by PAMELA DEAN
"A bet," said Thomas, a little grimly.
"I thought freshmen had to climb the water tower," said Janet. Blackstock's policy of having no fraternities or sororities had not prevented a certain amount of informal hazing of freshmen, especially the boys; but at least, if you had any backbone at all, you could
thumb your nose at the crowd you'd gotten in with and go find some group whose initiatory rites were more to your taste—people who read science fiction, or liked to fly kites, or play Ping-Pong, or get up at five in the morning to gather mushrooms. She wondered exactly what group of young idiots had decided climbing the heating-plant stack was the only gate to the inner circle.
"I started out as a Poli Sci major," said Thomas, just as if she had spoken. "They were getting a lot of grief from the guys in the hard sciences, and decided to prove their manhood by risking their necks. I should have switched majors right then; it would have saved me a lot of time."
"You're going to want it, next year," said Robin, soberly.
"I can take Latin in the summer, I hope," said Thomas. He looked over Janet's head, out the window. "Look how the light picks out the ridges of the stubble fields."
"Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness," said Janet, unthinking.
"Oh, do you know the rest?" said Thomas. "It drives me crazy that Keats died when he did; I think that Ode shows a whole new direction for him. Such a waste. Say it for us."
Janet collected herself and did so. It was not one of her favorites, being rather unlike Keats in many ways. It was probably the one she should have said for Nick, but she had not been aware until now that she knew all of it. She stumbled on the last two lines of the second verse, but Robin knew those. He declaimed them with a slightly exaggerated air that made Janet wonder if he shared Nick's prejudices, but on the whole she thought things had worked out very well.
Robin then started in declaiming the Player King's speeches from the play-within-a-play from Hamlet, with such unctuous exaggeration that he had all three of them laughing until they cried. Luckily there were only two other students on the bus, well toward the front, and the driver was used to far worse demonstrations.
One of their fellow passengers eventually got up and swayed carefully down the aisle toward them. It was Diane Zimmerman, in a red velvet off-the-shoulder dress and high heels. "Are you going to see Hamlet?" she said. "I thought I recognized that awful verse.
I'm taking my brother; he thinks he doesn't want to go, but he's wrong."
"It's amazing how Blackstock captures whole families," said Molly. "Half the people I know have a brother or a sister here. My aunt went here."
"Amazing," said Thomas; Janet thought she heard a sour note in his voice, but when she looked at him he was simply gazing in admiration at Diane's beautiful shoulders; so it was probably something else she had heard.
"Why does your brother think he doesn't want to see Hamlet? " she asked Diane.
"Oh, he thinks all literature should be political, and he's completely certain that nobody before 1700 had a social conscience."
"But that's folly," said Robin, hotly. "Hasn't the child read anything?"
"He stayed a Poli-Sci major," said Thomas.
"I thought that was a good department," said Molly.
"Well, it was," Robin said, "but Goldstein went to be President of some Eastern university and Marquez went to teach somewhere—Grinnell or Colgate or one of the other ACM places, and nobody left has any sense of history. They read Aristotle so they can feel superior and then they start on Rousseau and those fellows, and the time between is as the void to them."
"My God," said Thomas, "that's my speech."
"That doesn't necessarily prevent its being true," said Robin, grinning, "though it does create a strong presumption of falsity."
Thomas looked at him hard.
"I cry you mercy," said Robin, "that word was ill-chosen. Fancifulness, may I say rather?"
"If you must," said Thomas, but he looked less disturbed.
"You have been reading Hamlet," said Diane to Robin.
"Oh. You know us theater types," said Thomas. "A head full of quotations, in no good order."
"Do you think Hamlet's the best choice to show your brother he's wrong?" said Janet to Diane.
"Yes, I do. Or at least, if the reviews of this production are right, this production is the right one. The guy in the paper said that productions of Hamlet usually cut all the political stuff—Fortinbras, and all the speeches about usurpation and disease in Denmark; but this one leaves it all in."
