Leon Garfield's Shakespeare Stories

by Leon Garfield

  “More matter with less art,” said the Queen impatiently and Polonius, thus brought, unwillingly, to the point, produced a letter written by Hamlet to Ophelia. It was a love letter of the most sentimental kind.

  “Came this from Hamlet to her?” wondered the Queen, as if surprised that her son could pen such poor stuff.

  It had indeed.

  “But how hath she received his love?” asked the King, curiously.

  Polonius, uninterested in his daughter’s heart, replied by explaining that he had thought it fitting to put a stop to the business. “Lord Hamlet,” he had warned his daughter, “is a prince out of thy star. This must not be.” Very properly he had forbidden her to speak with the Prince again. But since then he had learned of such matters from his daughter as had left him in no doubt as to what had staggered the young man’s brain. Unrequited love.

  “Do you think ’tis this?” asked the King of Hamlet’s mother.

  “It may be,” sighed the Queen, over whose own heart love, passion and lust exercised a sovereign sway. “Very like.”

  But the King was not entirely convinced. He would like more evidence.

  “How may we try it further?” he asked.

  To Polonius, the ever-resourceful Polonius, this presented not the smallest difficulty. Hamlet, he recollected, was accustomed to walk in the lobby for hours at a time. “At such a time,” he proposed, with the heartless eagerness of the seasoned conspirator, “I’ll loose my daughter to him.” What passed then between the girl and the Prince might easily be overheard from a suitable place of concealment. (Such places were, to Polonius, as familiar as his study; and, doubtless, furnished with comfortable chairs). Readily the King fell in with the scheme, but further talk was prevented by the appearance of Hamlet himself. He was reading a book; and so deeply was he sunk in it that he might have been walking upon some lonely heath, instead of through the richly peopled rooms of the royal palace of Denmark. In appearance, Hamlet was somewhat declined. His shoes were unfastened, his stockings wrinkled, and his shirt hanging loose, like a limp surrender. Polonius nodded knowingly. He urged the King and Queen to depart and leave all to him, which they did most gladly. Hamlet seemed not to see them go.

  “How does my good Lord Hamlet?” inquired Polonius, with the patient kindness that might be offered to an idiot or a child.

  “Well, God a-mercy,” returned the Prince, not looking up.

  “Do you know me, my lord?” pursued Polonius.

  The Prince looked at him carefully. “Excellent well,” he said. “You are a fishmonger.”

  Somewhat taken aback, Polonius denied the charge, and then found himself caught in a swirling net of nonsense, of daughters, maggots and graves, from which he was glad to escape, when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, out of breath from searching, at last found their friend.

  “My excellent good friends!” cried Hamlet, throwing off all his madness and most of his melancholy in a moment. “Good lads, how do you both?”

  They laughed, and he laughed; and, for a little while, they were no more than three good friends delighting in each other’s shrewd wit and wisdom; and, for a little while, the grim horror and despair of Hamlet’s situation seemed to him to be no more than an evil dream . . . until, in all innocence and courtesy, he asked:

  “But in the beaten way of friendship, what make you at Elsinore?”

  “To visit you, my lord,” they answered promptly, “no other occasion.”

  A little too prompt; and accompanied by looks that were a little too innocent. In moments, they who had been commissioned to worm out Hamlet’s secret, had their own uncovered before they had so much as begun. They were forced to admit that they had been sent for by the Queen and King; and it needed no great skill on Hamlet’s part to guess the reason. Bitterly he stared at them and reflected on how easily they had been corrupted by the poisoned world of the court. Anxiously they tried to make amends and lift the Prince’s spirits. They told him that they had passed on their way to the castle a company of actors who were coming to perform before the court. It was, it seemed, a company from the city that the Prince knew well.

  In spite of himself, the Prince smiled. He delighted in the play and the company of players, those excellent fellow creatures whose highest aim was to please, seemed to him the best in the world. He looked forward keenly to their arrival; but then, remembering the two pupil-spies who stood anxiously by him, he felt a pang of pity. “You are welcome,” he said. “But my uncle-father and my aunt-mother are deceived.”

  “In what, my dear lord?” asked Guildenstern, hopefully.

  “I am but mad north-north-west,” said Hamlet seriously. “When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

  Before they could unravel Hamlet’s meaning—if, indeed, there was any—Polonius entered with the news that the players had arrived.

  “The best actors in the world,” read out Polonius, from the company’s extensive advertisement, which reached down, like a paper apron, almost to his knees, “either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral . . .” he drew breath and read on, until the players themselves appeared.

  They came into the grand ceremonial chamber where real kings and real queens and real princes held sway, and were not in the least abashed. They wore their paper crowns, clutched their wooden swords, and shrugged their patchwork gowns with a dusty dignity and a seasoning of pride.

  “You are welcome, masters!” cried Hamlet, and shook them all warmly by the hand. He looked fondly into each well-remembered face, commented ruefully upon the damage done by years, then begged the chief actor to recite, then and there, a certain speech for which he had a particular affection.

