Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

by A. J. Hartley

  “You’re dead, Hamlet,” Laertes said, clutching his stomach. “Minutes at most. Me, too.” He pointed at the tip of the sword Hamlet had snatched from him. “When you stole this blade you stole a little present from Italy too.”

  “There’s justice,” the Prince whispered staring at the smear of blood, the traces of a thick, purple fluid on the weapon’s tip. Close by, with his dimming vision, he could just make out two figures on the stone floor close to the statue of Old Yorick.

  “Forgive me, as I do you,” Laertes begged, sinking to his knees. The wound Hamlet had inflicted on him went deep. The venom was acting swiftly. “I know my sister loved you.”

  Hamlet nodded and reached for his hand. Laertes clasped it then his body was racked with a convulsion that doubled him up grimacing with pain.

  “The King,” he mumbled. “Claudius gave me the poison. He’s to blame.”

  The hall began to spin. The light to darken.

  “I know, Laertes. And so does he.”

  Unsteadily Hamlet lurched towards the scarlet-cloaked figure bent over the fallen Gertrude, and pricked him in the back with the tip of the poisoned sword.

  Claudius uttered the softest cry. Two guards with halberds ran towards them, but Horatio was there, rapier out, protecting the Prince.

  The King looked up at him.

  “Don’t worry, uncle. It was just a scratch. My heart races. Not yours. Most of the poison’s gone already. But you… and I… we will die this day.” His eyes wouldn’t leave the sad, still shape before him. “Mother…”

  He let the last word hang there. Next to his wife, pale and terrible in death, Claudius sighed, a great breath released as if he’d been holding it for years. His whole body seemed to sag and shrink. Tears ran down his face.

  “My beloved queen is dead. And I have murdered her son, whom I loved as a child and as a man.”

  “With love comes agony,” Hamlet murmured.

  “And we know it.” Claudius struggled to his feet. “I won’t offend you by asking your forgiveness or understanding, nephew. I deserve neither.”

  The two men faced each other, Hamlet looking at him along the length of the blade.

  Then Claudius reached casually behind him for the poisoned chalice, closed his eyes and smiled.

  “Remember when you were a boy? You had a horse called Zeus. Your father gave it to you.”

  “No lies now, uncle. The stallion was your gift, not his.”

  “Ah.” Claudius looked at him, lifted the cup in a toast and took a deep draft. “You knew that too. Yes. He came from me. You remember how we rode together along the shore when the tide was low, for hours sometimes? And your mother would greet us on our return...?” He smiled bleakly, lost in the memories, drinking more of the poison. “I thought that if your father was gone then those days would be our future, our life. I am so sorry...”

  He drained the cup and threw it away, grimacing as he felt the first of its effects.

  Hamlet lowered the sword. The blade clattered to the floor.

  “I remember…”

  Claudius doubled over and stumbled to the flagstones. With the last of his strength he crawled to Gertrude’s side and reached for her.

  “Love,” Hamlet said to Horatio. “Perhaps it’s easier in death.”

  “Everything’s easier in death,” said a low, familiar voice in his ear. “But you’ll know that soon enough.”

  “Yorick…?”

  The hall was like a dream now, hazy and uncertain. Hamlet could feel the poison starting to clench his limbs. His heart was thumping hard and fast as a beaten drum. There was so little time before him.

  “Your Majesty?” the jester asked.

  And yet the voice…

  Hamlet strained his neck and saw. The little man was by the statue speaking, almost a part of it. The same coarse, brute face, not quite human, flesh and stone looking to meld together.

  He pointed at this spectre and asked, “You see him, Horatio? You hear him?”

  The young man peered at him in grief and puzzlement.

  “I hear nothing but commotion, sir. And soldiers. Our own. Foreign. Lord Elias…”

  “You tricked me, clown,” Hamlet said, laughing, choking, he wasn’t sure which.

  The dwarf on his plinth shrugged, not that anyone else noticed. The colour in him was almost gone now, all the blood and the bright and energetic life.

  “No, Prince. You tricked yourself. Court jesters do not beget sons. There was but a single Yorick. A lost soul trapped in Purgatory alongside your father, though full of grief and guilt.”

  Unseen to all the world, he leaned down naked from the grinning tortoise.

  “You summoned me. Your fears, your suspicion, your knowledge of this castle’s secrets put flesh upon my bones.”

