bard is Updike's inclusion of soundbytes from the play, often in different contexts or even voices from those in Shakespeare. A full list would deprive readers of the fun of discovering unexpected bardphrases in the novel, but one illustration will suggest the cleverness of such a scheme. Herda, Gertrude's lady-in-waiting, confides to Gertrude when she inquires about her new role as queen, that "There's a shape in things, fiddle and fuss however we will around the edges." Her homely acceptance of destiny parodies Hamlet's greatest single discovery, that a man cannot be the author of, but rather must be an actor in, the drama of his life, as evidenced by his remark that "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will."

Much spirited conversation might center on the audacity of Updike's narrative. How do readers feel about the contemporary author's appropriation of one of literature's most cherished texts, and his re-casting the roles of villain and heroine? Is this heresy of a sort? Do modern authors breach some kind of literary decorum by amending stories by great authors of the past? Or is Updike doing what Shakespeare did, adding his culture's vision and variety to a story that has become nearly archetypal? Do such models as James Joyce's Ulysses, John Gardner's Grendel, or Jean Rhys's The Wide Sargasso Sea, which re-tell traditional narratives from a new perspective, apply to Updike's telling this classic story? Here are other questions upon which groups might focus.

1. Are Gertrude's transformations, from spirited girl to Horwendil's wife, to Fengon's mistress, to his wife and the grieving widow, fully motivated?

2. Does Updike overstate the arrogance and aloofness of Hamlet? Is this representation consistent with that character's role in the play? Should it be?

3. One of Shakespeare's great strengths is his creation of minor characters. Do Updike's come to life for you? Are these characters merely names from the play, or do they take on motives and habits of their own? If not, is that due to the novel's focus on three powerful characters' perspectives?

4. Are Updike's original characters, who do not appear in Shakespeare's or his predecessors' accounts, such as King Rorik, Sandor and Herda, fully realized? Has Updike succeeded in bringing these characters to life?

5. Is Updike's account of the Church's support of the suppression of women too harsh? Is it historically accurate (several recent books study early modern history and the place of women, and such studies might cast perspective on Gertrude and Claudius)? Can the harshness of this account be reconciled with Updike's public profession of his role as a believing Christian?

6. Did you like the murder scene itself, as told from Claudius's point of view? Or is this better a story indirectly told (by the victim) as in Shakespeare?

7. Do Claudius's efforts to establish common bond with Hamlet, as victims of "the Hammer's" assumed superiority and male modeling, establish sympathy for this character after he has committed a murder?

8. Does Updike's switching of names from the Icelandic narrative through Shakespeare's version, amuse or annoy you? Why?

Long recognized as one of the most acute observers of the American scene during the last half of the twentieth-century, John Updike's special strength has been novels set in the immediate present, in which the manners, styles, and sexual mores of American culture are dissected under the microscope of his fiction. The four novels concerning the life and times of ex-athlete Harry Angstrom (Rabbit, Run, 1960; Rabbit Radix, 1971; Rabbit Is Rich, 1981; Rabbit at Rest, 1990) constitute a chronicle of a man whose best years ended when he was eighteen years old; but they also tell with uncanny prescience the narrative of an America increasingly consumed by media superficialities, racial tensions, sexual revolutions, and a credo of material success that legitimates greed and self-interest as a way of life. Similarly, his novels Couples (1968), A Month of Sundays (1975), and Marry Me (1976) along with the powerful collection of short stories, Too Far to Go (1979), explore from a variety of perspectives evolving preoccupations with sex, marriage, religion, and failed relationships. Finally, his stories about growing up in the American depression and thereafter, collected in Pigeon Feathers (1962) and The Olinger Stories (1964) add to the sense that Updike has served his country well as one of its most astute and observant cultural commentators.

During the final decade of the twentieth century, however, Updike modified his habitual contemporary perspective, emphasized in Rabbit, Run by the use of the present rather than the past tense for the narrative voice. Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) looks at events from twenty years before the time of the novel's publication and In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) traces the lives of four generations of an American family. Toward the End of Time (1997) is set in the year 2020, but includes narratives about Egyptian grave-robbers and an important section narrating a Viking invasion and slaughter of an English monastery sometime in the medieval era. This seeming digression anticipates the subject matter of Updike's nineteenth novel, Gertrude and Claudius (2000).

