Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

lovingly by your boy. Let go, my good queen. Amleth at thirteen is formed for good or ill. The quirks that disturb you I would lay to his predilection for the actor’s trade. Hemust try on many attitudes in rapid succession. To be sincere, then insincere, and then sincere in his insincerity—such shifts fascinate him. How marvellous, to his student mind, is this human capacity to be many things, to take many roles, to enlarge one’s preening, paltry identity with many half-considered feints and deceptions. You have noticed, I am sure, his animation and awe when a troop of players travels to Elsinore—how avidly he studies their rehearsals, takes note of the fine points of their illusions, imitates while private in our lobbies and cloisters the rolling cadence of their recitations.”
    “Yes,” the Queen interrupted eagerly, “I hear him in his solar, orating to himself!”
    Corambus held to his chain of thought. “The Church has done ill, I sometimes believe, in letting up, in these lax times, its imprecations against this unholy travesty of theatrical performance, which, aping Creation, distracts men from last things and from first things as well. And how close, come to think upon it, the boy clung to the late Yorik, until that tireless jester, shaky from all his merry dissipations, joined the mass of mankind in the last, best joke on us all. Your son loved him, madame, and loves all clowns and triflers, as releasing him from heavy thoughts of rule and self-discipline. Your husband sets the boy, it may be, too stern an example. But I have no doubt, when clear duty is set before him, that Amleth, though turning it this way and that in his mind, will end in doing the needful.”
    “May it prove so,” Gerutha said, not entirely persuaded, and obliged to defend her husband. “The Kingdoes not mean to be stern; he is beset with the threats of an unrestrained Norway, a seething Poland, a rebellious Holsten, not to speak of the peasants and the clergy, who constantly resent the cost of government.”
    “Greatness has the disadvantage,” Corambus tactfully observed, “that all less great are enemies to it.”
    “In honesty, the King is easier with the boy than I. As they more and more approach the same stature and follow the same pursuits, Horwendil speaks ever more lovingly of Amleth. It is I who, in the helplessness of my sex, entertain anxieties.”
    Corambus sat erect for a moment, arranging upon his broad thighs the fall of his houppelande’s huge scalloped sleeves, and then leaned a little closer than before, and spoke in a softer voice. “Just so. It is not Amleth whose health seems out of joint, given the dreaming flamboyance and outward awkwardness common to the commencement of manhood, but, may I say, his mother. As a girl, Gerutha, you were radiant and serene; you warmed every heart. As a woman, of now thirty—”
    “A year more than thirty, as of October. Amleth’s age reversed.”
    “—you are still radiant but, in some intimate reach, disconsolate. Yet no visible discolor tinges your status, the highest a woman may attain in Denmark.”
    “Too high and too large, if I lack spirit to fill it. My hopes when young had been set on siblings for Amleth, for a slew of siblings, to fill Elsinore with happy noise.”
    “Children are indeed a comfort. Their needs supplant ours, and our being feels justified in their care. We hidebehind them, in a sense; our coming deaths are lost in the clutter of family matters. My Laertes, scarce older than your tricksome son, already thinks himself his father’s protector, as well as that of his little toddling sister, left motherless, alas—”
    Gerutha reached out to touch the widower’s rounded hand as it returned to his chair’s arm, having dabbed at his eye with a voluminous sleeve. “Magrit is happy in Heaven,” she comforted him. “The world was a travail to her fine spirit.” The world, she thought, and the succession of stillbirths the poor woman had