Leon Garfield's Shakespeare Stories

by Leon Garfield

  “Give o’er the play!” cried Polonius, urgently.

  “Give me some light!” shouted the enraged King. “Away!”

  The play was cut off, ended before its ending. The audience had gone. Tumbled stools and chairs bore testimony to the haste of the departure. The bewildered Player King crept back to recover his tinsel crown. Then he went away, sadly shaking his head. The performance had not gone well.

  But to Hamlet and Horatio the play had succeeded beyond all expectation. The King was guilty; the ghost had been honest. A furious excitement filled the Prince. He had at last set events into motion. Action had begun! His mood found expression in wild laughter and wild words, as if he had drunk strong wine. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, pale with uneasiness, came to tell him that the King’s rage had worsened. Hamlet was not distressed. The Queen, also, was much agitated.

  “She desires to speak with you in her closet before you go to bed,” said Rosencrantz, reproachfully.

  “We shall obey,” announced Hamlet, “were she ten times our mother.”

  Now came Polonius, limp with concern, and with the self-same message from the Queen. She would speak with her son.

  The King was with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Breathing heavily, for his anger had by no means subsided, he confided that he thought it dangerous for the Queen’s mad son to remain in court. God knew what he might do next. He must be sent away. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, being the Prince’s trusted friends (the trusted friends bowed), must accompany him to England. And without delay. No sooner had the two pupil-spies left the King, than the master-spy joined him. Polonius. His news was that Hamlet, even now, was on his way to his mother. He, Polonius, would hide and overhear whatever passed between them. The old eavesdropper hastened away, and the King, from force of habit, smiled. But it was a smile that died almost as soon as it had been born.

  “O my offence is rank,” he cried out in wretchedness. “It smells to heaven.”

  The play, with its presentation of the murder, had opened up his soul and exposed the breeding poison in it. He had murdered his brother and stolen his brother’s wife. He was in agony for what he had done; and a double agony, for, though he bitterly repented his deed, he could not repent the possession of the gains it had brought him. “Help, angels!” he groaned, and knelt to pray forgiveness from God.

  So deeply was he lost in his despairing plea to heaven that he never heard the soft footfall behind him, nor the sharp indrawn breath. Hamlet stood behind him, with sword upraised. He had, in passing, glimpsed the kneeling King. At once the rich, broad back invited him to the hideous duty he knew he must perform. He hesitated.

  “Now might I do it,” he breathed. The sword remained unmoving. The man was praying. To kill him now would send his soul to heaven. Better wait for a worse time; then he would go to hell. Silently the Prince withdrew and went upon his way.

  “My words fly up,” sighed the King, rising to his feet, “my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

  Hamlet, in obedience to her wishes, came to the Queen, his mother. His mood was black with self-contempt. He had failed. Revenge had been within his grasp, and his sword had stuck in the air. It had not been because the King was at his prayers that the avenger had spared him, but because the avenger was not, by nature, an avenger. As always, thought had come between Hamlet and the deed. The consequences, like the long shadow of action, ever cooled him as he drew close. Action must needs be hot . . .

  The Queen was in her bedchamber. Her hair was loose and streaked with silver, as if she had been too long in the moon. Beside her yawned the royal bed, gorged with kissing pillows and silken sheets.

  “Now, mother, what’s the matter?” demanded Hamlet harshly, as the rage against himself turned against the hateful scene before him.

  Sharply, she reproached him. More sharply he reproached her.

  “Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue,” cried the Queen, with the authority of an outraged mother.

  “Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue,” returned Hamlet, with the authority of an outraged son. His words grew savage, violent; his look was wild, his sword was in his hand. Alarm seized the Queen. She tried to leave. Hamlet gripped her arm and forced her to sit upon the bed.

  “What wilt thou do?” she shrieked in terror. “Thou wilt not murder me? Help, ho!”

  “What ho! Help!” A voice, shrill with alarm, cried out from behind a curtain.

  “A rat!” shouted Hamlet, whirling round in amazed fury. “Dead for a ducat, dead!”

