Leon Garfield's Shakespeare Stories

by Leon Garfield

  The King, the great, good King, loved and honoured by all, had been dead for two months. He had been stung by a serpent while sleeping in his orchard, and all Denmark had wept. But now the time for grieving was past: sad eyes gave way to merry ones, long faces to round smiles; and the heavy black of mourning, that had bandaged up the court, was washed away by a sea of bright colour. Yellow silks and sky-blue satins, encrusted with silver, blazed in the ceremonial chamber, and the walls were hung with glory. There was a new King—even though there was still the same Queen. She had married again, and with her dead husband’s brother.

  This new King was a sturdy gentleman, broad-shouldered and broad-featured, and much given to smiling—as well he might, for he had gained a luxurious throne and a luxurious queen at a stroke. Affably he conducted the affairs of state, dispatching ambassadors to Norway to patch up grievances and giving gracious permission to Laertes, his faithful chamberlain’s son, to return to France whence he’d come to attend the coronation. Next, still smiling, and with his strong hand guarding the jewelled hand of his Queen, he turned to her son, Prince Hamlet, a young man in black, like a plain thought in a gaudy world.

  “But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son—”

  “A little more than kin, and less than kind,” murmured the Prince, with a look of dislike and contempt.

  Anxiously the Queen, his mother, begged him to forsake his dark looks and dark attire. He answered her with scarcely more courtesy than he had shown the King. The King, hiding his annoyance, added his own urgings; and the young man submitted—to the extent of agreeing to remain at court and not return to school at Wittenberg as he had wished. The King was satisfied and, with more smiles (which he dispensed like the small coin of royal charity), he left the chamber with the backward-glancing Queen upon his arm. As if on apron-strings, the crowding courtiers followed.

  Hamlet was alone. Long and hard he stared after the departed court. The look upon his face, had it been seen by the royal pair who had inspired it, would have chilled their hearts, made stone of their smiles, and poison of the lust of their bed. Dull hatred oppressed the young man’s mind: hatred for the corrupted world in which he was imprisoned, hatred for life itself, and loathing and disgust for the Queen, his mother, who, so soon after her noble husband’s death, had married so wretched a creature as the dead King’s brother.

  “O most wicked speed!” he cried out in anguish, as, helplessly, his imagination both probed and shrank from the hateful circumstance. “To post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets!”

  But someone was coming! Hastily he hid all evidence of his breaking heart under his customary mask of indifferent courtesy.

  “Hail to your lordship,” a gentleman said, coming into the chamber.

  “I am glad to see you well,” responded Hamlet, scarcely looking up, and with the distant cousin of a smile. Then he saw that the gentleman was no tedious courtier. It was Horatio, his old school friend Horatio, from Wittenberg!

  At once, surprise and delight overspread his countenance. His gloom vanished and his sunk spirit revived. In a moment he was all quickness and liveliness and eager hospitality, as he greeted his good friend from Wittenberg, where life had been clear and honest, where the plain rooms had been enriched with noble ideas, not sullen tapestries, and the talk had flowed like wine. Warmly he included in his greeting Horatio’s two companions, who were soldiers of the Royal Guard. Then, turning to his friend, he inquired:

  “But what is your affair in Elsinore?”

  “My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral.”

  “I prithee, do not mock me, fellow student,” said Hamlet, his smile, like the sun in winter, forgetting its warmth. “I think it was to see my mother’s wedding.”

  “Indeed, my lord,” admitted Horatio, gently, “it followed hard upon.”

  “Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables,” said Hamlet. Then his bitter mood lightened and his smile regained some warmth. “My father,” he murmured softly, “methinks I see my father—”

  Horatio and his companions started. “Where, my lord?”

  “In my mind’s eye, Horatio,” said Hamlet; and his listeners grew easy again.

  “I saw him once,” said Horatio. “ ’A was a goodly king.”