"What does it leave out, then?" said Thomas.
"He said a lot of the antic disposition gets cut."
Robin uttered a dismayed cry at such a volume that the bus driver looked over his shoulder and said, "No fighting back there!"
"It's intellectual distress," called Thomas.
"Hasn't your brother got ears?" said Molly to Diane.
"He's sulking," said Diane.
"How can they cut the antic disposition?" said Robin heatedly. "Are they mad? Do they want to gut the play? Don't they know Hamlet must be his own clown?"
"Are you going to behave yourself?" said Molly.
"Let him rant now," said Thomas, "or there's not a hope he'll be quiet in the theater."
"I've got a canvas bag," said Molly. "Suppression will occur on demand. Or provocation."
"And did they also cut all the references to Hamlet's madness?" demanded Robin of Diane.
"No," said Diane, backing off a couple of steps and catching hold of the back of a seat as the bus rounded a sharp corner, "the review said that Hamlet is simply assumed to be truly mad."
"Oh, for God's sake," said Thomas, over a renewed cry from Robin. "If I'd known that I'd have gotten tickets to something else."
"There, there," said Janet. "We can have a nice malevolent discussion about it afterwards."
"The only comfort," said Thomas, gloomily, "is that companies that fuck Hamlet up invariably do an impeccable job on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead."
Diane went back to her brother, Molly returned to Janet's book, Robin and Thomas began an idle discussion of exactly why a director and company that could do a superb job of Stoppard's play couldn't seem to manage Hamlet, and Janet looked out the window, where the mild rolling fields of corn stubble and soybean debris, dotted with barn, silo, house, and spiderlike rusted farm machinery, were being replaced by the little frame houses, used-car dealerships, and fast-food restaurants of the city's outermost suburbs. In the low light of sunset they looked like the set of a modern play in which everybody talks interminably and nothing is resolved.
Janet wondered, for the n th maddening time, where Nick had gone after English this morning. She hadn't even thought of calling him; he was never in, and nobody on Fourth Taylor liked to answer the telephone. Molly could never get Robin on the phone, either; but he would at least send her notes via Campus Mail, which was often faster than leaving a phone message and waiting for an answer to it. She could send Nick a note this evening.
She had meant to ask him what he wanted to do about dinner, and tell him where to meet to catch the bus, when she saw him after English, and then he had inconsiderately taken himself off.
She wondered how he would get along with Thomas. She wondered what Tina would make of the whole enterprise. Nick and Thomas could probably talk theater until they were blue in the face, leaving Janet to either join in and abandon Tina, or make boring tennis or girl-talk with Tina and miss all the fun. She glared at Molly's curly head, and the bus pulled into the theater lot.
The Old Theater was in fact a ten-year-old building of stark appearance, made of a particularly muddy sort of yellow brick, entirely without windows, and shaped like a slightly squashed pear laid on its side They walked up the sidewalk that made the stem, and entered through huge glass doors. The flat or squashed bottom of the pear was connected to an art museum, some of the possessions of which were generally on display in the lobby of the theater. This time, pre
sumably in honor of Hamlet, there was a vast silk and canvas cloud somewhat in the shape of a camel, hanging from the ceiling, and an extensive display of sixteenth-century fans and perfume bottles in the glass cases.
Janet ruthlessly dragged Molly away from this and led her into the cramped little gift shop, where you could gape at porcelain masks of tragedy and comedy, copies of all the plays the theater had done in its history, toy copies of the Globe and the Old Theater, puppets in historical costume, paperweights with famous theatrical scenes in them, mugs written with quotations from Shakespeare and Shaw and Euripides and Ibsen, collections of critical essays, penny whistles, and little clay owls.
Molly was very satisfactorily delighted with all this, and had in fact to be prevented from spending her next term's book money on a miniature model of the Old Theater complete with the costumed cast of The Lady's Not for Burning.
