Gertrude and Claudius (23 page)

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.

In anticipation of these diplomatic triumphs—of feeling the very ribs of his chest reverberate in projecting his voice to the far corners of the hall—he squeezed the Queen’s resilient arm, under the concealment of their dragging robes, as they processed, bestowing smiles and nods, through the colorful ranks of Elsinore’s attendant population. Hamlet was there, looking ill-slept and sour, his red beard complemented by a velvet tricorne, which he removed with an ironical flourish as Gertrude and Claudius passed. The King wondered about the sleeplessness that set such a pallor on his face—up till the russet dawn with Ophelia, sullying his flesh? She was not here, still abed: a novice slut. Young Laertes, appearing in contrast altogether fit and rested, with a close, pointed Parisian cut to his beard and a smartly snug doublet that stopped short of his codpiece, stood erect at the side of his shrunken father. The two had some innocuous petition, the King had been forewarned. Though Polonius had doffed his sugarloaf hat and bowed low, exposing his bald pate and straggly sorcerer’s locks, Claudius saw that the old man’s gleaming eyes darted everywhere. He gave the King a wink, could this be? Or was it just a trick of the moment’s dust and sunbeams? The impression at any rate was unpleasant, and Claudius, cautiously nodding in response, made a mental note that his Lord Chamberlain’s retirement must be arranged.

How wonderful it was, the way that a king’s robes bring in their ermine-trimmed heaviness a spiritual investment lending each minor action a major implication
—a single fingertip moving through an arc of consequence with the power of a sword. To be thus, an entire nation concentric to his pumping heart, and all the reverence and hopes of a people arrowing toward him from the remote domains of Thy and Fyn, Møn and Skåne, was to be a man at last, his potential actual, his every thought and action magnified with eternal significance. He felt a black pang, there at the focus of all eyes including those great invisible ones peering from Heaven, through the clerestory windows. His offense was rank, with the primal curse upon it. Yet whereto served mercy but to confront the visage of offense? Time abounded in which to make his accounts right, through penitence and prayer. After his feats, this too seemed feasible; the Church made its intercessions as available as daily bread, and scarcely more expensive.

As he and the Queen, in the unison of a stately dance, took the three steps up to the throne dais, the thought of bread brought back their round room in the borrowed lodge, their picnic repasts often lost in the feast of their lust, and that day of rain, a rain pounding the fresh foliage into a green mist seen through the narrow pointed window, with a pellmell thrumming on the slates, when she, having resolved to make an end of him, instead slipped off her new silk robe and showed herself to him as she would be on the Day of Resurrection emerging naked from the tomb, forgiveness being on that day dispensed as freely as the loaves and fishes.

Ebulliently he felt her silent body, possessed, alive beside his. He glanced her way and, sensing his glance, uncertain whether to smile here at the height of ceremony,
Gertrude did quickly smile. Whenever he saw her afresh—the calm gray-green eyes, the ingratiating small space between her front teeth, the rosy complexion of a child heated by hope and play, the coppery hair unruly even beneath the weight of her golden crown—he realized what was, simply, real, all else being an idle show of theatrical seeming.

The royal couple took their two thrones, whose coat of gilt had not prevented rot from nibbling at the ancient sticks of linden and ash, including it was said bits of the True Cross and of the primal tree Yggdrasil. Claudius spoke his lines so all could hear. The speech went well, he thought. The regrets and compliments were distributed with a calm grace, the general collusion in his actions tersely made clear, and the situation with Fortinbras and the King’s response ringingly outlined. Laertes, having done his duty in attending the King’s coronation, asked for leave to go back to Paris, and this of course was granted, with compliments to Polonius that only the self-important old courtier would not recognize to be distancingly excessive.

Then, when Hamlet rebuffed with some muttered puns the King’s fatherly inquiry after his health, Gertrude surprised Claudius by speaking up at his side, entreating her son to stop looking for his father in the dust. “All that lives must die,” she gently told him, “passing through nature to eternity.” Not the least of the King’s reasons for loving her was that female realism which levelly saw through the agitations and hallucinations of men.