  “ ’A was a man,” said Hamlet, as if wanting to dispense with all worldly distinction of office. “Take him for all in all: I shall not look upon his like again.”

  Then Horatio told him. Eagerly, and yet careful to keep within the exact observation of a scholar, he told of the appearance of the dead King upon the battlements. “I knew your father,” he assured the Prince. “These hands are not more like.”

  Hamlet listened, with fiercely beating heart; but old Wittenberg habits of argument, question and debate made him cautious.

  “Armed, say you?”

  “Armed, my lord.”

  “From top to toe?”

  “My lord, from head to foot.”

  “Then saw you not his face?” demanded Hamlet, triumphantly.

  “O yes, my lord, he wore his beaver up.”

  There was no doubt. The spirit had been, to all intents, the ghost of Hamlet’s father. With huge and dreadful excitement, Hamlet promised that he would join Horatio and the soldiers on the battlements on the following night.

  “My father’s spirit—in arms,” he breathed, when he was alone. “All is not well . . .”

  Laertes was for France. Handsomely dressed in the newest fashion for his journey, he came to bid farewell to his sister Ophelia and give her such advice upon the perils and pitfalls of the world as he thought to be necessary. She was young and fair and modest as a bud. She was of so yielding a nature that she dared not call her soul her own, and had put it, trustingly, in the care of her brother and her wise old father, Polonius, the chamberlain. She had confided in Laertes that Prince Hamlet had, of late, caused her to believe that he loved her; and now, as she sat in a window seat, stitching some nursery proverb into a sampler, she listened as her brother solemnly warned her of the danger of passion and the unsteady nature of a young man’s love. She nodded and nodded, and, when he had finished, she looked up and expressed the timid hope that he would practise as he had preached. Indignantly he protested his own virtue, and was about to depart when his father, Polonius, appeared.

  “Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard for shame!” cried the old gentleman; and then, taking advantage of the moment, saw fit to advise his son, even as his son had advised his sister. But yet there was a difference; for while Laertes had warned his sister of dangers that might threaten her from without, Polonius warned of those subtler dangers from within. Although they were, for the most part, threadbare maxims such as Ophelia might have embroidered on her samplers, they were not unfitting.

  “Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,” said Polonius, severely eyeing his over-dressed son, “but not expressed in fancy: rich, not gaudy . . .”

  At the mention of “purse”, the young man’s hand had gone helplessly to his side, which caused Polonius to warn, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be . . .” The young man grew red; but, nevertheless, listened patiently until his father had done. Then, turning to his sister and reminding her of his own advice, he took his departure in a blaze of mostly good intentions.

  “What is’t, Ophelia, he hath said to you?” asked her father suspiciously.

  Timidly Ophelia confessed that it had to do with the Lord Hamlet. The old man nodded; he had suspected as much.

  “What is between you?” he demanded. “Give me up the truth.”

  “He hath, my lord, of late,” murmured the girl, dividing her looks between her proverb and her father, “made many tenders of his affection to me.”

  “Affection!” exclaimed Polonius contemptuously. “Pooh, you speak like a green girl!” And then and there he berated her soundly for her foolishness in believing in a prince’s love. He warned her (as her brother had done) of the danger that m
ight lie in Hamlet’s fondness—a danger not only to herself, but, more importantly, to that wily politician who was her father. Sternly he forbade her to have any further talk with Prince Hamlet; and she, mild Ophelia, who had already given up the charge of her soul, now gave up the charge of her heart. “I shall obey, my lord,” she said.

  The night was bitter and the frozen stars peered secretly down upon the three cloaked figures who stood upon the castle’s battlements.

  “What hour now?” asked Hamlet for perhaps the hundredth time.

  “I think it lacks of twelve,” answered Horatio.

  If the dead King was to appear, his time was almost come. Suddenly there came the sound of festive trumpets and the double thunder of a cannon.

  “What does this mean, my lord?” wondered Horatio.

