348
PARTISAN REVIEW
Geruthe and Horvendile (Updike switches to Belleforest's version of
their names, perhaps
to
suggest a Renaissance mood) are settled in mid–
dle age with concerns about the future of their thirty-year-old son and
his possible marriage to Corambis's (that is, Polonius's) delicate daugh–
ter. Feng, renamed Fengon, is back from his travels, his passion for his
brother's wife still as strong as ever, despite years of absence. The time
has come for the laying aside of renunciation and troubadour courtly
love, and their trysts begin in a hideaway in the woods lent by Coram–
bis. Fengon brings gifts gathered for her in exotic places, gifts that
express his sophisticated taste in all things-including sex-a cloisonne
pendant in the form of a peacock, a fantastically engraved and bejew–
eled goblet, a tunic woven in intricate design in shimmering silk-a fab–
ric at that time unknown in the North. But, of course, someone tells
Horvendile, and Fengon must hear himself accused directly by the King
for having "bewitched and pierced my most virtuous-seeming queen,"
words that echo-not precisely, but almost-those of the ghost in
Ham–
let.
We are already within the walls of the play. The scene enacted at
Hamlet's instigation by the traveling players to "catch the conscience of
the King"-Shakespeare's brief cinematic flashback-reels out in
Updike's elaborated narrative as Fengon proceeds
to
the inevitable
moment when he pours his vial of poison into his brother's ear and Hor–
vendile's death is assumed to be the result of a snakebite.
In
Updike's final chapter, we are at Shakespeare's threshold, and the
characters have the names the playwright uses. Claudius marries
Gertrude and celebrates the marriage with a ponderous politic speech
to
the court and a feast, while Hamlet sulks despite his uncle's expressed
goodwill.
In
Shakespeare, the ghost will soon show itself
to
the son who
bears its name, but already Gertrude feels its presence:
King Hamlet in Gertrude's sense of him became almost palpable,
quickening all of her senses save that of sight, her ears imagining a
rustle, a footstep, a stifled groan, the nerves and fine hairs of her
sixth sense tickled and brushed by some passing emanation, though
the corridor was windless, and no newly snuffed candle or fresh-lit
fire could account for the whiff of burning, of smoke, of char, of
roasting. And upon this sense was visited an impression of pain; he
seemed, this less than apparition but more than absence, to be call–
ing her name, out of an agony-Gerutha, as she had been in the
deeps of time.
