Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard

GUIL: No, no, no... you've got it all wrong... you can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen--it's not gasps and blood and falling about--that isn't what makes it death. It's just a man failing to reappear, that's all--now you see him, now you don't, that's the only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back--and exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.

I read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead because I thought it would be an interesting companion piece to Gertrude and Claudius. Both are attempts to look at Hamlet from different vantage points, but Stoppard's play is decidedly more tangential. His protagonists, Rosencrantz and Guildernstern, are decidedly minor characters: Hamlet's college friends turned spies for Claudius, who appear on stage to be mostly spoken at, and then are dispatched with little fanfare.

Rosencrantz and Guildernstern works better than Gertrude and Claudius because it nimbly sidesteps the trap into which Updike falls. Attempts at recontextualizing Hamlet are bound to fail because Hamlet is so expansive; derivative works will always feel narrow and slight. Stoppard embraces that feeling and uses it as the dynamic force in his play. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern know next to nothing about the events that propel Hamlet, and so Rosencrantz and Guildernstern becomes about the frustration of understanding. They have been asked to keep an eye on Hamlet and report to his uncle, but they don't know why; they are so little informed that this assignment becomes impossible. Stoppard elevates this lack of understanding to a universal, neurotic affliction:

ROS: I remember--

GUIL: Yes?

ROS: I remember when there were no questions.

GUIL: There were always questions. To exchange one set for another is no great matter.

ROS: Answers, yes. There were answers to everything.

GUIL: You've forgotten.

ROS (flaring): I haven't forgotten--how I used to remember my own name--and yours, oh yes! There were answers everywhere you looked. There was no question about it--people knew who I was and if they didn't they asked me and I told them.

GUIL: You did, the trouble is, each of them is... plausible, without being instinctive. All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque. A man standing in his saddle in the half-lit half-alive dawn banged on the shutters and called two names. He was just a hat and a cloak levitating in the grey plume of his own breath, but when he called we came. That much is certain--we came.

In this way Rosencrantz and Guildenstern provide a contrast for Hamlet, who seems to know everything. In the postmodern world there are no more Hamlets, however, and a great number of Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns. Like this pair we too suffer from an incompleteness of knowledge, and spend our lives trying to reconcile ourselves to it.

There is a final question, of course: The man in the hat and cloak, "levitating in the grey plume of his own breath" becomes a likeness of Death, who has called them--as he calls all of us--without telling us why, or when, or how. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern exhibit some sense that they have been cast into a plot that ends with their doom, and ironically everyone in the play, including the audience, understands more of it than they do. Even at the last, Guildenstern is left wondering:

ROS: All right then, I don't care. I've had enough. To tell you the truth, I'm relieved.

And he disappears from view. GUIL does not notice.

GUIL: Our names shouted in a certain dawn... a message... a summons... There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where w e could have s aid--no. But somehow we missed it. (He looks round and sees he is alone.)

Rosen--?
Guil--?

He gathers himself.

Well, we'll know better next time. Now you see me, now you-- (and disappears).

Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike

She felt this would happen but once, this unfolding of herself, and so she was luxuriously attentive to it, as if she were both storyteller and heroine, physician and invalid. In their hours of stolen intimacy, Fengon disclosed to her in the white mirror of his own body, furred and pronged, a self laid up within her inner crevices and for forty-seven years merely latent, asleep. All her unclean places came alive, and came clean. Did she not carry in her veins the warrior blood of Rodericke and of his father, Hother, the vanquisher of Guimon, who had betrayed Gevare and whose live body Hother burned in revenge? Protest had been lurking in her, and recklessness, and treachery, and these emerged in the sweat and contention of adulterous coupling.

John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius is predicated on a major miscalculation: That the story of Hamlet can be told without Hamlet. Or, rather, that a prequel to Hamlet can be written in which Hamlet himself is forced to the periphery, barely mentioned (I don't believe he has any quoted dialogue in Gertrude and Claudius), perpetually away at Wittenberg. The problem with this is not merely that Hamlet is a superior work--which it is, to everything--but that Hamlet is too large to be contained this way. He is too expansive; he commands our attention even when he is not on stage. Hell, he commands our attention when we're reading things that have nothing to do with Hamlet.

Gertrude and Claudius' neatest trick is that Updike, borrowing from Shakespeare's original sources, Saxo Grammaticus and Francois de Belleforest, splits his prequel into three sections in which the characters are first called by the names Grammaticus gives them, and then Belleforest's, and finally Shakespeare's. So Gerutha in Grammaticus becomes Geruthe in Belleforest and finally Gertrude in Shakespeare; Feng becomes Fengon becomes Claudius; Amleth becomes Hamblet becomes Hamlet; Hamlet's father Horwendil becomes Horvendile becomes--as Hamlet himself subsumes all others--Hamlet senior.

I was first inclined to think that this was a sort of pedantry, but I decided that it has an appealing thematic thrust: The story's progress toward Hamlet is inexorable, and by extension, our principals' progress toward death. Updike's Hamlet is an apocalypse, though a hastily sketched one; the crimes of Gertrude and Claudius are by comparison are minor stuff. Gertrude is a noble, clever woman trapped in a marriage of political convenience. Claudius is a wise, cosmopolitan adventurer unfairly overshadowed by his older brother, and is incited to murder only when his brother threatens to dispatch Gertrude as punishment for their adultery. Here are people whose yearning ought to make them more relatable than Hamlet, whose vengeance looms larger than its cause.

But Updike has too much to overcome to make Gertrude and Claudius work. First of all, he doesn't help himself with flabby discourses on Danish history and geography like this one:

Geruthe and Horvendile paid a patriotic visit to the battlefield of Fotevig, where over a century ago Erik the Memorable had decisively defeated Niels and his son Magnus, who had treacherously murdered Duke Knud the Breadgiver, conqueror of the Wends, in Haraldsted Wood. Magnus fell at Fotevig together with no fewer than five bishops. Erik's victory had been aided by three hundred German armored knights hired for the occasion, a technological innovation which at blow rendered popular levies upon the peasantry obsolete.

Or pointed references to the original, like this one from Corambis, known in Shakespeare as Polonius:

"Without forgetfulness, milady, life would be intolerable. All that we have ever felt or known would come crowding in upon us, like rags stuffed into a bag, as they say happens to unfortunates in the moment of drowning. It is averred that it is a painless death, but only the drowned could tell us with assurance, and they are silent, being so. That is, drowned."

Because his daughter Ophelia drowns in the play. Get it?

But the real issue is that Gertrude and Claudius is incapable of surprising us. We know exactly what will happen: Gertrude will fall in love with Claudius and Claudius will kill the King and usurp the throne. This is, save for a few minor details, the entire plot of Gertrude and Claudius. Gertrude's feelings about her marriage can be surmised without reading them, and there is little about their affair that might capture our interest, especially from an author who might reasonably be called our foremost literary expert on adultery. The novel's most powerful effect is to make us impatient for Hamlet and then to interrupt the narrative before he does or says anything of interest. It may drive us back to the original play--a result of no small worth--but there we find that Updike has little to illuminate.