With his first novel published during the new millennium, Updike has moved further back into history than ever before. Even his under-appreciated play, Buchanan Dying (1974), which imaginatively chronicles the final months in the life of a minor president whose bad historical luck it was to precede Abraham Lincoln, seems recent by comparison with Gertrude and Claudius, Updike's "prequel" to William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Set at a transitional if undefined moment in Danish history, this novel daringly tells the story of the adultery and murder that constitute the situation for England's best-known play, a staple of American high-school and college curricula. As filmmaker George Lucas told the opening chapter of his Star Wars saga in the fourth film, America's foremost cultural observer deploys modern perspectives to tell, 400 years after Shakespeare's play was first produced, his story of passion, lust, intrigue, and regicide/fratricide in a Denmark that is, as is Updike's America, evolving through transformations in manners, technology, religion, and politics. As Shakespeare's Elsinore Castle resembled a feudal British duchy more than a medieval Danish monarchy, so Updike's Elsinore, while fastidiously medieval in dress and climate, reminds us of modern America in its evolution from one mode of existence into an uncertain future.

In his play Shakespeare nearly eliminates historical time and social conditions to concentrate on one man's relationship(s) with his destiny, so much so that a mid-twentieth century production and subsequent film of Hamlet were set in contemporary dress, including v-neck sweaters and worsted slacks, with little negative impact on the timeless power of the story itself (the production starred Richard Burton). Many other productions have set the action in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We may infer that time in Shakespeare's play is "internal"; that is, we as readers or playgoers are concerned with the fact that Hamlet is 30 years old (a detail withheld until Act 5), that his father killed the Norse king on the day of Hamlet's birth, that two months have passed since the king's sudden death, that the queen re-married only a month after her husband's death, that the ghost has been seen on the castle wall for two consecutive nights before the play begins, and so forth. Readers and playgoers alike do not particularly care whether the events take place in the thirteenth, sixteenth, or even nineteenth century. In Hamlet time is internal, a pressure that is felt within the play but not with specific reference to external conditions.

By contrast, Gertrude and Claudius is very much about time and the inevitability of change. Like the end of the century in which Updike penned his story of the Danish throne and the end of the century in which Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Updike's Denmark is a monarchy in transition. Several crucial social changes are underway, which affect the characters' ability to relate to one another and to the world they occupy. For example, the king's advisor, Polonius, complains that Gertrude gets dangerous ideas from her reading "Gaulish" (French) novels to pass the time while her husband is doing kingly business. By implication, she assimilates Renaissance influences from southern Europe, which proves to be a crucial differentiation between her provincial husband and his cosmopolitan brother. Shakespeare's Gertrude was probably illiterate (the play does not mention her reading or writing skills); moreover, most literary scholars date the invention of the novel as a literary form to the sixteenth century or even later. Polonius, unlike the character (who boasts that he once played Julius Caesar) in Shakespeare's play, laments the emerging theatrical profession, and especially its impact on Prince Hamlet. The novel's character's positions, that acting companies blaspheme by mimicking God's creative genius, and that acting companies further contribute to a general decline in religious and ethical values, were widely voiced by conservative and moralistic persons in Shakespeare's time. Stephen Gosson, for example, lamented the insidious moral influence of acting companies in a pamphlet influential enough to cause Sir Philip Sidney to respond with his great essay, "An Apology for Poetry" (1595). Minister Thomas White cleverly if illogically proved that plays are a principal cause of plagues in a sermon delivered in 1577. Updike inserts fragments from Shakespeare's play, in which Hamlet and Polonius exchange views of the theater and its role in society (Hamlet offers the classical view that players "hold the mirror up to nature"), but he wants to make us constantly aware of a civilization in cultural change, whether in its methods of entertainment, its economy, its religion, or its theories of marriage.

In Updike's novel, the transition between King Hamlet and his brother corresponds directly with an important shifting cultural paradigm, the transference of wealth and power from the traditional baronial estates to the new burgher or merchant class. Hamlet senior laments the collapse of the traditional lines of fealty and authority, as do the conservative factions in many of Shakespeare's English history plays, most notably the deposed king in Richard II. Claudius seems to align himself with the less traditional modes of government, perhaps because his journeys into Mediterranean Europe and Constantinople have taught him that authority takes many forms. At any rate, the conflict between the brothers, for a queen's love and a kingdom's throne, is further aligned by Updike with emerging patterns of power and wealth that would lead to the end of the feudal system in Europe and with the beginning of guild and mercantile capitalism that would in turn drive the forces of colonialism, leading to the settlement of the New World and several less fortunate consequences.