They went to their seats about ten minutes before curtain time. Robin had refused to take a program book, because they all contained rubbish, he said; but once they had sat down, he insisted on reading Janet's over her shoulder. "Oh, Lord, they've raked up that Olivier nonsense again," he groaned. "Tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind, indeed. What poppycock. What insolent rubbish. How anyone can watch the play and say such things I do not know."
"It's these nineteenth-century poets reading it in their studies," said Thomas from Janet's other side. "Upsets the order of the incidents."
Janet, who had heard the problem of Hamlet's delay discussed since as long as she could remember, was rather taken aback, but decided to reserve judgment. She went on placidly reading her program book, which was stuffed with the pronouncements of famous actors past and present concerning the proper handling of the play and the character, and with the conflicting remarks of directors on the same subject. She was amusing herself with a reflection of how Olivier might have directed Edmund Kean when the lights dimmed.
Before the audience had quite ceased its rustling, a huge and startled voice boomed, "Who's there?"
Janet almost jumped out of her skin, and had the satisfaction of feeling Thomas jerk also. An equally startled voice said roughly, "Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself,"
and Janet, who had dutifully read the footnotes for this scene, suddenly realized what they were saying. The first voice did not unfold itself, but persisted, "Barnardo?" and Barnardo gave in and answered, "He." One of the people on the dark stage uncovered a dim light.
Their voices grew hushed; and Janet forgot where she was.
She discovered at the first intermission that no such happy thing had happened to Thomas or Robin. Robin, perhaps mindful of Molly's canvas bag, had been quiet during the performance, but excused himself immediately to go outside and laugh. The other three, laboring through the crowds in search of something to drink, perched eventually on top of a radiator that had not yet been turned on for the winter, and entered into an acrimonious discussion punctuated by lemonade.
Molly, who was a realist, was perturbed by the fact that the actor playing Hamlet was Korean, while the rest of his putative family was tall and blond. "What'd they do, adopt him?" she said.
Thomas, whose opinions on this subject were remarkably similar to Nick's, dismissed her objections but launched into a tirade of his own, consisting largely of a minutely detailed list of what lines and speeches had been left out and how these omissions were warping the meaning of the play.
Janet thought he was probably right; but she was enjoying the play far too much to worry about it now. She had fallen for the Korean actor, a slight, short, mobile young man with a mane of straight dark hair that might not be Elizabethan (Thomas said Robin thought Hamlet looked like a sailor of those times, but hardly like a prince) but was certainly effective. She didn't blame him for going mad, either. Luckily, it was only a fifteen-minute intermission and they needed five of those just to get back to their seats.
The lights went down. Robin climbed over Janet's knees and sank into his seat just as the sharp, clear voice of Hamlet said, "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue." Robin made an infuriating snort, but said nothing. The lights came up on the Players in their gorgeous, tawdry clothes—the only Elizabethan clothing in the entire play, everybody else being dressed like a cross between hippies and farmers, another thing that had annoyed both Thomas and Molly.
The play moved toward its high point. Thomas hissed in her ear, "They cut the dumb-show, the idiots," and Robin was heard, during the Closet Scene, to damn Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, and all their intellectual children; but for the most part they were quiet.
Janet found herself most interested in Ophelia and Horatio. She had always considered Ophelia a poor-spirited creature; but this one, with an inflection of her docile lines that Janet had never conceived of, and a delicate way with gesture and facial
expression, delivered the impression of a spirited and sensitive young woman. She was delighted with Hamlet's bawdy remarks, and responded in kind. (Robin was delighted, too, and chortled well into the interior play, which was staged somberly and with a great deal more effect than Janet would have believed it capable of.) As for Horatio, he did not have much to say, but if you watched him over Hamlet's shoulder, as it were, you could see that he was always alert, that nothing escaped him—as, indeed, he had promised; but he had been doing it all through the play, and only now, watching, did you call it to mind. His steady replies to Hamlet's hysteria in the interior play's aftermath, the extremely sharp eye he bent on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when they came to tell him how angry the King was, and especially his wariness and distress when the King exiled Hamlet to England, were like a commentary that pointed up all the important points of this part of the play. He stepped forward to go with Hamlet, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern after the King had dismissed them, and was swiftly waved back by Hamlet. Janet felt for him very much.
