by John Updike
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 calling her name, out of an agony—Gerutha, as she had been in the deeps of time. She felt dread; she was often unattended, for Herda was advanced in her pregnancy, and, at her years, much discommoded by it. Gertrude wanted no casual companion, no silly young lady-in-waiting, sent by some provincial court as spy, to intrude upon her restless patrol of Elsinore. So no one with her could confirm her imagination, when she halted nearly suffocated as if by a hand scorched yet icy clapped across her face.
What did dead Hamlet want of her? All-seeing from beyond the grave, he knew her sins now, every rapturous indecency and love-cry. Still, does not the liquid bath of Heaven wash away the smut of this sphere? The blessed dead do not haunt the living; only the damned do, tied to the living fallen, and her late husband had been a model of virtue and a very pattern of kingship. He wants me still to be his was her intuition; the King loved her, had always loved her, and her infidelity, that while living he had in his royal preoccupations overlooked, now tormented him so that she could smell his burning flesh and almost hear his strangled voice.
Such thoughts were not natural; she sought to surmount them. Gertrude had always been able to turn toward the natural, trusting in what was obvious, what she could touch—the dyed threads of her embroidery, the feathery seed-bearing heads of the grasses—leaving to the Church the great craggy superstructure of which nature is but the face, the visible fraction, the forestage holding an evanescent drama. Confidently and universally the priests proclaim this sad and gaudy earth to be but the prelude to an everlasting afterlife, where Jesus and Moses and Noah and Adam will glower down like stone heads in a cathedral banked dazzlingly with supplicant candles. Now the natural had been tugged slightly awry; she felt, vaguely, pursued. In her bedchamber she tried to describe her sensation to Claudius, omitting her husband’s name and the suspicion that Hamlet, dead Hamlet, was in the castle exerting a claim upon her.
Even Claudius felt the suspicion, for he had directed that they not, married, sleep in the same bed she and Hamlet had used, but in another solar of the royal apartments, in a Venetian bed with ivory inlay brought, in a long day’s lumbering hay-wagon ride, from Lokisheim. Out of habit she had more than once wandered, having risen in the night, toward her old chamber, where she met a locked door. She told Claudius, “I am happy, I am grateful, I am pleased and yet, dearest, something will not rest; it troubles me.”
He said sensibly, “You have endured several shocks: suddenly a widow, and then soon a wife again.” His tone was more judicious and, though affectionately, final than she had hoped for. “Your substance is not as elastic as it once was,” he added. Was this a criticism? Did he already regret possession of her aging substance, coveted when she was far younger?
“Herda worries me, for one thing. She seems so bereft and sodden in her spirit, and the baby but a month from greeting the sun. I wonder it can grow. She thought Sandro loved her.”
“He did, when he said he did. Then he became frightened of his ardor’s consequences. She has no cause to fear for his child; Elsinore’s economy can afford one more mouth. If she declines to love the infant, it will die.”
“You sound so absolute.”
“Without love, we die, or at best live stunted.” He imposed, for emphasis, a firm kiss upon her mouth. He still maintained all the shows of love, defying her prejudice that it weakens a man’s devotion when that devotion becomes lawful.
“Was that your experience in Jutland?” she asked him.
“It was bleak. We made do with half-portions.”
“I, too, had a half-portion, after my mother died just as we could begin to converse. I was three.”
He was suppressing, she saw, a male impatience with such exploration of idle feelings and a past beyond recall. “At three,” he said, “I expect our bearing and courage are formed. Your mother loved you, and you bloomed. You bloom still, in my eyes.” He heard his own words and looked at her steadily. Under his solemn dark stare she could not help smiling. He said, “I look at your smiling face and a hole is punched in the gloom of the world. Something better flows through from … from elsewhere. ‘Tant fo clara,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘ma prima lutz d’eslir lieis don ere crel cors los huoills. So clear it made it, my first flash of choosing her whose eyes my heart fears.’ ”
So romantic an avowal warranted an embrace, a kiss returned to his lips, lips once so potent in their molded shape and still able to stir her, to fluster her. Yet she could not stop seeking for what, elusively, was amiss in their circumstances, like a skipped stitch that might unravel the whole sleeve. “Did you help Sandro get away?”
