Gertrude and Claudius

by John Updike

  The guests were far fewer than when good King Roderick had assembled the flower of the Danish aristocracy along with officials from the farthest reaches of Danish power in Sweathland and nether Slesvig. Colored wimples and diamond-patterned doublets had become fashionable, and asymmetrically colored hose, even on the old and staid. Heavy necklaces and chains of hammered gold were consigned to the garb of mayors and officials, and the bells Gertrude had worn about her waist when she was seventeen would be considered now a quaint relic. And either she drank less wine and mead than on that giddy, frightening, flattering first occasion, or her capacity for alcohol had improved. The words of the service, which she had been too excited to listen to the first time, this time struck her with their touching archaism, their talk of plighting troth and of no man putting asunder—“asunder” a word employed on no other occasion. Until death us do part. Gertrude wondered how soon that would be. How could it be at all? Yet an eternal parting had occurred, at a stroke, on the mild afternoon of All Saints’ Day, a serpent in the sunny orchard grass.

  She and Claudius had debated the matter of music and dancing. Perhaps there should have been none, within a month of King Hamlet’s death. And yet life must go on, and some of the guests had travelled from as far as Holsten, Blekinge, and Rügen. Subdued music, the espoused agreed—a lute and a recorder trio, with a timbrel to keep the beat—might form a background, like a faded tapestry, to the midday feast, and if dancing was generated afterwards, let it occur. She and the King, to establish the propriety of a reserved celebration, led a few measures of the ductia, its slow gliding movements almost like a dirge, she thought, her vision hazed by the smoke of the rushlights and the fires roaring in the great hall’s two barrel-vaulted fireplaces. Her weddings took place in winter, but to the verge of this December the snows had been but dustings. Heaven has been withholding. Claudius as he glided beside her, taking her hand and releasing it to turn and take the other, felt somehow removed by his having become her husband. His touch was rigid and tense with his new responsibilities. She had loved, when they had met dangerously in Gurre Forest, his relaxation into lawlessness, his abandon to the moment once he had achieved his goal—conquest of her, regardless of the consequences. Now they were living into an aftermath of consequences, treading in time to the timbrel, trying to survive the extinction of the adulterous, rapturous couple who had existed outside Elsinore’s walls. The seducer had become a public man, his far-off beloved a daily presence.

  He let go her hand when the music paused, and left her to greet their guests, the high subjects of his reign. She watched him—the fur collar of his robe upright and its rim glittering as if with frost, the gold cross on his chest reflecting red flashes of firelight—move to Hamlet and Laertes, who had been talking together, bonded by their knowledge of the world south of Denmark. Laertes sported a dark goatee shaped like his father’s white one, and Hamlet had grown a red beard. A delicate beard, less curly than his blond father’s: its redness was a version of the pale coppery tint of her own luxuriant head, and of her tufts elsewhere. The gauzy beard repelled her; it seemed an intimate aspect of herself lodged within him, which he had decided to flaunt. He was daring her, in the fullness of his thirty years, to assert maternal control over his face. She could no more do that than consciously control her disposal of herself in love and marriage. Always between them, mother and son, stood her failure to feel herself loved enough by his father—a transparent, unsayable obstruction through which he gazed at her as if through the caul in which he had been born. He had hurt her so much, being born. No person had ever hurt her as Hamlet had, while the Battle of Thy was being won.

  She could see, from the twists of his beautiful, ruddy, almost feminine lips, that Claudius was speaking French to Laertes and German to Hamlet, establishing himself with them as another man of the greater world, though his languages might be rusty, not as supple and freshly acquired as theirs. She worried that Claudius, his cosmopolitanism already faintly dated, would be mocked; but both younger men responded, as best she could make out, courteously, in Laertes’ case with some animation, in Hamlet’s with an expression masked by that disturbing beard, still so sparse the pallor of his cheeks glanced through. She trembled in fear for her husband, drawing dangerously close to her son. Her son was his enemy, she could feel in her loins. Claudius’s hopes for winning the boy over seemed deluded folly to her, but, then, his courting of her, his impossible romantic love, had been carried through to this triumphant nuptial conclusion. To her relief, Claudius moved on, he had to greet everyone; he was the star, the center of the occasion, he had to parcel himself out equally. Gertrude knew how that was, having been since birth a star herself, a king’s only progeny, the focus of envious and possessive eyes while still in her cradle.

