Sweet prince? Good night!

Sweet prince or bad seed? That is the question.

And in his newest novel, John Updike asks whether it is nobler to blame Hamlet's mother for the family tragedy that unravels the dysfunctional Danish royals ... or to take arms against the gloomy, disturbed Prince of Denmark himself. Either way, after reading "Gertrude and Claudius," you might not be sure what is to be ... or not to be.

"Gertrude and Claudius," Updike's 19th novel, is a post-Elizabethan prequel.

It tells the story of young Hamlet's mother and stepfather/uncle before the action of William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" begins. Updike uses the tortuous vernacular and delightful details of ancient Scandinavian legends about the prince who feigns madness to avenge his father's assassination by Claudius.

He brings to life Gertrude's girlhood as the daughter of King Roderick, her arranged marriage to the "beefy" and "unsubtle" warrior who becomes King Hamlet, and her midlife brother.

Updike paints a very different portrait of the long-suffering but affectionate Gertrude, diverting sympathy from son to mother. Once "radiant and serene" but now feeling caged, she worries about the emotional chasm separating her from her "fragile, high-strung, quick-tongued" son and her remote husband.

Almost from the start, the strong-willed Gertrude laments her station in a patriarchal, barbaric society: "I was my father's daughter, and became the wife of a distracted husband and the mother of a distant son. When, tell, do I serve the person I carry within, the spirit that I cannot stop from hearing, that sought expression with my first bloody cry?" A feministic fatal attraction from Updike, in whose earlier novels about dysfunctional relationships adultery has transformed his characters? Aye, there's the rub.

Overlooking the trivial matter of fratricide, the dysfunctionality seems no more rotten in Denmark than elsewhere. Gertrude and King Hamlet worry about their son's friends (alas, poor Yorick), argue about the suitability of his girlfriend, Ophelia, and ruminate on whether he's spent too much time in college and too little time in the family business. In that, Updike has masterfully entwined an almost-contemporary family drama with a courtly romance.

Updike's novel ends brightly at the very point where the Bard begins somberly: Updike's Gertrude and Claudius expect a long, benevolent reign and eagerly anticipate Prince Hamlet's eventual rise to power; Shakespeare's sullen, soliloquizing Hamlet (and the ghost of his slain father) obviously have different ideas.

After Updike, the young Hamlet, his mother and stepfather cannot be seen the same way again. As with eyes newly adjusted to darkness, Shakespeare's murky staging, ironically, might now be rendered even murkier by the ominous shadow of the brooding prince.

Imagine a tender family tale that ends as the gentle Crazy Horse sings a bedtime song to his children on a hot June night in 1876 on the banks of the Little Big Horn, while the scheming Custer is unknowingly bivouacked just over the horizon. It would certainly cast our history of the next day's events - and its various tragic heroes - in a more complex light.

If Updike's pastiche makes him a literary borrower, he is equally a lender in this new take. "Gertrude and Claudius" becomes only one half of the whole, its shine derived from the old, dark tale. It clearly lends new perspectives, but to fully enjoy it, a reader must be more than essentially familiar with Shakespeare's greatest historic tragedy or miss the marvelous threads binding the two tapestries together.

Alone, "Gertrude and Claudius" cannot stand. But Updike alone is still entertaining, with many a Freudian slip between cup and lip. "Gertrude and Claudius" overflows with Shakespearesque puns and double entendres, more in the final third than the sluggish first.

And chalk it up to roguish literary intentions when Updike uses different names for his characters as the book unfolds; the names in Part One come from a late 12th century text; Part Two from an English translation that appeared soon after Shakespeare's play debuted; and Part Three from Shakespeare's play itself.

Nonetheless, it is prologue to the past, a revision of the events that lead up to the final tragedy. In the realm of the fictional Elsinore, it falls to the reader to decide. But as Updike himself recounts in the afterword, everything Hamlet touches dies. His capable stepfather, noble mother, winsome Ophelia, essentially loyal Polonius, his friend Laertes, Yorick, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the whole lot of them.