  He plunged his sword deep into the curtain. He felt it enter more than cloth and air. He heard the sighing cry of a life escaping!

  “What hast thou done?” cried out the Queen in dread.

  “Nay, I know not,” whispered Hamlet, staring at his dripping blade. He trembled with excitement. “Is it the King?”

  He drew back the curtain. Polonius glared up at him. He had killed the eavesdropping old man. Action, at last performed, had mocked him. His heart ached with horror and pity. “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool,” he mourned, “farewell. I took thee for thy better.” He let fall the curtain and turned to his white-faced mother. “Peace, sit you down,” he muttered, “and let me wring your heart.”

  She sank back upon the bed and tried, unavailingly, to shut her ears against such words as no son in all the world had ever stabbed a mother with. Tears made rivers in her cheeks and drowned her pearls as Hamlet pitilessly laid bare his mother’s easy lust and the shameless corruption of her bed. Her husband-lover—

  “A murderer and a villain!” accused Hamlet.

  “No more,” wept the Queen.

  “A king of shreds and patches—”

  Suddenly he fell silent. His looks altered and he seemed to stare into vacancy. He uttered words that made no sense.

  “Alas, he’s mad,” breathed the Queen. She sat, not daring to move, till her son’s fit should be over.

  It was no madness that had suddenly stopped his tongue and engrossed his looks. The ghost had returned! The dead King’s hopeless eyes dwelt forlornly on the bed, then fixed themselves upon the Prince.

  “Do not forget,” uttered the spirit. “This visitation is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.” Its bleak, unhappy gaze turned upon the trembling Queen. “Speak to her, Hamlet,” pleaded the dead King, as an aching memory of fondness stirred the ashes of his heart. Hamlet obeyed.

  “How is it with you, lady?”

  “Alas, how is’t with you?” asked the Queen, who saw no ghost but only her mad son transfixed. “Whereon do you look?”

  “On him, on him,” cried Hamlet, pointing to his father and striving, with all his might, with all precise detail and exact picture, to make his mother see the figure by the bed. But all she saw were the bed’s hangings, and Hamlet, mad.

  “Why, look you there,” cried the Prince, “look how it steals away. My father in his habit as he lived! Look where he goes even now out at the portal!” But she saw neither the ghost’s coming, nor the ghost’s going. It had not appeared to remind her of forgotten love, but to remind Hamlet of neglected revenge.

  The scene had been strange and terrible and the King, had he heard of it, would have been filled with dread. But the quiet spy behind the curtain had overheard with an unrecording ear.

  “This counsellor is now most still, most secret, and most grave,” said Hamlet, as he dragged the dead Polonius from the room, “who was in life a foolish prating knave . . . Goodnight, mother.”

  He had hidden the body and would not confess where. It seemed he mocked his own bloody act by hiding the spy who could no more hide himself. Concealment had brought about Polonius’s death; now death brought about his concealment. To all urgent questioning the Prince replied in a vein that was tragical-comical.

  “Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?”

  “At supper.”

  “At supper? Where?”

  “Not where he eats, but where a’s eaten.”
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br />   But soon the body was found and taken to the chapel. And, that very night, the mad and dangerous Prince was dispatched to England, in the close care of his good friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Dearly would the King have liked to dispatch him to join Polonius, but he dared not. The Queen’s love for her son and the people’s love for their Prince stood in his way. But England would serve his darker purpose. He entrusted, to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, a sealed letter for the English King. In it he required that Hamlet should directly be put to death.

  Ophelia begged to see the Queen. But the Queen was reluctant. Her soul was too burdened with her own griefs to endure the sight of Ophelia’s. Nonetheless she was prevailed upon to see the girl, so Ophelia entered.

  She wore, as was proper for her visit, her best and most delicate attire; but had buttoned it all awry, as if she knew she ought to be modest but could not recollect how. She had painted her cheeks, but one less skilfully than the other. Her hair was down and still wild from sleep for, although she had remembered to dress everything else, she had forgotten her head. Which was not to be wondered at: the murder of her father by her one-time lover had quite blown out the candle of her mind. She smiled absurdly at the Queen, and then began to sing. But there was more madness in her music than music in her madness, for she kept neither tune nor time. The songs she sang were lewd fragments and snatches that came weirdly from her lips. God knew what they meant to her, or where she’d gathered them, or for how long her modesty had kept them folded, like bride-gowns, at the bottom of her mind.