“I did not,” Claudius emphatically stated. “His defection took me by as much surprise as it did Herda. I had thought him loyal. It proves: only trust a Dane, and even then be wary.”
“He must have needed some money, even walking. There is lodging, and food, and bribes at every border, for every little German princeling.”
“Darling, why this harping? I would bring Sandro back, if he were within my realm. But he had passed out of it before it became mine.”
Something in this—the strict timetable, the proud claim of acquisition—plucked at her disquiet. The approach of tears warmed her eyes, roughened her throat. “It’s just that poor Herda, imitating us, now has this burden, and all we have is—happiness!”
“Yes, for me at least it is a great happiness. We did not ask Herda and Sandro to imitate us.”
“We created a wanton atmosphere,” she went on, tears and voice tumbling together in an erupted soreness, “and now she suffers with the evidence.”
“I think, my dear, you are becoming—”
“You’ve shut me out somehow! There are things I don’t know! Polonius was telling me you saved his life, but he won’t tell me how. He implied I should be grateful to you, too, but for what? I mean, besides loving me and making me once more a queen?”
Claudius glowered in consideration; the darkening of his face made the scar-patch of white hair above his temple stand out brighter. “I fear our trusted friend and adviser may indeed be getting old. He rambles, he drops mysterious hints. My brother was right—the Lord Chamberlain is ripe for retirement.”
She seized the opportunity to agree, not wanting the gulf between them to grow. “He does fuss at everything. He wants to forbid Ophelia from seeing Hamlet, hoping to regularize his courtship. He’s afraid she’s going to sleep with him and degrade herself in his eyes.”
“Is that likely?”
The quick intensity of his interest snatched the words from her mouth for an instant. “I don’t know,” Gertrude weakly admitted. “She has a streak of strangeness. Hamlet—your brother—noticed it. He didn’t think she was suitable for our son. He wanted a Russian princess.” She disliked evoking her late husband, but Claudius had mentioned him already—had brought him into the room.
“I want Hamlet near us,” Claudius said.
He meant young Hamlet, she realized. “Oh, why?” she burst forth in honest, unnatural, unmotherly feeling. “He throws such a cloud.”
“He would give our court a necessary unity. A trinity. The people don’t want an anointed prince who is never here. In any case, I like him. I like young men who dislike Denmark. I think I understand him, and can help him.”
“You do? How?” These kings, she thought. They never ceased to surprise her with their blithe attempts to be omnipotent.
“He blames himself, I believe, for his father’s death,” Claudius smoothly explained. “He feels he willed it, in desirin
g you.”
“Me? He avoids me, and always has.”
“That is the reason. You are too much woman for him, my dear, too warm for his comfort. He fled into coldness, idealizing his father and taking up German philosophy. He loves you, as I do, as any man with eyes and a heart must. He and I share something else: we were overshadowed by the same man, a man hollow but for his appetite for reputation. The Hammer was an oppressor; you felt it, too, or would not have betrayed him.”
“ ‘Betrayed’ seems harsh—augmented him, was how I felt it. Augmented him with you, at your incessant importunities. Dearest, you are less than just to your brother. You become unreal on the subject. You have—did have—much in common, all the more so, now that you are king.”
“My brother reminded me, always, unpleasantly of Jutland—that terrible lowness of the view, the bogs and mists and heath, the sheep and the rocks thinking the same deadly thought day after day, that is, how satisfied they were to be what they were, at the exact windblown center of the universe. But that is past. To the issue at hand: I want you to love Hamlet. Hamlet your son.”
“I do. Do I not?”
“In a franker mood you have professed not. Now make a fresh start. Greet him, engage him. Don’t expect an immature girl to do all your work of restoration. Cease to be afraid of him, Gertrude.”
