CLAUDIUS THE DIARIST

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31542, 2 December 1967, Page 4

CLAUDIUS THE DIARIST

My Nephew Hamlet By John Turing. Dent 144 pp. Foreward by Richard Church.

"The familiar story of Claudius has been much bedevilled by the playwright Shakespeare, who corrupted the narrative of Kyd with such foreign matter as The Murder of Gonzago,’ of which Hamlet remarked: The story is extant and writ in very choice Italian.’” From this premise John Turing has constructed a work calculated to resist classification and to frustrate librarians: it purports to be a translation of

the diary of Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, and indeed it displays a royal contempt for petty English pop-dramatists who have used the same story. Needless to say, Claudius .the diarist Is not the ruthless megalomaniac of the play, who is after all depicted largely through the mudtinted spectacles of the febrile Hamlet: “Oh villain, villain, smiling, damned villain,” and the ghost: “Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast” Mr Turing has dismissed these as hopelessly subjective, and has fabricated a new Claudius based on six lines of Shakespeare (quoted in the preface), an inactive cynic who so far from debauching Gertrude was actually forced into a political marriage with her at the expense of his preferred mistress.

But this book is much more than a mere attempt to whitewash Claudius; details of his character are in fact almost irrelevant to Mr Turing’s purpose,, to present in a coherent and consistent form material that Shakespeare “corrupted.” With this aim, it was a fairly obvious step to switch to a more objective narrator, and to change the form to give an illusion of the authenticity of Procopius’s “Secret History.” The result

is a superb piece of scientific documentation with impeccable structure and logic,' but no claim whatsoever to literary greatness. The shift in perspective makes the work no longer a tragedy: Hamlet becomes merely an angry young rabble-raiser who has made Ophelia pregnant

Such a reconstruction is long overdue: Brophy’s recent attack on the play is only the culmination of a tension that has been developing all this century. But the assailants have been politically cautious in suggesting just what Shakespeare should have done. T. S. Eliot was quite dogmatic that the play was an artistic failure, and his syllogisms have been widely echoed. Turing praises Eliot extensively in his preface, and it may be assumed that his are the principles he attempts to ’ demonstrate in the diary. But his understanding of Eliot is superficial, and his generalisations crude: “The central theme of the play . . . may be termed in a short phrase ‘a struggle for power’.” It is on this themfe that *My Nephew Hamlet’ is based, and anything not relevant is cut: an act of rash hubris. This is assuming that the numerous scholarly footnotes throughput the diary imply serious criticism. But if read as nothing mote than "gentle but lethal mockery” . (as Richard Church seems to think possible), it is a spectacular refutation of scientific literary criticism; indeed, the titles of the author’s previous works (“Nothing Serious but Tax,” “101 Points bn Buying a House,” etc.) suggest that his Muse might be other than tragic. Whatever one makes Of it, “My Nephew Hamlet” i* well written, entertaining, ■ and stimulates the reader to reconsider the play. It should be approached as sophisticated entertainment rather than academic comment