  The actor, a grand figure of a man, with the nose and eye of a battered eagle, recollected the speech and straightway launched it, as gloriously as a galleon, its sails full of wind. Either by chance, or design, the speech was from a tale of old Troy, and was full of murdered kings, revenge and mourning queens. Absorbed, Hamlet listened.

  “Look,” exclaimed Polonius admiringly, when the actor paused, “whe’er he has not turned his colour and has tears in’s eyes. Prithee no more.”

  The players, pleased with the reception of this modest sample of their art, were preparing to be bustled away by Polonius to their quarters, when Hamlet detained their principal.

  “Can you play ‘The Murder of Gonzago’?” he asked quietly, for a curious idea was fermenting in his mind. The actor nodded. “We’ll ha’t tomorrow night,” murmured Hamlet. “You could for a need study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines, which I would set down and insert in’t, could you not?”

  The player, familiar with the vanity of poet-princes, agreed; then followed the busy chamberlain. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern likewise, bowed themselves away, doubtless to report to the King. Only Hamlet remained.

  The Greek Prince, of whom the player had so roaringly told, had killed a king as bloodily quick as sword could strike; but the damned King of Denmark still lived. The Trojan Queen had rent her garments and shrieked aloud to heaven when she had seen her husband dead; but the Queen of Denmark still sighed and smiled in the bed of her husband’s murderer. The player who had presented the scene had wept real tears over those long-dead griefs; the Prince of Denmark, with father murdered, mother lost to shame, and himself urged, by his father’s ghost, to revenge, did nothing. “Bloody, bawdy villain!” he cried out, as his uncle’s smiling face forced itself before his mind’s eye. “Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!” He stormed and waved his arms, even as the player had done; then shook his head. Ranting words were not to the purpose. Better think carefully of the speech he would write for tomorrow night’s play. He nodded grimly. It was in his mind that the speech and the play together would represent, as nearly as was possible, the exact circumstance of his father’s murder. His uncle, watching it, could not fail to be struck to the soul, and betray
his guilt to the world. That is, if he was guilty. Hamlet frowned. Though the ghost’s accusation had been, at the time, terrible in its certainty, now, in the light of a later day, it seemed remote, doubtful, and even fantastic. “I’ll have grounds more relative than this,” decided the undecided Prince. “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King!”

  Ophelia, in her best and most delicate attire, sweetly perfumed and with sufficient red in her cheeks to sharpen her natural modesty, waited meekly while her father, closely huddled with the King and Queen, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, murmured about the Lord Hamlet. They were gathered in the lobby where, daily, Hamlet walked; and where she, as her father had expressed it, was to be loosed to the Prince. Presently the two young men took their bowing departures, and the Queen, after speaking kindly to Ophelia, also went away.

  “Ophelia, walk you here,” said her father, taking her firmly by the arm and examining her critically as if to see if anything further might be done by way of improvement. He was anxious to be proven right in his judgement that the Prince’s madness had been brought on by love for his daughter. He pressed a book into her hands and bade her read it so that her solitary walking should seem plausible. Then he and the King secreted themselves in a curtained alcove that might have been expressly made to hide such a King and such an adviser. The girl looked unhappily towards the curtain. Angrily Polonius gestured her away. The Prince was approaching. Ophelia, divided between obedience to her father, and shame for the part she had been told to play, opened her book, and shrank into the furthest obscurity she could find.

  The Prince also was reading; but there was a deeper likeness between Hamlet and Ophelia than such outward show. Each had been commanded by a father, one living, one dead, to play a part for which nature had not fashioned them: Ophelia for deceit, and Hamlet for murderous revenge. In order to overcome his nature and keep his anger hot, he had returned to the book in which he had so fiercely scored his fury while the ghost’s words still sounded in his ears and tore at his heart. But no such tempest tossed him now.

  “To be, or not to be, that is the question:” he mused; for he had, in turning the pages, come upon the notes he had made of a great debate at Wittenberg, in which the old question had been closely argued, of whether it was better to live or to die. The arguments were strong upon both sides. Indeed, for a time, it seemed that he who argued for death had the stronger case, as he piled up, in a grim edifice, all the agonies of living that might, by the single stroke of death, be utterly demolished. And yet, as his opponent shrewdly pointed out, the death-lover, in spite of all his excellent reasons, still lived. Why did he shrink from the one act that would, by his own admission end his sufferings? The answer, as Hamlet gave it murmured utterance, was as sombre as the question. “The dread of something after death, the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.”

  He shut the book and helplessly considered how closely the swaying of the argument reflected the swaying of his mind. He longed for death, which would have absolved him from the hideous duty that had been laid upon him; but he dared not rush into it. Self-murder was as repugnant to him as the murder of another. “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,” he sighed bitterly, “and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought . . .”