Hamlet watched Fortinbras's army go by, and standing alone on a bare stage (having shooed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into the aisles, where they fidgeted and alarmed the members of the audience closest to them and made Janet feel like a part of Fortinbras's army herself), he meditated on why he had let his capability and godlike reason to fust in him unused. Janet had always thought of this soliloquy (one of her favorites) as rising steadily in intensity; but he began rather frenziedly and got quieter and quieter. The rustling and murmur of the audience quieted with him; until into a dead silence he said, in a friendly and meditative way, as if he had decided which shirt to wear, "From this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth."
He jumped off the stage, disdaining the ramp, to join Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; grinned at having made them jump; and swept them before him up Aisle 7 and so out. Janet let her breath out. There was a long silence, and then, as the lights went out and the house lights came up, a great deal of applause.
People began to get up. Molly, Robin, Janet, and Thomas sat in a row, looking straight ahead. Janet finally looked at Thomas. He turned his head and regarded her gravely. "It's all downhill from here, you know," he said. "By any normal standards. By some weird sort of tragical morality, it's all uphill. But he's such a devil, Shakespeare. He's going to give us some of the most exquisite scenes of the whole play; and for what?"
"You know," said Robin, as if in answer, "if they do not play the wrong sort of merry hell with the gravediggers, most of this production will answer very well. There's more antic disposition than I'd feared, and you see that they could not cut it all, 'tis too interwoven with the play. Clever Will, a devil indeed, but a most sweet contriver."
"Are you on terms of such familiarity with all your favorite poets?" said Molly.
Robin provided her with an open and delighted grin, and said, "No, indeed; I'd never speak of Miss Austen so, nor Dr. Johnson, nor even Master Coleridge, though he thought better of himself than he ought to have. But our Will, you see, wrote those Sonnets, and after reading of them, it's hard to be formal with him."
"I suppose it's no ruder than calling them by their last names, like the critics do," said Molly. "As if they were suspects in a murder case."
"Are you liking the play?" Janet asked her.
"Oh, yes, a lot. It's wonderful to hear Shakespeare in American accents. Polonius seems a little out of place, though, doesn't he? Like somebody imported for the occasion."
"Claudius might have, I guess," said Janet.
"You science majors are so literal," said Thomas, with a laugh. "He speaks with an English accent not because he comes from England, but because he's of the old school."
"Right," said Molly.
The lights went down abruptly, and out of the darkness the velvety voice of the actor playing Gertrude said, rather raggedly, "I will not speak with her." Horatio's light, flexible tenor, also rather uneven, answered, "She is importunate, indeed distract. Her mood will needs be pitied." Like Hamlet, thought Janet, except that Hamlet was not importunate. The Queen, in a long-suffering voice, said, "What would she have?" and the lights came up.
Janet noted with interest that the quiet Horatio could say quite a lot, when he had to. And then her spirited, sensitive Ophelia whirled in upon them. Janet sat bolt upright, tears starting to her eyes; but what she thought, quite clearly, was, Hamlet's not crazy. This is how people are crazy here.
The play tore on to its relentless and bloody conclusion; but as Robin and Thomas had said in their different ways, it stopped twice: once in the graveyard, in a scene that made Robin so happy Janet wished Molly would get out the canvas bag; and once again in the great hall, when Hamlet told Horatio what had happened on the way to England. The graveyard scene impressed Janet particularly, both because Hamlet seemed like a different person and because Horatio seemed just the same as usual, having lapsed back into his old taciturnity the moment he and Hamlet were back together. While Hamlet and the Gravedigger and Robin and indeed the rest of the audience laughed happily at the peculiar macabre jokes, Janet watched Horatio eye Hamlet as if he were a friend newly released from the hospital; Horatio looked, in fact, like a man who would be consulting his watch every ten seconds, if he had had one.
