Gertrude and Claudius
John Updike Hamish Hamilton, 212pp, £16.99
ISBN 0241140978
The word "motive" appears more often in Hamlet than in any other Shakespeare play. Deep undecidability is one of the qualities that determine great writing, and Hamlet is about as ambivalent as literature gets. Generations of critics have wondered at how the court of Elsinore descended into such a sorry state. What is at the root of Hamlet's inability to avenge his father's murder? What is the genesis of Gertrude's marriage to her brother-in-law? Is Gertrude culpable for her first husband's unnatural death? Is Claudius driven by the power of love or the love of power?
John Updike's marvellous new novel - amazingly, his 19th - brings many of these questions into sharp focus. A prequel to Shakespeare's play, it tells how the indulged and vivacious daughter of a Danish king is married in her teens to a rapacious warrior who, upon the old King's death, becomes sovereign of Elsinore. They have one child, Hamlet, a sickly, solipsistic boy who abjures his mother's love and is fearful of "solemn duty and heartfelt intimacy". Hamlet's father proves to be a wise governor. He is a Christian (unlike his pagan predecessor), who faithfully discharges his duties and understands instinctively the foundations upon which the court is built and what is required to maintain them. Gertrude feels affection and respect but no passion for her husband.
Elsinore is a cold place to confine a feeling woman. When the King's brother returns to court, after years as a mercenary in Byzantium, his presence makes his sister-in-law sharply aware that there are other ways to live. Feng, as Claudius is known in the early part of novel - the name comes from a 12th-century Latin version of Hamlet - is a linguist, traveller and storyteller, and his cosmopolitan panache throws into relief the stiffness of Gertrude's earthy Danish husband. Feng makes her pine for the sophistication of southern Europe. People there, he tells her, enjoy a more refined material existence: they do not drink themselves to stupefaction or feast crudely with knives and hands, and they pursue diplomacy instead of war. Affection soon grows between them, and Gertrude discovers from Feng ways of making love that are only generically related to the cursory pawings of her husband. When their affair is finally discovered, Feng's carrying out of the fratricide is ruthlessly efficient.
This summary does scant justice to the unalloyed pleasure of reading this book. Gertrude's admiration for "subtlety" is reflected in Updike's weightless prose and exquisitely detailed characters. He portrays brilliantly how the passionate companions, Feng and Gertrude, become the nefarious and anxious King and Queen of Shakespeare's play. Although Feng may see killing his brother as a way of vaulting on to the Danish throne, permissive modern readers are still made sympathetic to the adulterers' pursuit of happiness. At the same time, Updike forces us to see that, without the traditions of right conduct embodied by old Hamlet, the future of the kingdom is seriously imperilled. Duty trumps love.
There are other delightful suggestions. The Prince, whose sulky disputes with his mother and fear of responsibility inspire the allegiance of A-level students everywhere, is presented in this book as a marginal and obnoxious figure who, at 30, should have left behind his saturnine moods and enthusiasm for play-acting. Polonius, rather than being a comic buffoon, emerges as the ageing chamberlain to successive kings, a devious and wise courtier with powerful instincts for self-preservation and an instrumental role in the lovers' affair and the regicide.
As the American scholar Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out, Shakespeare is a wonderful poet of courtship and is sensitive to the deepest nuances of family relations - especially between fathers and daughters - but he created surprisingly few portrayals of the quiet intimacies that pass between mature husbands and wives. There are the Macbeths, but most of their talk flows from their ambition and gnawing guilt. Gertrude and Claudius surges joyously into this lacuna, filling it with descriptions of friendship and lust that give new weight and depth to Shakespeare's sometimes opaque characters. It is hard to imagine a more enjoyable and effortlessly accomplished book being published this year.
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