Not to Be.

Gertrude and Claudius, by John Updike (Knopf, 212 pp., $23)

To a great extent, the story of Western literature has been one of imitation. Perhaps homage is a better word. Virgil paid homage to Homer. Dante paid homage to Virgil. Milton paid homage to Dante. More recently Joyce retold the Odyssey and set it in early-20th-century Dublin. Shakespeare, too, appropriated the classics of ancient Greece and Rome, retelling them in plays like Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida.

So it isn't surprising that one of the reigning masters of contemporary fiction should attempt his own retelling of what is widely considered the best play ever written. After all, Hamlet itself was a borrowed Norse legend that Shakespeare dropped into the frame of a Senecan tragedy and updated in Renaissance Denmark.

Depending on how much you know about the play's sources, you may be a bit thrown by the names in the first three-quarters of John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius. In the original version, which appeared in Saxo Grammaticus's History of the Danes (c. 1200), Prince Hamlet was called Amleth, Hamlet pere was Horwendil, Gertrude was Gerutha, and Hamlet's felonious Uncle Claudius was Feng. The second interpreter of the Hamlet legend, the French man of letters Francois Belleforest (Histoires tragiques, c. 1570), used slightly different spellings and modernized the Danish court somewhat. Shakespeare changed or anglicized the names, and modernized the play altogether.

Updike has separated his novel into three parts, roughly corresponding with Saxo, Belleforest, and Shakespeare. He thereby achieves a kind of historical progress in each part, moving skillfully and subtly over centuries, nimbly melding his brash Vikings into scheming Castiglionian courtiers. Updike's technique works well, and helps to bridge the yawning gap between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that is typified by Shakespeare's eponymous father and son.

Updike begins with Saxo's Horwendil, a Viking warrior whose savage likeness can more readily be found in the Icelandic sagas than in the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Updike has clearly made use of the sagas in drawing this character, whom he likens to Nietzsche's pillaging "blond beast." This king lives and dies by a primitive code of revenge, and is neither the Machiavel that Shakespeare made of Claudius, nor the enlightened courtier/scholar that he made of the brooding prince. Progressing quickly through Belleforest's and Shakespeare's versions- and using Shakespeare more as a springboard than as a source-Updike extrapolates backward from the play into a past that Shakespeare only hints at and assumes.

In Shakespeare's play, Hamlet pere is a virtuous and noble king slain by his inferior brother, the Machiavellian Claudius. Updike, conversely, draws a highly sympathetic picture of Claudius and an unflattering one of King Hamlet. Feng is educated and charming-a suitor far superior to his brother Horwendil, to whom Gerutha was given in an arranged marriage, and whom she deems "unsubtle." Most of Updike's novel is taken up with the story of Gerutha's seduction by Feng-a seduction in which she is a willing participant, eager both to escape the lackluster attentions of her husband, the doltish king, and to experience a sexual gratification he cannot give her. On their wedding night, Updike tells us, Horwendil was so besotted that he passed out before consummating the marriage. Updike's Gerutha has never forgotten or overcome this slight, and it leaves her prey to Feng's warm, sensuous flattery.

Their clandestine affair begins well before Horwendil's murder, and, in fact, Feng's desire to legitimize their love-not his kingly ambition-is portrayed as his primary motive. "Lord Christ," he says to himself, "this love of her is eating me alive."

Updike's bias toward Feng and Gerutha and his evident dislike for Hamlet (pere and fils) turn Shakespeare's Oedipal drama into a beautified love story between a rightfully usurping brother and an understandably adulterous queen whose well-deserved happiness is systematically spoiled by "a foppish, rude brat." As Updike sums it up in the novel's brief afterword: "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 counselor, Laertes a generic young man. Hamlet pulls them all into death."

But Claudius's crime and his coverup are nothing to put aside lightly: They are the linchpin of the play. Without them, the tragedy of Hamlet could not be set in motion. Updike is well aware of this, and his cavalier dismissal of Claudius's misdeeds is a glaring act of hubris and an indicator that Gertrude and Claudius is not an entirely serious novel. Updike ends his tale where Shakespeare's play begins, with Claudius relishing the fruits of his as-yet-undetected crime: "[H]is queen stood up beside him, beaming in her rosy goodness, her freckled face alight with pride at his performance. He took her yielding hand in his, his hard scepter in the other. He had gotten away with it." This is another one of Updike's little jokes, it seems. We all know very well that Claudius hasn't gotten away with it. But as he demonstrates throughout Gertrude and Claudius, Updike is much less concerned with Shakespeare's play itself than with his own ingenious approach to it.It might be said that Updike does the play a service by unpacking Shakespeare's all-too-human characters. To think of Claudius as a devil is to limit him immensely, while making Gertrude a whore, as Hamlet does, leaves out too much of the human complexity of Denmark's royal family, which Shakespeare meant us to infer. In showing us the obnoxious, antiheroic side of Prince Hamlet, Updike seems to be following the dissenting Hamlet critic Salvador de Madariaga, who sought to demolish the romantic view of Hamlet painted centuries before by Goethe and Coleridge. Their image of Hamlet as the consummate beautiful soul collapsing under the burden of an unrelenting fate has been the dominant interpretation ever since, though most modern critics have conceded that Hamlet is by no means blameless; he is often cruel, and even heartless. Take his cavalier murder of the bumbling Polonius, a deed for which he expresses no remorse, though it drives his love Ophelia to madness and suicide; or the fatal dispatch of his conniving school chums Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with the brusque words, "They are not near my conscience."Gertrude and Claudius sports an arid wit at times, and thereby lacks the air of gravitas that one has come to expect of everything connected with Hamlet. But after centuries of beating this gloomy Danish horse, the relief of levity is far overdue.

One can't help guffawing, for example, when Updike renders Act I, scene 2, in his own words. This is the famous scene where Claudius eulogizes his dead brother, strains to justify his hasty marriage to the widow, and tries to ingratiate himself with Hamlet, who merely utters bitter gibes-the famous "A little more than kin and less than kind," and "Not so, my lord. I am too much in the sun." All this Updike revises as follows: "Hamlet rebuffed with some muttered puns the King's fatherly inquiry after his health."

Updike has sprinkled his novel with many such delightful asides. His King Hamlet, for example-who, as we know, is later murdered while napping in his orchard-complains to Gertrude about experiencing "uncanny spells of fatigue." Gertrude replies cheerfully: "Normal aging, merely, darling. I too need a nap more than formerly. You'll live another 20 years at least." Such zingers will entertain aficionados to no end.

Ultimately, however, one wonders what Updike hoped to achieve by deflating this Danish colossus into a soap opera befitting an age in which half of all marriages end in divorce. Turning Hamlet into a spoiled suburban brat may be amusing, but in the end it's a bit like portraying Macbeth as a hen-pecked Walter Mitty. It turns the plays and characters of Shakespeare into shadows of themselves, unworthy of the sublime poetry he wrote for them. Was Gertrude and Claudius just a lark? Something Updike did for fun in his spare time? Or is it a case of a brilliant and erudite novelist good-naturedly thumbing his nose at the master? For all its pleasures, Gertrude and Claudius can't help being a disappointment to those who still find dignity and meaning in the tragic view of life.