  Polonius, twinkling in a flowing new houppelande, came up to her and, having noted the direction of her gaze, said, “Our king bears himself well, as one long accustomed to preëminence.”

  “I confess I did not know,” she said, “he would measure up so willingly. I thought he was a wanderer, a well-born vagabond.”

  “Some men, Your Majesty, wander in order to return with sufficient strength to achieve their long-nursed goals.”

  Gertrude did not like to think that Claudius had, like his brother, sought the throne. She preferred to think it had fallen to him by unhappy accident. True, he had shown initiative and singleness of purpose in seeking endorsement from the råd and election from the four provincial thing, and had by swift letter elicited allegiance from the bishops of Roskilde, Lund, and Ribe; but she ascribed all this to the good cause of stifling chaos in the wake of calamity. In those stunned days after Hamlet was found dead, and not only dead but hideously transfigured, like a long-buried statue disintegrating in shining flakes, Gertrude had been directing her attention elsewhere, inward, to her ancient task of mourning, of shouldering bereavement. For almost the first time in her life since the onset of menses she had felt transformed by illness, unable to leave the bed, as if her proper place were beside Hamlet in his clay grave, in the loathsome burial ground outside the walls of Elsinore, where mist clung to the tufted soil and the shovels of chattering gravediggers were always pecking away at the underworld of bone. Thus isolated, visited only by Herda, who had her own reasons for grief, for Sandro was gone and her belly was swollen, and by her whispering ladies-in-waiting, whose faces were rapt with the thrill of the recent horrific event, and the castle physician, with his dropsical bagcap and bucket of writhing leeches, Gertrude played doctor to her own spiritual symptoms, wondering why her grief felt shallow and tainted by relief. The King’s weight had been rolled off her. He had never seen her as she was, fitting her instead into a hasty preconception, his queen. It did occur to her, later, that in this interval some other queen might have been forwarding her son’s claim to the throne. But Hamlet had attended his father’s burial and disappeared again. Her maternal instinct told her that the throne of Denmark with all its petty, bloody taxes on the soul was an acquisition he would snub. Nor had Polonius in his renewed dignities advanced the Prince’s cause: there smoldered an animosity between them, a dislike passed from father to son. It was all, while she sickly dozed, and listened to her female visitors’ own complaints, too entangled for her, like a basket of embroidery thread a kitten has slept in. When she stirred again, a presentable widow, all had been settled elsewhere in Elsinore and King Claudius approached her begging for her hand. She could hardly deny him; he had adored her from afar and, come closer to flesh out his fantastic image of her, had proven entertaining and responsive to the realities of her person. She would train him out of his over-estimation gently, day by day, keeping alive the cherished little princess he had revived. It was too soon to marry him, perhaps, yet what else was she to do? Bereaved queens sometimes entered nunneries, but nuns seemed unhappy women to her—married to a preoccupied God and as sallow and shrewish as sublunary neglected wives. She liked the luxuriant, silky-stiff texture of Claudius’s beard, the nu
tty scent of his bare chest. She liked his vagrant, insolent energy, now harnessed to the performances of kingship.

  This wedding night was very different from her first. Then the groom could not stay awake, now he could not rest, though the celebration, relatively muted, had subsided in a flurry of polite departures, and the midnight bells had, like a crowd dispersed but returning to search for a lost glove or purse, reappeared as a lonely single clang, and then two. He had made love to her triumphantly, his nutty smell becoming mixed with an odor like the brackish scent close to the shore of the gray-green Sund. Surges of sensation in her lower parts lifted her so high her voice was flung from her like a bird’s lost call; yet still, their wedded desires so gratified, he could not sleep. In the heated space of their curtained bed she could not drop off, feeling his male sinews still taut in him. Each time her thoughts had begun to dissolve into rumpled nonsense—reality’s patterns folded chimerically—an abrupt motion of his beside her tugged her back into the clear night.

