The implications of Hamlet have been debated for centuries, both in fiction and essay; yet the most intriguing character, Queen Gertrude, has received the least illumination. In Hamlet, she is identified by the Ghost as both criminal and crime, both antagonist and victim: She commits "damned incest" with the newly crowned Claudius, yet the loss of Gertrude -- "of life, of crown, of queen" -- is included in the Ghost's list of grievances against Claudius.
It's a brilliant step to remove Hamlet from Hamlet, to see what is left. Into Hamlet, Shakespeare built a deceptive figure: the Ghost upon the battlements, who identifies himself as Hamlet's "father's spirit," but whose identity is open to possibility. He appears in the discorporeal shape of an author, penetrating the divide between two worlds to hand the young Prince a cruel directive, then urge him forward. If, as Stephen Dedalus argues in Ulysses, Shakespeare himself "is the ghost and the prince," subtracting Hamlet removes both the character and his author. Without Hamlet (and the ghost of Shakespeare), how might the kingdom of Elsinore appear?
Unfortunately, John Updike has proved himself unfit to answer that question: Gertrude and Claudius is a bum book. His concept was beautiful, but the book itself is a clumsy jumble of spongy prose and clogged Danish history. Lumps of undigested research knock against wooden phrasing; the characters, the narrative, and especially the language are ridiculously unsuited to the complexity of Shakespeare's drama. In the face of the founding linguist and mythmaker of the Western world, John Updike -- arguably one of the 20th century's significant authors -- produced a wet sock, with a hole in the toe.
What happened?
Gertrude and Claudius was doomed from its conception. Countless authors have employed Shakespeare's characters, reconstructed his narrative, and taken linguistic cues from Hamlet, but Updike blithely attempted one of the ultimate acts of Western literature: challenging Shakespeare on his own turf. Elements aren't merely imported from Hamlet into Updike's story; instead, Gertrude and Claudius is set in Elsinore, Shakespeare's own world.
The language alone completely unmans Updike; in his attempts to find a plausible narrative voice to match "Hamlet's infinite reverberations" (as Harold Bloom identifies them), Updike improvises a cloying, wretched diction already abused by paperback fantasy novelists. By the third sentence of the book -- "'To disobey the king is treason,' Rorik admonished his child, the roses in whose thin-skinned cheeks flared with defiance and distress" -- the cheap perfume of false pomp is already sticky on the page. From there, Updike wallows deeper and deeper in hopeless romance. With his language a mess, there's no possibility of creating worthy likenesses of Shakespeare's characters, and Updike's versions of Gertrude, Claudius, and King Hamlet are grotesque and garish clowns.
The final infamy is that all of Updike's "jewel-beknobbed chalices" and "long icy eyes" are a setup for the last scene, in which Updike's Gertrude and Claudius mouth words from Hamlet: "'Think of us as a father,' [Claudius] commanded, reminding [Hamlet], 'You are the most immediate to our throne.'" Against a single sentence of the original, Updike's creation is a threadbare lie.
It's not surprising that the task was beyond him; the surprising thing is that John Updike attempted this novel at all. Maybe it was mere over-confidence from a man who has made his own impression on modern literature. As Harold Bloom posits in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Shakespeare not only documented the human soul, he authored many of its key passages. Taking up his work is a radical task, and has to happen in that weird space where language and character create totally new versions of each other.
There are other novelists who have taken on the challenge with better results: Anthony Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun is a bold rendering of Shakespeare's language, and Salman Rushdie's short story "Yorick" is a playful linguistic study wrapped around an appropriately arcane pun. Vladimir Nabokov in Bend Sinister, and James Joyce in Ulysses, both devote a chapter each to dazzling, painstaking constructions of Hamlet's relationship to his author, and the clues that might exist within passages, even between the spaces of the letters on the page. But even they know better than to rewrite Shakespeare, and are content to reread him.
