Word: hamleted
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...ready for the Shakespeare onslaught. A new Hamlet hits theaters in a couple of weeks starring Ethan Hawke and Diane Venora. The twist? This time it's the Danish Corporation in modern day NYC. A couple weeks later, Kenneth Branaugh's Love's Labour Lost opens nationwide, set as a 1930's period musical with songs by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. We'll have interviews with both Hawke and Branaugh before the year is up...Everyone is going gaga over the new Lord of the Rings trailer-the first movie in the trilogy opens this December. Check...
Finally, Henrietta finds some good fortune, as she comes upon an "Old Vagabond" sitting on a park bench who has lost his glasses. The search proves "bootless," but she walks the president of the "Great University" home--and by recognizing his references to Hamlet and Oedipus Rex earns his respect...
Then, in her 40s, Gertrude awakens to the charms of her husband's younger brother, himself more than a decade her senior. Their courtship is protracted and passionate. In Shakespeare's play Hamlet upbraids Gertrude for her infidelity: "You cannot call it love, for at your age/The heyday in the blood is tame." That, Updike's novel suggests, shows how much Hamlet knew...
...Gertrude's husband learns of the affair; court life affords little privacy for a queen. He confronts Claudius and outlines the punishments he will inflict on the guilty. Claudius, without Gertrude's knowledge, murders the king and becomes king himself. Once he marries Gertrude, the stage is set for Hamlet...
Gertrude and Claudius is engrossing enough on its own terms to stand independently of Shakespeare's play. But those readers who know Hamlet will find Updike's novel an echo chamber of beguiling allusions. "You protest too much," her husband-to-be tells young Gertrude, a sentiment she will repeat during her life onstage. And the doom awaiting Updike's people lends their deeds a tragic cast...