  It was a custom, expounded Hamlet, with a sour smile, for such uproarious noise to accompany the revelry and drinking of the King. It brought the nation into disrepute, and made them seem to be no more than idle drunkards, so that, whatever of good there was, was lost in bad report. From this, Hamlet’s unresting mind hovered over the curious circumstances of how a single defect in a man might, in the general view, taint and discolour his fairest virtues.

  “Look, my lord, it comes!” Horatio’s voice was sharp with fear; his hand shook as he pointed.

  Hamlet turned. His face grew pale, his eyes huge, and his expelled breath made a thread of grey amazement in the air.

  “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” he cried out.

  Upon the dark battlements stood his dead father! All in armour, as cold and lifeless as himself, the dead King gazed with tragic sorrow upon his shaking son. He beckoned, and Hamlet made to follow. Urgently his companions—Horatio and the sentinel—tried to prevent him, for they dreaded that the spirit might be malevolent and would tempt the young Prince to his death. Savagely Hamlet threw off the restraint and threatened to strike with his sword if he should be hindered any more.

  “Go on,” he cried to the beckoning ghost, “I’ll follow thee!”

  The dead King stalked on and the wild Prince went after, till both were lost from sight.

  “Let’s follow!” urged the sentinel, fearful for his Prince.

  “To what issue will this come?” whispered Horatio.

  The sentinel stared into the freezing darkness in which the dead King and his son had vanished. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” he said.

  Father and son stood close together in a secret fold of the night. The young man shuddered as the unnatural chill of his dead father struck through to his heart.

  “Mark me,” whispered the ghost.

  “I will,” breathed his son.

  “My hour is almost come,” sighed the spirit; and, as it told of the grim and hateful regions to which it was soon condemned to return, Hamlet stared into his father’s shadowy, unhappy eyes and longed, with all his heart, to kiss his freezing hand and pour out, into his hollow ear, all the love and devotion that death had stopped.

  “List, list, O list!” begged the ghost, with sudden urgency. “If thou didst ever thy dear father love—”

  “O God!”

  “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder!”

  “Murder!”

  The stars glared, the battlements shuddered, and Hamlet’s heart ceased as the terrible word was uttered. Murder! And revenge!

  “Now, Hamlet, hear,” whispered the ghost. “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life now wears his crown!”

  “O my prophetic soul! My uncle!”

  Sombrely the dead man observed and approved the quickening of anger in his son, and went on to unfold the hideous circumstance of the crime, of how the King’s loving wife, Hamlet’s mother, had been seduced by the King’s wretched brother, and then, how that brother had poured poison in the sleeping King’s ear.

  “Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand, of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatch’d . . .”

  Consumed with rage and horror, the son listened to his father’s words, each one of which seemed a command for revenge upon the unwholesome pair whose faint rejoicings, from time to time, mocked the night.

  “But howsomever thou pursuest this act,” warned the ghost, with a sudden tenderness made horrible by its hopelessness, “taint not thy mind nor let thy soul contrive against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven . . .”

  Hamlet’s heart ached with pity, for he saw that his father’s spirit was tormented by love no less than by hate: both had outlived the grave. But now the night was wearing threadbare, and the phantom shivered as the dark grew thin and patched. “Fare thee well,” it whispered. “Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me.” Then it was gone and Hamlet stood alone.

  Breathing harshly he leaned against the battlements and rested his head upon the cold stone, as if to support his staggering mind. Far, far below, a wild sea crashed and raged against the rocks at the base of the cliff upon which the castle stood; but darkness and disturbance reduced its fury to silent, tumbled lace. Yet had it been seen in all its huge madness, it would have seemed no more than distance had made it beside the raging in Hamlet’s soul. He raised his head and, with eyes blazing with tears, swore to heaven that he would be the instrument of the ghost’s revenge. He would wipe from his mind all the calmness, wisdom and fine thoughts he had learned in happy Wittenberg, and leave behind only—revenge!