  “Sleep, husband,” she said softly.

  “The day will not let go. Old Rosencrantz was telling me that young Fortinbras must be crushed and the Norwegian threat put to rest for good. These venerable nobles still live in a dream of heroic violence, of crushing and burning and final solutions. At the same time they grow fat on their share of the commerce that international peace brings.”

  “Hamlet used to say just that.” She had spoken too quickly in her drowsiness, uttering a poisoned name. Her betrayed husband, his envied brother. She hurried on: “Polonius thinks you’re a marvellous king already.”

  “He has personal reasons to believe and hope so. His good opinion has been already bought.”

  By what? Gertrude sleepily wondered. “He told me—a group of us, actually, gathered around—that you’ll take us back to the days of King Canute. Not the saint, the original one.”

  “The one who couldn’t stop the tide from coming in.”

  There was a dark sardonic undertow to his tone that tugged her awry. However bright the wedding torches, you marry a man’s shadow side, too. She explained, “The one who conquered all England and Norway.”

  “And who, if I recall my history, made a pilgrimage to Rome to repent his many sins.”

  “Is that what you want to do?” she asked shyly. The idea of such a harsh pilgrimage seemed remote, cozy as she was. In bed with Claudius she felt as she had when a girl, on a freezing winter night, laid in her cot in a tumble of furs, that tingled and tickled and were tucked tight around her, so her body revelled in a warmth stolen from these other creatures. Marlgar, huddled in a hooded cloak, would sit a while silently with her, and the stars through her paneless window would shine as bright as icicle tips glinting in the morning sun. She wondered if, the way they had begun in sin, her husband saw her as tainted. The brothers shared this somber Jutland religious streak, that refused to accept the world at face value, as a pure miracle daily renewed.

  “Not yet,” Claudius said. “Not until Denmark is in perfect order. And I will take you with me, to see holy Rome and those other sun-soaked congeries beyond the Alps.”

  He turned his back, and seemed minded at last to sleep, now that he had stirred her up. She resented it. He was making her into Marlgar, awake while he drifted off. She said, “I saw you talking to Hamlet.”

  “Yes. He was amiable enough. My rusty phrases of German amused him. I don’t understand why you are afraid of him.”

  “I do not think you can charm him.”

  “Why not, my love?”

  “He is too charmed by himself. He has no need for you or me.”

  “This is your own son you are speaking of.”

  “I am his mother, yes. I know him. He is cold. You are not, Claudius. You are warm, like me. You crave action. You want to live, to seize the day. To my son, everything is mockery, a show. He is the only man in his universe. If there are other people with feelings, then that just makes the show more lively, he might concede. Even I, who love him as a mother cannot help doing, from that moment when they place the cause of your pain in your arms, this newborn wailing and whimpering in memory of your joint ordeal—even me he views disdainfully, as evidence of his natural origins, and proof that his father succumbed to concupiscence.”

  Claudius’s voice became sharp: “Yet in my dispassionate estimation he appears witty, large-minded and many-sided, remarkably alert to everything around him, engaging to those worthy of being engaged, excellently educated in all a gentleman’s arts, and handsome, most women would surely agree, though the new beard makes perhaps a hostile impression, concealing more than it enhances.”

  Gertrude said gropingly, “Hamlet wants to feel, I believe, and to be an actor on a stage outside his teeming head, but cannot as yet. In Wittenberg, where the mass are frivolous students, jesting in the foyer of real affairs, his lack—even madness of a sort, the madness of detachment—is not revealed; he should be a student forever. Here, amid earnest interests, he is challenged, and turns all to words and scorn. My hope is that love will lend him the right gravity. The fair Ophelia could not be bettered in her sweetness, her delicacy of apprehension. Your brother thought her too frail to serve his line, but she grows womanly, and Hamlet’s interest grows apace.”

