conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a title for a book about I>Gertrude, blockquote, Borrowing with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Gertrude and Claudius'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Gertrude and Claudius
  The King was irate. His daughter, Gerutha, though but a plump sixteen, had voiced reluctance to marry the nobleman of his choice, Horwendil the Jute, a beefy warrior in every way suitable, if Jutes could ever suit in marriage a Zealand maiden born and reared in the royal castle of Elsinore. "To disobey the King is treason," Rorik admonished his child, the roses in whose thin-skinned cheeks flared with defiance and distress. "When the culprit is the realm's only princess," he went on, "the crime becomes incestuous and self-injuring."
  The phrase piqued Gerutha. "Is a woman's death less than a man's, I wonder? I think death for both is exactly as big as it must be, like the moon when it blackens the sun, to eclipse life completely, even to the last breath, which perhaps will be a sigh over opportunities wasted and happiness missed. Sela was a rover, but no woman wants to be a mere piece of furniture, to be bartered for and then sat upon."
  So defiant a formula, emerging from his fair daughter's flushed face, lifted Rorik's tangled half-gray eyebrows in synchrony with his upper lip, from which a long limp mustache drooped. His lip stopped lifting as his instinctive indulgent laugh was checked and hardened, by the pressure of royal policy, into a snarl. He was reminding himself to be stern. His mouth looked meaty and twisty and red between his mustache and his uncombed, grizzled beard. He would have been ugly, had he not been her father. "Since your mother's untimely death, my dear child, your happiness has been my supreme concern. But I have pledged you to Horwendil, and if a king's word is broken, the kingdom cracks. All the three years when Horwendil roved, seizing trophies from Koll's hoard and Sela's palace and a dozen or more fat ports of Sweathland and Rus, he allowed me as his liege-lord the pick of the plunder."
  Was this meant to soften her, so she could be bent more easily to his command? That she would eventually yield, both knew. He was a king, all substance, in essence immortal, and she of an evanescent loveliness, negligible amid the historical imperatives of dynasty and alliance. "Truly," Rorik pleaded, "is there no chance of Horwendil pleasing you? Have you already such strict notions of what a husband should be? Believe me, Gerutha, in the rough world of men, he is a more than fine specimen. He sees his duties and keeps his vows. Since your veins carry kingship in them, I have chosen for you a man fit to be king." He dropped his voice, with its cunning political range of threat and entreaty, into a register of irresistible gentleness. "My dear daughter: love is so natural a condition for men and women that, given normal health and an approximate parity of endowment, it will all but inevitably follow upon cohabitation and the many shared incidents of married life. You and Horwendil are fine specimens of our northern vigor—blond beasts, one could say, as solid as runestones in an upland pasture. Your sons will be giants, and conquerors of giants!
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She answered in offended kind. "You would theologize me out of my real existence. I would rather have the material gifts," she told him, almost angrily, on a queen's dignity, "that you say you possess but could not scrape through the window. Next time, use the door, as your servant has done. We are too old for puppy love's acrobatics. Let Corambis's haven be ours for the odd hour, for what conversations we wish, without timorous skulking. Those who know of it are our collaborators, and the risks of collaboration bind them to silence."
  Fengon gathered that she would grant him naught but this ultimatum today, and he bowed in leaving. Sandro had not expected him to emerge so soon, or to leave by way of the passage into the hearth-room, for he looked up startled from the depths of a dialogue between himself and Herda. She was twice his age, but with traces still of comeliness. By the great central bed of embers they huddled over unglazed cups of mulled cider. They were working out a language; Sandro filled in his gaps of Danish with supple gestures that left her blinking.
  His first gift, brought the week following, when the buds of the maples and alders had gone from a button-like solidity to the particulate leafiness of tiny cabbages, was a cloisonné pendant in the form of a peacock, the spread tail a fan in whose center the neck and body of shimmering blue stood out against the proud spread of green feathers eyed in yellow and black. Each segment of enamel was outlined in gold finer than thread, even to the tiny chips of white and red, green and gray that gave anatomy to the profiled head with its downcurved beak. The maker of so fine a thing must soon have gone blind; his blindness was part of its worth. "You always give me birds," Geruthe said, then remembered that the first such present, the pair of pied linnets, had come from Horvendile.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Some persons in attendance glanced up, the drama before them having perhaps stretched long. The day was revolving overhead, dropping rhomboids of sun upon the multi-colored finery and the hall's broad oak planks, worn and scarred. In olden days bored knights would clatter their horses up the stone stair and joust beneath the beams, where captured pennants faded and frayed.
  Gertrude played her part, adding, "Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet: I pray thee, stay with us; go not to Wittenberg."
  Trapped by their twin professions of love, the Prince from beneath his clouded brow studied the two glowing middle-aged faces hung like lanterns before him—hateful luminaries fat with satisfaction and health and continued appetite. He tersely conceded, to shunt away the glare of their conjoined pleas, "I shall in all my best obey you."
  The era of Claudius had dawned; it would shine in Denmark's annals. He might, with moderation of his carousals, last another decade on the throne. Hamlet would be the perfect age of forty when the crown descended. He and Ophelia would have the royal heirs lined up like ducklings. Gertrude would gently fade, his saintly gray widow, into the people's remembrance. In his jubilation at these presages the King, standing to make his exit, announced boomingly that this gentle and unforced accord of Hamlet sat so smiling to his heart that, at every health he would drink today, the great cannons would tell the clouds. And his queen stood up beside him, all beaming in her rosy goodness, her face alight with pride at his performance. He took her yielding hand in his, his hard sceptre in the other. He had gotten away with it. All would be well.
  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 counsellor, Laertes a generic young man. Hamlet pulls them all into death.