Vol. 3, Number 2	Summer 2000

 

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Generations of students of Hamlet have tended to view Claudius as a cold and malignant throne-snatcher and Gertrude as a frail specimen of womanhood, both itching to get their paws on Hamlet, the virtuous and sensitive philosopher-prince. In Gertrude and Claudius, his new prequel to Shakespeare’s play, John Updike gives these secondary characters new, complex inner lives.

Attempting to modify time-worn conceptions of characters in a canonical play seems daunting if not foolhardy, but Updike handles the task admirably, with sparkling wit, biting commentary, and a literary incisiveness as honed as a bodkin. The novel, which spans the time between the wedding of Gertrude and Hamlet the Elder (Gerutha and Horwendil in Updike’s version) and the second scene of Shakespeare’s play, presents quite a different version of each character, portraying Gertrude as wise and enduring in a world where women are mostly decorative and Claudius as kinder, more refined, and more thoughtful than his unsubtle brother, whom he refers to as the Hammer. Prince Hamlet, always offstage in this view of Elsinore, is portrayed as detached and sulky almost from birth, characterized by “a certain cruelty, disguised as foolery” that merely grows as he ages.

The novel is divided into three parts, each beginning with the same sentence, “The king was irate,” referring each time to a different miffed monarch. In Part One, old King Rorik is annoyed that his daughter Gerutha is resisting the alliance he has made with Horwendil. In Part Two, Horvendile (who will become the Ghost in Hamlet) is annoyed that young Hamblet at twenty-nine is still hanging out at the University of Wittenberg. In Part Three, Feng, who has taken on the less snarling-sounding coronation name of Claudius, is annoyed that Hamlet posted with such dexterity to Wittenberg right after his father’s funeral, successfully avoiding his old friend Horatio. (Here Updike cleverly accounts for the surprise Shakespeare’s Hamlet expresses when he sees Horatio for the first time at Elsinore as they meet to await the Ghost.) The curious names, which Updike lifts from the various versions of the Hamlet legend, change sneakily in each part of the book, giving a sense of the Danish history that forms the background of the legend and eventually evolving into more “modern” Shakespearean names: Gerutha to Geruthe to Gertrude; Amleth to Hamblet to Hamlet.

Updike obviously enjoys the names of his characters as they evolve from part to part, but his real pleasure is in recalling the words Shakespeare put in their mouths. The text is peppered with allusions to Hamlet: parallel but distorted scenarios crop up frequently, and phrases and single words from the play are altered and paraphrased, evoked and teased, throughout the novel. In Updike’s version, Corambus (Polonius) tells Gerutha that Amleth loved Yorick, echoing the famous graveside speech. Horwendil complains to Gerutha, “You protest too much,” recasting Gertrude’s rejoinder to Hamlet during the play within the play. In a particularly sly rearrangement, Gerutha’s servant, in an anticipatory scrambling of Hamlet’s observation “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / rough-hew them how we will,” tells Gerutha, “There’s a shape in things, fiddle and fuss however we will around the edges.” Updike uses Shakespearean language so convincingly that one wonders whether Hamlet and Company lacked originality, whether their memorable language is simply remembered from the colorful speech of Feng, Horwendil and Gerutha. Moreover, Updike’s clever manipulation of Shakespearean phrases inspires readers to pause and consider the motivations of the Bard’s characters.

Updike’s characters are all familiar-after all, it is the same story-but, because the point of view is so altered to place emphasis on different traits, they take on a new life. Whereas Shakespeare emphasizes Hamlet the Elder’s good leadership, Updike focuses on his lack of respect for women (especially Gertrude). In Shakespeare, Young Hamlet, obviously wronged by his uncle-father and misunderstood by his virtuous-seeming mother, elicits sympathy. In Updike, he is brooding and unkind and elicits disgust. Shakespeare highlights Gertrude’s misdeeds, and he reveals her remorse only when Hamlet cleaves her heart in twain. Updike’s Gertrude is not only sympathetic but admirable. In Shakespeare, Claudius is defined by his deeds, which do him dishonor; in Updike, by his motivations and intentions, which do him honor. While Updike’s creative vision suggests a vastly different perspective, it provides a delightfully complex stage for Shakespeare’s characters to play on, offering a witty “what-if” to a play that he undoubtedly admires.

Gertrude, in particular, assumes a much more defined personality in Updike’s novel, where the powerlessness of the women of her day inspires sympathy for her as she endures a mostly unhappy marriage to the Hammer. Gertrude observes the plight of women from her childhood, when she notes that she is to be “the plunder in exchange,” given to Hamlet the Elder as payment for loot he shared with her father. At the same time, though, Gertrude feels “warrior blood within her-warrior pride, warrior daring,” which remains as a vague unrest beneath her dutiful, wifely resignation. When Claudius introduces her to falconry, she identifies immediately with the birds in their jesses, explaining, “We are females, she and I… We must take what we can of what the world offers.” Gertrude’s keen recognition of her own role in her world adds depth and complexity, layers to consider when re-reading Hamlet. While Shakespeare’s Gertrude seems clearly weak, Updike’s prequel, by offering her some motivations, reminds us of life’s ambiguities. Updike’s prequel hints that perhaps Gertrude is not “clearly” anything, that young Hamlet’s view is not necessarily the only acceptable one.

Updike’s novel is imbued with tragic fate-visions of the corpse-strewn final scene of Shakespeare’s work add poignancy to Claudius’s naïve plans for the marriage of Hamlet and Ophelia. Updike’s literary sleight of hand meshes Gertrude and Claudius artfully with Hamlet, adding unexpected dimensions and even successfully explaining some of the inconsistencies of the play (why, for example, the Danish climate switches so quickly from gazebo-napping weather to nippy to flower-picking weather). Such successful meshing carries with it a peril: readers of Updike’s prequel will find it difficult to return to Shakespeare’s Elsinore without recalling what really happened before Hamlet the Elder took his final nap. But the novel is well worth the re-assessment such knowledge will require.

Gerutha remarks to Feng early in the novel that “the brother of one’s husband is a figure of interest, providing another version of him-him recast, as it were, by another throw of the dice.” Gertrude and Claudius, like a younger brother of Hamlet, provides quite a different version of the elder: a tragedy reevaluated, reworked, recast; another vision of who these monarchs could have been.