Brush Up Your Shakespeare

By Paul Gray

Students of Shakespeare know, or are supposed to, that the characters in his plays exist only while they are on the stage or the page. The rest, as far as they and we are concerned, is silence. Thus the eminent scholars and critics who once busied themselves in disputations about the number of Lady Macbeth's children or Hamlet's course of study at Wittenberg were actually engaged in nothing more than romantic woolgathering. But the urge to think of Shakespeare's people as real dies hard, and woolgathering has its charms, as John Updike wittily demonstrates anew in Gertrude and Claudius (Knopf; 212 pages; $23). This novel ends where Shakespeare's Hamlet begins--after Act I, Scene 2, to be precise--and fills in the story of what the dramatis personae might have been up to before their tragic undoings at Elsinore.

Updike's enterprise is not as fanciful as it might at first seem. He has consulted the same sources Shakespeare apparently used for his play but shapes this material to different purposes. Here the moody prince makes only a walk-on appearance. Updike's spotlight falls instead on Hamlet's mother Queen Gertrude and her adulterous affair with Claudius, her husband's younger brother. The topic of illicit sex will sound familiar to Updike's readers, but the archaic Scandinavian setting and the regal gravitas of the characters involved make this old story fresh and moving.

Updike's Gertrude is a feminist well ahead of her time. "A good woman," she muses, "lay in the bed others had made for her and walked in the shoes others had cobbled." A princess, she must marry the man her father, for dynastic reasons, chooses for her, even though she feels no love for him. She does her duty, becomes a queen, bears an heir, Hamlet, and resigns herself to a life she sees as "a stone passageway with many windows but not one portal leading out."

Then, in her 40s, Gertrude awakens to the charms of her husband's younger brother, himself more than a decade her senior. Their courtship is protracted and passionate. In Shakespeare's play Hamlet upbraids Gertrude for her infidelity: "You cannot call it love, for at your age/The heyday in the blood is tame." That, Updike's novel suggests, shows how much Hamlet knew.

Eventually, of course, Gertrude's husband learns of the affair; court life affords little privacy for a queen. He confronts Claudius and outlines the punishments he will inflict on the guilty. Claudius, without Gertrude's knowledge, murders the king and becomes king himself. Once he marries Gertrude, the stage is set for Hamlet.

Gertrude and Claudius is engrossing enough on its own terms to stand independently of Shakespeare's play. But those readers who know Hamlet will find Updike's novel an echo chamber of beguiling allusions. "You protest too much," her husband-to-be tells young Gertrude, a sentiment she will repeat during her life onstage. And the doom awaiting Updike's people lends their deeds a tragic cast.