“I am afraid of him, yes!”
This confession, with all her smoldering terror suddenly ablaze in it, did throw Claudius off stride, as he swung back and forth undressing, pontificating as King Hamlet used to do. “What is to fear? He brings us only a troubled heart, begging to be healed. He knows his future is here.”
“I am afraid of the war he brings within himself. You and I have made a peace, on terms allowed by a tragic mishap, and Denmark has set you peaceably on the throne. My son in his nighted color and spicy-red beard may unsettle all these fine arrangements.”
“How can the boy? He has nothing but his expectations. The power is ours, to share. I have no son, but hope to play the father to yours.”
She surrendered, as was her wont. “Your hope is generous and loving, my lord; it shames me. And shames Hamlet as well, if he could know it. I will be glad to follow your lead and attempt to act a mother’s part.” Already, during her talk of Hamlet with poor smitten Ophelia, she had felt a renewal of fondness, as if in plotting his marriage she were carrying him again within her—below my heart, she had said. Her resentment of the bond he had adamantly formed with his father was receding, and with it doubt of her maternal effectiveness. Through her tender, piteous intimacy with Ophelia she had seen that the generations need not be inimical, the younger impatient for the older’s ruin. And still—“Still, my dear husband, why do I have this dread?”
Claudius laughed, showing his wolfish teeth in his soft beard. “You have acquired, my sweet Gertrude, what the rest of us are born with or soon acquire, an unease of the soul. You have ever been too much at home in the world. This unease, this guilt for our first father and mother’s original sin, is what calls us to God, out of our unholy pride. It is the sign He has placed within us of His cosmic rule, lest we think we are the very top of the universal hierarchy.” He laughed again. “How I do love you—that cautious glance as you puzzle at how much of what I say I say to tease you. I do tease, but with a feather of truth. All my life I have been gnawed, feeling but half a man, or a real man’s shadow. No more: you flesh me out. ‘I am in her service,’ the poet says, ‘del pe tro c’al coma—from my foot to my hair.’ Come, wife, let me see you undress. In Byzantium,” he went on, with a docent’s wide gesture, “in wastelands beyond the reach of iconoclastic potentates and censorious monks, ruins a thousand years old present to the sun roofless pillars and broken statues of naked women—goddesses, perhaps, from before Eve’s disobedience. You are their sister. The glory of you lavishes balm on my uneasy spirit; the Creation that has you in it, wife, must hold salvation for the vilest sinner. You are my virtue and my plague, of which I defy all cure.”
“You speak out of all proportion, my lord,” she objected, yet continued to disrobe. The bedchamber’s air clothed her in a film of cold that stiffened her nipples and made the pale hair of her forearms rise up.
His eyes took her in and his voice and gestures became extravagant. “Behold, you shiver, and your throat and shoulders blush to the verge of your breasts, so wildly Heaven-storming sounds my praise! Not so. It is honest. You render me honest. You are conjunctive to my soul, as the heretic troubadours expressed it. We have outgrown beauty, the young of the world might judge, but our senses swear otherwise. Here, Gertrude, I will be the far rug spread ahead of your naked feet. I will warm the icy bed with my burning old bones!”
And she did glimpse something of beauty in his fattened white shanks and hair-darkened buttocks and bobbing roused member as he scuttled underneath the covers, his teeth in their beard chattering while his feet sought the swaddled hot bricks servants had placed between the sheets. She had feared, of herself and Claudius, that their passion might not survive the transition from adultery’s fearful wilderness to the security of proclaimed marriage; but it had. In that way they had proven both sturdy, and worthy of the trouble and labor of mating. Being with Claudius in bed was meeting herself come from afar, a forthright and unforced reunion.
