized_by_his_Father_-_1832.jpg

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IMAGE 3 of this scene, from 1912, by William Russell Flint. In this version, Medea is offering the cup to Theseus herself, with Father and Son perhaps not yet recognizing one another. From 1912, collected by Charles Kingsley in “The Heroes, or Greek Fairy Tales for my Children," London: Philip Lee Warner (Riccardi Press) for the Medici Society.
https://catalogue.swanngalleries.com/full//764/718764.jpg

FOR MORE READING:
Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford, 2017)
by Tanya Pollard
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/greek-tragic-women-on-shakespearean-stages-9780198793113?cc=us&lang=en&

Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca,
by Robert Miola https://global.oup.com/academic/product/shakespeare-and-classical-tragedy-9780198112648?cc=us&lang=en&

How the Classics Made Shakespeare
By Jonathan Bate
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691161600/how-the-classics-made-shakespeare


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