It is a convenient model, if nonetheless an oversimplification, to suggest that Updike associates Claudius with forces of progressive thinking and emerging definitions of wealth and power, whereas he aligns the elder Hamlet with traditional forms of loyalty and obligation. Claudius adroitly manipulates the "thing," Updike's playful invention for the assembly of barons and merchants who elect the king, to select him upon his brother's sudden death by creating alliances with the emerging class. Even the election process Updike assesses as a precursor to modern democracy. If Hamlet complains at least twice in Shakespeare's play that Claudius "Popped in between th'election and my hopes," Updike provides an answer to the question that comes up in almost every college discussion of Hamlet, why the hero, at age 30, did not become king upon his father's death. Shakespeare was not interested in the mechanics of succession in Hamlet, even if he was politically obsessed with such themes in his English history plays, but Updike observes that this process of selecting leaders, like the displacement of chain mail by plated armor because of technical improvements in archery, is due to the inevitability of change and perhaps a precursor of modern democracy.

In Updike's narrative, then, Claudius seems to be a man of the future, and Hamlet the elder a man of the past. The senior brother clings to traditions and forms that are slipping away as Denmark grudgingly absorbs influences from Mediterranean and Atlantic nations. But Updike compounds his own irony in that Claudius shows preliminary signs of devolving into a carbon copy of his elder brother once he assumes the royal diadem. He changes his name from Feng (the brother's name in one of Shakespeare's sources) to Claudius to symbolize the new era Denmark is entering. But he becomes increasingly preoccupied with his royal obligations and his shaky claim to the throne. Even though the novel ends with an illusory hope ("The era of Claudius had dawned . . . All would be well, " itself echoing the final line of Claudius's soliloquy after his guilt has been disclosed in Act 3 of the play), Updike depends on his readers' familiarity with Shakespeare's play for one final irony—to remember that within months all the major, and several minor, characters in this novel will become indirect victims of Claudius's regicide. Like so many of Shakespeare's English Kings, notably Henry IV and Richard III, Claudius learns that power is easier to get than it is to hold and wield. As the cultural paradigms shifted under the elder Hamlet and Gertrude's father before him, they continue to shift during the brief era of Claudius.

Throughout this discussion it has been necessary to associate Updike's novel with Shakespeare's play as well as Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a play that depends on the audience's knowledge of Hamlet for much of its effect. While Shakespeare's tragedy is one of the most important works in the western literary tradition, it is not in itself an original narrative. Upon examination of the known and surmised sources Shakespeare drew upon to craft his great play, we may infer that Updike has staked out a position similar to that which Shakespeare took in the creation and refinement of an existing narrative. In fact Updike calls attention to the continuity of authorship he implies by appropriating and modernizing the Hamlet narrative. His Foreword acknowledges his debts to two of the sources many scholars believe Shakespeare drew upon. That acknowledged debt accounts for the three-part structure of Updike's narrative as well as a certain pedantry that pervades the text.

The earliest probable source, direct or indirect, is the Historica Danica of Saxo Grammaticus. In Part I of Updike's story, concerning the youth and marriage of the queen and her growing attraction to the brother-in-law recently returned to Denmark, Updike uses the names of characters in Saxo's version. Thus Gertrude is "Gerutha," Claudius is "Feng," and the husband-to-be is "Horwendil," who names his son "Amelth." Appropriating the names in the original version, however, Updike holds generally to the narrative data of Shakespeare's play, ignoring the profound changes Shakespeare, or one of his lost sources, made. For example, the king in Saxo was a "rower," or a pirate chieftain, and his murder by Feng was no secret. Amelth feigned madness to keep from getting himself killed and to buy time to plot his revenge. Updike adapts the names while ignoring the substantive changes Shakespeare and his probable predecessor, Thomas Kyd, made in a crude and violent tale of murder and revenge.

Having established these archaic names for the central characters, Updike changes them twice, to indicate both the maturation of the Hamlet plot in the early Renaissance and his own characters' evolutions and transformations. In Part II, the section dealing with the courtship, decision to reform, and eventual seduction, as well as "Geruthe's" transformation because of her love for "Fengon," Updike uses names from Francois Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, a play printed in French in 1576 and translated into English after Shakespeare's play was performed. Part III of Gertrude and Claudius treats the events of the first act of Hamlet and in that section the characters are assigned the names with which we are familiar. Updike cleverly explains Fengon's changing his name to Claudius and Corambis's simultaneous adoption of Polonius as politically motivated. The characters' decisions reflect the Latin and Renaissance humanism that was taking hold in southern Europe and thereby reinforce the culture-clash issues discussed in the "Social Concerns" section of this essay. He does not offer comparable explanations for the updating of other characters' names.

Throughout all three sections, Updike moreover casts a perspective on the literal physical space of the play. Elsinore is a work in progress; rooms are added and their purposes change constantly between the time of Rorik's ancestors and Claudius's coronation. As playgoers or readers, we tend to think of Elsinore as "static space," an unchanging place, very much like the story with which it is associated. Updike reminds us that places, persons, events, and even stories are dynamic rather than static.

