BOOKS
345
Updike's Shakespeare
GERTRUDE
AND
CLAUDIUS. By John Updike. Alfred A. Knopf.
$23.00.
To BE CURIOUS ABOUT the unwritten past of fictional characters is one
of those forbidden urges that used to cause critics to bind themselves to
the mast and sail resolutely away from a natural temptation. Other
readers might allow themselves to ask: "How Many Children Had Lady
Macbeth?"-a question mocked in a famous critical essay so titled by
L.
C.
Knights. The primly professional critic knew better than to inquire
in that way about a character in a play. Lady Macbeth is just an effect
produced by Shakespeare's words, and has no existence beyond them.
About her children and their fates, even their number, we never hear a
thing; all we know is what she tells us in a famous speech-she had once
"given suck." But a good many readers or playgoers have always
refused to deny themselves the fun of such speculation. And isn't it
allowable, after all?
Maybe the critic ought to remember that what we call the play is an
experience that stimulates the reader or playgoer's own invention. The
prompting we receive to fanciful imaginings beyond the author's limited
story is a sort of creative collaboration of ourselves with him. How
interesting
it is to consider the Macbeths' marriage before the project of
murdering Duncan changed everything. In the same way, we can't help
wondering what kind of father and husband (his queen is never men–
tioned in the play) Lear had been when his difficult girls were growing
up. What were the details of Othello's early life before he became a
Christian convert and the servant of the Venetian state? And what was
the real story of the marriage of Hamlet's parents, and how did
Gertrude happen to fall in love with her husband's brother?
To read John Updike's elegant
jeu d'esprit
called
Gertrude and
Claudius
is to taste the delicious forbidden pleasure of imagining a pos–
sible early story to answer this last question- though Shakespeare did
not choose to tell it when he wrote
Hamlet.
Updike feels no obligation
to forbid himself to respond to the songs of the sirens. He is a novelist,
and it is his business to listen to sirens' songs. His "prequel" as he play–
fully calls it, is, of course, one of his own fictions.
It
bears all the signs
of being an Updike novella. With some transposition of place and cos–
tume and social circumstance it might have taken place in his own
familiar American suburbia where lust and treachery and ambition
weave brilliant, dangerous patterns in the lives of some well-placed,