  “O most pernicious woman!” he wept, as again he heard sounds of distant revelry. “O villain, villain, smiling damned villain!” With trembling hands he drew a book from his pocket—a student’s book in which observations of life and nature were noted down. “Meet it is I set it down,” he muttered, as if to calm his extreme agitation by such scholar’s habit, “that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.” He wrote so fiercely that he scored the paper through. He put the book away. “It is ‘Adieu, adieu, remember me’,” he repeated. “I have sworn’t!” He drew his sword as if meaning, then and there, to rush down into the black castle and kill its poisoned heart.

  But he heard voices calling. His companions were searching for him. Desperately he searched for some secret place in his mind where he might hide the dreadful knowledge he possessed; he would not, he dared not, confide what the ghost had revealed. When his companions found him, and eagerly questioned him, he answered them with wild, fantastic humour which, to his great relief, bewildered them into asking no more. Nonetheless he made them swear, upon the cross of his sword, that they would never tell of what had happened that night. This they did, and more than once; for wherever they stood, Hamlet heard the ghost, deep in the earth, calling: “Swear!”

  “This is wondrous strange,” said Horatio, troubled by his friend’s frantic manner.

  “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome,” returned Hamlet; and then, with a sad smile at his old school friend, said: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  He made them swear again, this time that, if his mad humour should continue, they would never betray that they suspected what lay behind it. He trusted no one, least of all himself. His heart was so full that he dared not trust his tongue not to betray him. Madness would be his refuge and hiding place of truth, until the time was ripe for his revenge.

  Revenge! He shrank within himself as the full horror of his circumstance came upon him. What was he, Horatio’s fellow student, doing in this dark world of murder and revenge, of treacherous kings and faithless queens, of creeping courtiers and poison? Most bitterly he sighed:

  “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.”

  Laertes was in France and out of his father’s sight, but by no means out of that cautious old gentleman’s mind. Polonius did not trust his son; and perhaps not without cause. He sent a servant to spy on him and on what company he kept.

  Polonius, cunning old adviser to king after king, deemed it his duty to know everything. Consequently if walls had ears, they w
ere Polonius’s; if keyholes had eyes, they were likewise, Polonius’s. Yet this abundance of knowledge did not make him wise; it made him merely knowing. Thus when his daughter Ophelia came to him, as she was in duty bound, and told him that the Lord Hamlet had appeared in her room while she was sewing, with the looks of a melancholy madman, he sought no further for a cause than in disappointed love. “Have you given him any hard words of late?” he asked.

  “No, my good lord,” she answered, with a downcast look, “but as you did command, I did repel his letters and denied his access to me.”

  “That hath made him mad,” pronounced Polonius. “Come, go we to the King. This must be known . . .”

  But Hamlet’s strangeness had already troubled the smooth surface of the court, puzzled the smiling King and vaguely distressed the easy Queen. Knowing that nothing would be got from the loyal Horatio, two other school friends of Hamlet had been sent for, in the hope that they would discover the cause of the Prince’s change. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two courtly scholars, so alike in bows and smiles and flattered pleasure at being Royally summoned, that the King was hard put to know which was Guildenstern and which was Rosencrantz. However, the two fledgling courtiers had no such difficulty in knowing the King, and divining, amid the oiled smiles that slipped from face to face, that they would be well paid for spying on their old friend and smelling out the secrets of his heart.

  “Heavens make our presence and our practices pleasant and helpful to him,” said Guildenstern to Hamlet’s mother, judging that such tender interest would concern her more than it would the King.

  But it would seem that the young men’s skills were not to be needed. No sooner had the bowing pair departed, to search out Hamlet, than Polonius came bustling in, stuffed with good news. First, from Norway. Young Fortinbras asked for no more than the free passage of his army through Denmark to some distant spot. Next, and best of all, the cause of Hamlet’s madness had been discovered. Polonius had found it out. What was it? The King and Queen waited while the old politician, who could never be plain, used up words like stuffing, to swell the importance of a small goose before serving it up.