A final element of Updike's narrative technique is his effective use of landscape and symbolism. As we have seen, the iceworld of Denmark is represented as harsh, cruel, indifferent, a test to the body and the spirit. Despite the inevitable association of the cold world with rationalism, decorum, and iron codes of duty, Updike's description of the Danish spring, which is traditionally associated with the blossoming love of the adulterers, is lush and evocative. Much like his descriptions of seasonal change in Toward the End of Time, his description of the coming of spring in a northern climate powerfully evokes the association of natural and human rebirth that animates traditional English texts back as far as The Canterbury Tales and many middle English lyrics.

By contrast, the world of Mediterranean Europe, primarily evoked in Fengon/ Claudius's stories for Gerutha/Gertrude but also mentioned in connection with Laertes's Paris education, associates with new ideas, a more lax moral code, the dawning of the modern age. In fact, Fengon's servant Sandor misses the opulent Mediterranean world, from which he was exiled when his master chose to follow his heart back to Denmark, so much so that he betrays Fengon to his brother in return for safe passage back to Italy. With this small event, Updike not only reinforces his paradigm associating locale with culture, but he also reminds us that in an hierarchical society, the governing class may be so callused to the feelings of the lesser classes that they forget that such persons may have rights and may also have the will to act upon them.

Several of Updike's novels, and his play Buchanan Dying, speak to his growing interest in the literary and cultural history that contributes to our modern experience. He has never, however, reached so far back into literary history, and only a few writers have had the audacity to re-write the narratives of the masters. His retrospective narratives have generally been confined to the American experience of the past two centuries, except for the fragments of historical narrative about Egyptian grave-robbers and the Norse invasion of an English monastery in Toward the End of Time (1997). Two additional literary and cinematic phenomena provide a context for Updike's approaching Shakespeare to re-cast and reinterpret one of our culture's widely-accepted core narratives.

First, the final decade of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of Shakespearean drama adaptations into commercial films. Kenneth Branagh (to whose 1996 "four-hour film" version of Hamlet Updike attributes a "revivified image of the play" in his "Afterword") also produced critically and commercially successful films of Henry V, Much Ado about Nothing, and Othello during the decade. Other important films of the 1990s include the Mel Gibson and Glenn Close Hamlet, Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night, Ian McKellan's Richard III, and Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sir Anthony Hopkins' adaptation of the revenge play Titus Andronicus, while a commercial as well as critical failure, gives convincing evidence that the 1990s were the Shakespearean decade on film. In no other time period would anyone have put up capital to produce a play that has never been popular, and has occasionally been the object of claims that it was not the work of the bard. The Shakespeare revival was also reflected in stage performances in national, regional, and local theaters. Shakespeare in Love, a film about the bard's life and love, contained several references to lines and events from Shakespeare's plays, as well as the ubiquitous theme of androgyny in his golden comedies, as the heroine, with whom the young Shakespeare falls in love, disguises herself as a young man in order to break into the exclusively male profession of acting.

In addition to film interest in Shakespeare and especially his plays, several of Updike's predecessors and contemporaries had begun to re-visit established narratives, both literary and cultural, from a contemporary perspective. The ground-breaking text is of course James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), in which a day in the life of a modern Dublin Jew resembles, or in some ways parodies, events in The Odyssey. Updike also emulated Joyce's appropriation of classical narrative in his third novel, The Centaur (1963), which superimposes the story of the centaur Chiron on the life of a Pennsylvania high school teacher.

Several of Updike's contemporaries also built upon this model of re-telling a classic story from a contemporary perspective. Playwright Tom Stoppard tells the Hamlet story from the perspective of the fated and very limited school chums in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967). American novelist John Gardner re-told the epic Beowulf from the monster's point of view in Grendel (1971). Adapting less distinctly literary sources to explore past events from contemporary perspectives, William Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987) explore the origins and effects of slavery in America, whereas Thomas Pynchon re-examines the establishment of the surveyor's line that would eventually distinguish between slave and free states in Mason and Dixon (1997), along the way creating portraits of the founding patriarchs that challenge our general historical view of these individuals. Finally, Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer take us even further into our cultural past, Mailer's Ancient Evenings (1983) telling the story of all four lives of his protagonist, who in one incarnation is the Egyptian pharaoh Menenhetet, and Heller's God Knows (1984) narrating from a complex temporal perspective the ancient Hebrew warrior-king David's quarrel with God. Like these fellow writers, Updike revitalizes old narratives, literary, sacred, or cultural, with the modern or even postmodern imagination to explore their continued relevance to the modern human condition.