  “Very well,” Claudius said, sated with wifely wisdom, and quite ready now to let this grand day go. “But your analysis brings with it another reason why he must not escape to Wittenberg. True attachment must build on increments, as you and I well remember.”

  She broke the silence his own had pointedly suggested. “My lord?”

  “Yes, my queen? It is late. A king needs to greet the sun as an equal.”

  “Do you feel guilty?”

  She felt his body stiffen, his breathing skip a breath. “Guilty concerning what?”

  “Why, what else?—guilty concerning our, our coming together while … Hamlet was my husband.”

  Claudius snorted and hugged tighter his accumulating nugget of fatigue, making their featherbed emphatically heave. “The old Norse rule is, what you cannot hold is not yours. I took from him a property he didn’t know he owned—territory he had never plowed. You were a virgin to unbridled love.”

  And, though she felt this as not entirely true, it was true enough to rest on, and they fell asleep in unison.

  The Queen, some weeks after her wedding, summoned Ophelia to visit her in her closet, once King Roderick’s new oriel room. The daughter of Polonius and his mourned Magrit had become in her eighteen years a luminous beauty, shy yet lithe, her skin pale and flawless, her waist willowy, her bosom high, her hips wide enough to declare her a vessel of nurture. She wore a blue mantle, a chaplet of gold braid, and a flowing gauzy gown almost indecent in its transparency. She carried herself with her chest lifted as if by a sharp, startled gasp, conveying an expectancy touchingly mingled with something wary and fragile. Gertrude looked upon her seeking her own young self, and saw that Ophelia’s cheeks lacked a shade of rosiness and that her hair, brushed back from a glossy brow more ideally high than Gertrude’s had ever been, was a bit thin and lacking in body; it did not spring up from her temples but lay docilely flat, held in place by the braided gold cord. Her face in profile was as cleanly stamped as a coin, yet frontally showed a certain vagueness, a tendency to direct her wide blue eyes a little off to the side. Her teeth, Gertrude noted not without envy, were perfect pearls, perfectly spaced. They were given an almost infantile roundness by her low, palely pink gums, and tilted very slightly inward, so her smile imparted a glimmering impression of coyness, with even something light-heartedly wanton about it.

  Gertrude waved her toward the same bare-bottomed, three-legged chair that Polonius had occupied in their sessions of counsel. “My dear,” she began. “How fares it with you? We women are so few at Elsinore, we owe each other the comfort of a tête-à-tête.”

  “Your Majesty flatters me. I feel still a child in this court, though attentions that lately come my way would call me out from my hiding corner.”
The girl had a lovely upper lip, turned both inward and outward like a plucked rose petal, slightly crumpled by its infusion of sweet plumpness, and it was fetching, Gertrude thought, the way it rested tentatively closed on the lower, leaving an open triangle through which her teeth dimly gleamed. Her nostrils were exquisitely narrow—Gertrude had always thought her own a little broad, her nose a trifle mannish and blunt.

  “As women, we would not wish never to receive attentions, yet they can be alarming when they come.”

  “Indeed, exactly, Your Majesty.” If Ophelia’s character had a flaw, it was an excess of docility with yet, as in a child, an implicit defiance and secrecy. Her eyes, far from Gertrude’s gray-green, which could in passion darken like the Sund, reflected blank heavens in their pale blue.

  “You need not call me ‘Majesty,’ nor can you quite call me ‘Mother,’ though I would like to serve you, in the absence of a mother, with kindness and advice. I, too, had a mother early dead, leaving me to make my way in a world of stone and men’s clamor.”

  “Your Majesty has already shown me much kindness. As long as I can remember, you have been kind, and paid me notice, when few did.”

  “My kindness now takes on a closer quality. I believe the attentions you speak of have been coming from my son.”

  Ophelia’s cloudless eyes widened but did not surrender that unsettling off-centeredness, as if focused on things invisible. What had King Hamlet irascibly said? Her brain holds a crack. “Some of them,” she conceded, unsatisfactorily. “With Hamlet and Laertes both being home since your—since you and the new king—”

  “Married, yes.”