  The King came in and, together with the Queen, looked on dismayed. “O Gertrude, Gertrude,” he sighed to his wife, when the girl, with a dozen or more “Goodnights”, had drifted meaninglessly away, “when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions . . .”

  Laertes, the mad girl’s brother and son of the murdered man, had returned from France and, even now, was in the city where rumour and discontent were inflaming his already unsteady nature. Bitterly the Queen began to reproach the unthinking insolence of the common people, when the sound of a furious commotion was heard. Doors splintered, steel clashed, and voices shouted. A moment after, Laertes, with sword drawn and some half-dozen wild-looking fellows at his heels, burst in. He glared about, saw the King, and bade his followers leave him and guard the door.

  “O thou vile King!” he accused. “Give me my father!”

  The Queen tried to hold him back.

  “Let him go, Gertrude,” said the King calmly. “Do not fear our person. There’s such divinity doth hedge a king, that treason can but peep to what it would . . .”

  Laertes faltered. Royalty awed him, and so did the thought of the King’s Swiss guards. He took his advantage where it lay, and grew peaceable. Then Ophelia came back. As if reminded of a childish duty neglected, she had returned with a gift of flowers. She had gathered them from somewhere wild, for her gown was stained and torn and her white arms scratched. She smiled at her brother as if he was a stranger.

  “O heavens,” wept the young man, seeing the ruins of his sister, “is’t possible a young maid’s wits should be as mortal as an old man’s life?”

  She began to sing, no lewd fragments now, but the mournful ditty of a burying. Then she gave away her flowers, telling the proper virtue of each as she gave them to her brother, to the King, and to the Queen . . .

  “There’s rue for you. And here’s some for me. We may call it herb of grace a Sundays. You must wear your rue with a difference,” she said to the Queen, with an eerie cunning smile. She returned to singing, and presently, with a quick, “God be wi’ you!” fled from the room.

  The King, with cautious sympathy and enclosing arm, led the distressed brother aside, and promised to tell him how the tragedies had come about, and who had been to blame: not him—not him . . .

  Two sailors, rough and slanting, with cutlasses wide enough to divide a man, brought a letter to Horatio, who had remained in Elsinore, and waited while he read it. The letter was from Hamlet. He was in Denmark. The vessel on which he’d sailed had been pursued by pirates. The ships had briefly grappled. Hamlet had boarded the pirate and been taken prisoner. His own ship had escaped and continued on to England. Since then he had come to terms with his captors. They were good fellows and would bring Horatio to where Hamlet now waited. Also, they had letters for the King.

  At once, Horatio went with one of the sailors to meet with Hamlet, while the other took his letters to the King.

  The King was still with Laertes. He had told the young man how Hamlet had murdered Polonius and had become dangerous to the throne itself. Laertes listened, and wondered why the King had done nothing against the murderer.

  “Break not your sleeps for that,” murmured the King, smiling his old smile that slipped round his lips like oil. “You shortly shall hear more . . .”

  It was then that he was given the sailor’s letter. Hastily he read it. Rage and amazement filled him. Hamlet was returned. Hamlet who should, by all the King’s shrewd scheming, have been dead in England, was once more in Denmark. Tomorrow he would be coming to the court.

  “Let him come!” begged Laertes, wild with hatred for his father’s killer and longing only to destroy him. The King, desiring Hamlet’s death no less, paced to and fro, brooding upon some means whereby this might be brought about, a means by which no blame should be laid at any door and even the Queen should think it an accident. His Queen was always in the front of his thoughts. His love for her was almost a sickness, equal with his guilt. He paused in his pacing, and beckoned Laertes to his side.

  “What would you undertake,” he asked softly, “to show yourself in deed your father’s son more than in words?”

  “To cut his throat i’ the church!” came the prompt reply.