And when the boy—boy! thirty years old!—wordily implied, with the whole court listening, that only he
was truly grieving King Hamlet, Claudius took it upon himself to continue her instruction in the obvious: men die, each father in turn has lost a father, it is unmanly and impious to persist in unavailing woe. “Think of us as of a father,” he commanded, reminding him, “You are the most immediate to our throne.” He elaborated on this theme of his love, and as he spoke, one iambic cadence smoothly succeeding another, Claudius was distracted by a clatter of birds—starlings, he guessed, shriller-voiced than rooks—at the blue clerestory windows above. The birds, scenting spring here at the height of winter, were stirred up and flocking to the sun-warmed roof of crumbling slates.

Some persons in attendance glanced up, the drama before them having perhaps stretched long. The day was revolving overhead, dropping rhomboids of sun upon the multi-colored finery and the hall’s broad oak planks, worn and scarred. In olden days bored knights would clatter their horses up the stone stair and joust beneath the beams, where captured pennants faded and frayed.

Claudius finished with Hamlet by bluntly stating—where others had been pussyfooting for years—that he did
not
want Hamlet to return to Wittenberg: “It is most retrograde to our desire.” He relished the imperious ring of this, but softened it by beseeching his stiff nephew to bend, to stay here, in Elsinore, “here in the cheer and comfort of our eye, our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son.”

Gertrude played her part, adding, “Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet: I pray thee, stay with us; go not to Wittenberg.”

Trapped by their twin professions of love, the Prince
from beneath his clouded brow studied the two glowing middle-aged faces hung like lanterns before him—hateful luminaries fat with satisfaction and health and continued appetite. He tersely conceded, to shunt away the glare of their conjoined pleas, “I shall in all my best obey you.”

“Why,” Claudius exclaimed, startled by the abrupt concession, “ ’tis a loving and a fair reply.” They had him. He was theirs. The King’s imagination swayed forward to the sessions of guidance and lively parry he would enjoy with his surrogate son, his only match for cleverness in the castle, and to the credit such a family relation would win him in the heart of the boy’s newly fond mother.

The era of Claudius had dawned; it would shine in Denmark’s annals. He might, with moderation of his carousals, last another decade on the throne. Hamlet would be the perfect age of forty when the crown descended. He and Ophelia would have the royal heirs lined up like ducklings. Gertrude would gently fade, his saintly gray widow, into the people’s remembrance. In his jubilation at these presages the King, standing to make his exit, announced boomingly that this gentle and unforced accord of Hamlet sat so smiling to his heart that, at every health he would drink today, the great cannons would tell the clouds. And his queen stood up beside him, all beaming in her rosy goodness, her face alight with pride at his performance. He took her yielding hand in his, his hard sceptre in the other. He had gotten away with it. All would be well.

Afterword

T
HE ACTION
of Shakespeare’s play is, of course, to follow. To Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour film of
Hamlet
in 1996 the author owes a revivified image of the play and of certain offstage characters such as Yorick and King Hamlet. A hint of Claudius’s foreign soldiering can be found in IV.vii.83–84. His seductive gifts are mentioned by the Ghost at I.v.43–45. Salvador de Madariaga’s
On Hamlet
(1948, rev. 1964) lists some of the play’s many careless inconsistencies—the apparent invisibility of Horatio prior to Hamlet’s greeting of him at I.ii.160, though he has been at Elsinore for two months, and the strangeness of a climate that goes in four months from a nap in the orchard to “bitter cold” on the battlements and thence to Ophelia’s gathering of May and June flowers—and emphasizes Hamlet’s impenetrable self-centeredness, drawing a parallel between the Prince’s contempt for his auditors and the playwright’s for his audience. William Kerrigan’s
Hamlet’s Perfection
(1994), a wholly positive and enthusiastic exposition of the play, contains this haunting summary of G. Wilson Knight’s reading in
The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy
(1930; rev. 1949):

Putting aside the murder being covered up, Claudius seems a capable king, Gertrude a noble queen, Ophelia a treasure of sweetness, Polonius a tedious but not evil counsellor, Laertes a generic young man. Hamlet pulls them all into death.

A Note About the Author