  A flicker of silk and the movement of a pale hand caught the corner of his eye. He looked round and saw Ophelia. Gently she greeted him. Gently he responded. Timidly she approached him and held out a little box of trinkets he had given her. She wanted to return them. He denied all knowledge of them. Bewildered, she protested; and then came out with such a sentiment as might well have been stitched on one of her samplers: “For to the noble mind rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”

  Hamlet laughed, somewhat harshly. He did indeed love Ophelia, but for her dear soul and not for her unformed mind. In her stiff words he smelt out the instruction of her pompous meddling father; and he became very angry. Even she, even the lovely, simple Ophelia, was being poisoned by the general poison of the court. Savagely he turned upon her and lacerated her with the insensate fury of his tongue—even though he knew full well that no fault attached to her. But he knew that whatever he said would pass directly to her father, who was an ever-open channel to the King.

  “I did love you once,” he said abruptly.

  “Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so,” faltered the girl.

  “You should not have believed me,” dismissed the Prince, hiding his pain under contempt. “I loved you not.”

  “I was the more deceived,” whispered Ophelia, not knowing whether she was on her head or heels.

  “Get thee to a nunnery!” shouted Hamlet wildly. Yet at the same time, he ached with pity and remorse for the frightened girl. But Ophelia could never walk the bloody path of revenge to which he was condemned. He wished only for her to escape from the foul corruption of Elsinore. “Where’s your father?” he demanded suddenly.

  “At home, my lord,” lied Ophelia, horribly confused. And yet it was no lie she told, for Polonius’s home was wherever he might hide and overhear. Nonetheless she grew pale, fearing that Hamlet had spied her father spying.

  “I have heard of your paintings well enough,” jeered Hamlet, seeing false colour, like treacherous flags, thrown up in her vacant cheeks. “God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another . . . Go to, I’ll no more on’t, it hath made me mad. I say we will have no more marriage. Those that are married already—all but one—shall live. The rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go!”

  With that, the mad Prince fled, leaving the girl he loved amazed and weeping on her knees. A moment later, the King and Polonius crept out of their concealment.

  “Love?” said the King, his broad face bereft of smiles. “His affections do not that way tend, nor what he spake, though it lacked form a little, was not like madness. There’s something in his soul . . .”

  Polonius agreed, for he was not the man to disagree with his king; but he still maintained that neglected love had been the cause. “How, now, Ophelia?” he said impatiently, as his daughter’s sobbing distracted him. “You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said, we heard it all.” Then, continuing to the King, proposed that the Queen might be better able to worm out her son’s secret. If such a circumstance could be arranged, he, Polonius, (needless to say), would be concealed and hear all.

  “It shall be so,” nodded the King. “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”

  Hamlet, his face pale and his eyes glittering with excitement, waited in the great hall where the play was to be performed. Horatio was with him. Horatio knew all. Together they were to watch the King to see if he betrayed his guilt as the play unfolded the crime.

  “They are coming to the play!” cried Hamlet, as the customary trumpets and drums sounded the approach of the King. “I must be idle. Get you a place!”

  There was a buzzing and murmuring and laughing, and rustling and shuffling, as the King and Queen and courtly audience came in and flowed, like a silken sea, over the gilded chairs and stools and cushions that had been made ready.

  “Come hither, my dear Hamlet,” invited the Queen, a treasure store of pearls and diamonds and brilliant smiles, “sit by me.”

  Curtly the Prince declined. He took his place by Ophelia, whose brightest jewels were her eyes. But his preference seemed more spiteful than fond. He taunted her with lewd remarks that made her blush with misery, until the players’ trumpet sounded the beginning of the play. The audience grew quiet, leaned forward, and misted over into a single monster of many mouths and eyes. All watched the stage—save Hamlet and Horatio, who watched the King.

  At first, there was a dumb show. Gaudy painted figures stalked stiffly to and fro, and enacted, wordlessly, what might, or might not have been, the tale of a royal poisoning. The Player King grimaced,
clutched air, and perished in dire agony. The King of Denmark’s smile seemed nailed to his face. The dumb show ended to applause like a thin shower of hail. The dead king revived, bowed, and begged all to attend to what should follow.

  “Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring?” demanded Hamlet, consumed with impatience.

  “ ’Tis brief, my lord,” murmured Ophelia.

  “As woman’s love,” said Hamlet, with a sharp, accusing look at the Queen.

  Now the play began in earnest; and, though the king wore a tinsel crown, and the queen was no better than a padded boy, they spoke their love so eloquently that the Queen of Denmark sighed. But the King of Denmark’s smile still seemed nailed to his face.

  “Madam how like you this play?” asked Hamlet.

  “Have you heard the argument?” demanded the King. “Is there no offence in’t?”

  “No, no, they do but jest—poison in jest. No offence i’ the world.”

  “What do you call the play?”

  “The Mousetrap.”

  The play continued. The Player King lay sleeping on the boards. A murderer entered. “Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing,” he hissed; and crept towards the sleeper with black cloak trailing, like some malignant bat. He drew out a phial, unstoppered it and, with horrid smile, poured its deadly contents into his victim’s ear. The King of Denmark’s smile was gone!

  “A poisons him i’ the garden for his estate!” cried Hamlet, unable to contain his fierce joy. “The story is extant and written in very choice Italian. You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago’s wife—”

  The King of Denmark stood up. His eyes were blazing with anger. His face was grey with guilt.