The King was ebullient. Last night had been bitter cold, the stars a merciless icy spatter, but this morning a sunny wind whipped the froth in plumes from the whitecaps in the Sund, and a bustle of action sounded throughout Elsinore. An official audience was scheduled for this morning, St. Stephen’s Day, and whatever of ineradicable unease clung to his soul, and whatever black remorse remained of the vial of poison he had poured into his sleeping brother’s ear (the waxy hole, at the center of the universe, had seemed to drink thirstily, to suck the very zenith from the sky), these ghosts were banished by the sunlight that flooded the great hall; the flames in the two great arched fireplaces paled in the solar beams admitted by the high, unshuttered clerestory windows. The sky outside showed an unsullied blue, clearer than the conscience of a saint. All comes clean, Claudius thought, under Heaven’s wheel.
Two months had passed since his brother’s death, and a month since he had with bold haste taken to wife King Hamlet’s widow. His opening remarks to the assembled court would address both these untoward contingencies, and by describing them, frankly yet tactfully, relegate them to history, as building blocks of the foundation upon which his reign rested. He would remind his councillors that he acted with their approval; he would acknowledge that, in choosing to wed so soon, his discretion had warred with nature, but that, after all, he, Claudius, was alive, and had to think of himself as well as, with wisest sorrow, his dead dear brother. Life was framed by such paired contraries.
Phrased with a grave and artful balance, making music of dirge in marriage and of contrasting delight and dole, this exposition would serve as a sop to Hamlet, who was putting on an ostentatious show of his mourning costume and, with many overheard sighs and asides in dubious taste, was letting it be known that he resented his mother’s swift capitulation to his uncle’s suit. Claudius could coldly see that he and his nephew, now stepson as well, might come to a hard enmity, but for now all the effort was to be of reconciliation, as one makes up to a sulking child, ignoring immaturity’s ill-formed insults and spreading wide the arms of paternal forbearance.
He would remind, too, his auditors that Gertrude was no accidental queen but herself closely tied by blood to Denmark’s throne, indeed an “imperial jointress”—a pregnant phrase whose resonance would not be lost on any who harbored thoughts that his claim to the throne was weak and his election in any way irregular in its efficient haste. Polonius, too, he must professedly knit close to his royal authority, as close as the heart to the head, or the hand to the mouth, this Lord Chamberlain for the king’s two revered predecessors.
The devious old courtier, with his uneven and garrulous wits, should be reassured in public that his service was still
valued and, it could be implied, along with his service his co-conspiratorial silence. Were Polonius ever to be retired, it unpleasantly crossed Claudius’s mind, it must be to the silence of the grave, rather than to any intermediate station, such as the cozy dwelling by Gurre Sø, wherefrom he might suffer temptation to be restored, with sale of his secrets, to power. Murder and usurpation, alas, are acids so potent they ever threaten to dissolve the barrel in which they have been sealed.
But now the court, the state, and the nation, in widening rings of attention, must be reassured. Though his grip on the sceptre felt secure, a shakiness pervaded the public mind. The preparations for a defensive war that that overweening pup young Fortinbras, seeking to reembody his father’s militant spirit, had forced upon Denmark filled even the Sabbath air with the sounds of halberts being forged and ships being pounded and pegged together. Affairs trembled on the edge of fantasy; it was rumored that battlement sentries on the midnight watch had been seeing an apparition in full armor. This morning, in clear and ringing syllables, the King will allay the general unease with a diplomatic mission: Cornelius and Voltemand are to be dispatched with documents whose every article bears the impress of resolute ponderation, to Norway, younger son of the slain Koll and an infirm relic of a heroic age, bedridden and impotent yet with still the regal power to forbid. Claudius’s detailed missive will inform him that his nephew on his own initiative, out of levies and resources that are Norway’s and not his own, intends a rash sortie. Claudius knows first-hand of this modern age’s reluctance to risk rebellion, among nobles or populace, in the wake of bloody adventurism for fleeting gains; the Crusades and their long-range failure have taken the heroism out of battle. Old Norway, the elder Fortinbras’s effete and gouty younger brother, will suppress his hot-blooded kinsman, and Denmark will fatten in the peace its shrewd and prudent monarch has arranged.