  The King shook his head. The scheme he had in mind was different. Hamlet, who delighted in swordplay, was to be tempted into a fencing match with Laertes. One of the weapons would be unbated and needle-sharp. With this, Laertes might, as if by unlucky chance, kill his man. As he confided the scheme, the King watched the young man shrewdly, to see if so mean and dishonourable a proposal repelled him. But Laertes was Polonius’s son, and guile and concealment were in his blood. He entered into the scheme with all his heart, and gilded its cunning with some of his own. He had brought back from France a deadly poison, and with this he’d anoint his sword. It was a poison for which there was no remedy, and the merest scratch would procure Hamlet’s certain death. The King smiled. Poison was the means whereby he had gained his Queen and crown; it was fitting that poison should be the means whereby he secured them. It must be by poison. Therefore, if Laertes failed to wound the Prince, a poisoned cup should be awaiting Hamlet when he paused to quench his thirst.

  So Hamlet’s death was encompassed; but even as it was nodded upon, there came news of another, lesser death. The weeping Queen came in to tell that Ophelia had been drowned. Frail mad Ophelia was dead. The news brought forth no wild excess of grief; but was received with quietness, as if this was calamity’s fragile herald, sent in advance of its huge self.

  A gravedigger was singing at his work. A jovial soul: the deeper he dug, the higher rose his spirits, and his song flew up in snatches, together with flying clods of earth. Hamlet and Horatio, on their way from the seashore to the castle, drew near; and the gravedigger, finding he had attracted a noble audience, paused, beamed, and wiped his brow. Amused by such good cheer among the bones, Hamlet fell into talk with the man; and Horatio could not but smile to see how his friend readily forgot his griefs and troubles in the pleasure of argument and debate, for the scholar-prince got as good as he gave. The gravedigger, by toiling so long among the grinners, had come by a shrewd and bony wit.

  “What man dost thou dig it for?”

  “For no man, sir.”

  “What woman, then?”

  “For none neither.”

  “Who is to be buried in’t?”

  “One that was a woman, sir; but rest her soul, sh
e’s dead.”

  Presently he threw up a skull. Whose was it? Why, it was the old King’s jester, Yorick . . .

  “This?” murmured Hamlet, taking the skull in his hands and gazing at it, so that his sad smile was answered by its sightless grin.

  “E’n that,” said the gravedigger.

  “Alas, poor Yorick,” sighed the Prince. “I knew him, Horatio . . .” As Hamlet mused, the gravedigger continued with his work, for the grave’s tenant was approaching to take possession of the premises. A sombre procession moved towards the grave, with a coffin borne on a swaying tide of black. The King and Queen were among the mourners: plainly the burial was for one of high estate. Hamlet and Horatio drew back, to observe the scene from a distance. The coffin was lowered into the earth, but the priest intoned no prayer; for the death had been doubtful. Suddenly, from among the mourners, Laertes stepped forward; and Hamlet saw that the grave he had laughed over had been made for Ophelia. He cried out in anguish; but his cry was quite lost in the shouted grief of Laertes, whose words and feelings were as extravagant as his attire. His black was a whole night to Hamlet’s little corner of dark; his grieving was a tempest to Hamlet’s aching sighs. Frantically he leaped down into the grave to catch up his sister for one last embrace; and Hamlet, enraged that Ophelia, whom he had loved, should be used as a property for such gaudy grief, rushed forward to grapple with Laertes in the grave. Fiercely they fought until they were dragged apart. Then Hamlet, much ashamed, retired with Horatio; and the burial of Ophelia was concluded.

  “Strengthen your patience,” murmured the King to Laertes, and reminded him that revenge would soon be his.

  “So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to’t,” murmured Horatio. He and Hamlet were alone in the great hall of the castle; and Hamlet had told him how, on the ship bound for England, he had found, in the cabin of his two good schoolfriends, a sealed letter to be given to the English king. He had opened it and read therein his own death warrant. So he had, most skilfully, exchanged for another in which he had put forward Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in place of himself. Thus those two gentlemen had sailed on to England bearing with them, not Hamlet’s, but their own deaths.