  The march of soldiers’ boots. Voices of many accents and different tongues.

  “You were real,” Hamlet whispered.

  The last, familiar chuckle.

  “As real as you. The antic actor in your head.”

  There was the metallic rattle of armour around him and the sound of harsh, military voices.

  “I must leave now, Hamlet. Just as you…”

  His wraithlike hand came out and matched the pose of the statue’s arm, outstretched in a mock greeting to the tumult in the hall, freezing into stone.

  “This play is run.”

  Another voice, fierce and foreign.

  “What bloody theatre is this?” Fortinbras demanded. “Where’s my crown? Where…?”

  Elias took Gregor by the elbow and led him to the Norwegian.

  “Your new Lord Chamberlain can tell you, sir,” the Dane said then patted the Scot on the back. “He’ll tell you what to do.”

  Fortinbras stared at the two of them.

  “Lord Chamberlain…? I recall no words of mine to that effect.”

  But Gregor Macbeth was issuing orders already. For peace in the castle. A decent respectful attendance to a dread scene that shocked even his hard troops.

  All this was nothing but a dying murmur in Hamlet’s failing mind. He felt himself tumbling through memories, moments in time, days, weeks, months, Ophelia’s arms around his neck in a meadow by the water, then further back, drifting through the swirling tangle of recollection to a day he could not possibly remember, had only heard of from the ghostly jester, the loud and bloody moment of his birth, his father victorious on the ice outside, an infant’s cries echoing through bright cold air from a high window…

  One last time the jester’s voice came, warm, fond, caring, grimly amused at a finale they both knew must come.

  “And now, Prince?”

  Hamlet closed his eyes and heard his own final, fragile words.

  “And now the rest is silence,” he said, then slipped into the endless dark.

  Afterword

  Hamlet, The Play

  * * *

  You’d think that after more than 400 years people would have run out of things to say about Hamlet. Not so. Like most of Shakespeare’s plays Hamlet is a constant source of new ideas and arguments, the play seeming to shift as our culture evolves and finds that it somehow keeps pace, holding as t’were the mirror up to us.

  Some of those debates concern the text of the play itself, there being several early versions of different lengths and emphases, and we know for sure – or as sure as we ever can be about such things – that even the earliest of these texts was not the play as it was first written and performed. While Shakespeare’s play in the forms we have it seems to date from about 1601, there was at least one other version floating around a decade or so before that, though whether it was written by Shakespeare or someone else, we can’t say.

  What we do know is that the version most people read in school today was never performed in Shakespeare’s own lifetime and represents a cobbling together of parts from those early versions. The earliest of these, the first quarto – sometimes called the “bad” quarto – is half the length of the later texts a
nd reads like a very different play. It lacks much of the digressive rumination which became so central to the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s romantic notion of what the play was – and who its title character was – feeling much more like the blood and thunder revenge tragedies of Shakespeare’s early contemporaries.

  In our novel we have used few of the specifics from that first quarto choosing, for instance, to stick with the familiar name “Polonius” instead of Corambis. But one thing David and I wanted to capture from that version of Hamlet is its story-driven thrust, its emphasis on action over rumination. Hamlet, in the popular consciousness, isn’t generally thought of as a thriller; but there is evidence to suggest that when it was first staged, it was rather closer to that than to the existential or Freudian musing which it subsequently became. Hamlet is a tragedy of blood, and we wanted to find something of that original fire in our retelling of the familiar story.

  That meant, among other things, giving time to show those elements of the story which go by quickly in the play because Shakespeare knew the limitations of his own theatre. As we did with Macbeth, a Novel, we have given more scope to battle scenes, to landscape, to the background intrigues which surround the core story, and to potentially thrilling moments which get fairly cursory treatment in the play such as Hamlet’s boarding of the pirate ship.

  But our boldest decision, perhaps, was to rethink the great soliloquies for which the play is famous as dialogue between the title character and someone who never actually appears in the play. Yorick may well be the most famous non-character in literature, enshrined forever in quotes and half-memories and jokes because of a casual utterance made by Hamlet in the graveyard. “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio.”

  It’s an oddly inconsequential thing to confer such literary immortality, but the play was made to be performed and the key to the line is actually a visual motif which the quotation doesn’t actually articulate. When the line is delivered, Hamlet is gazing on Yorick’s skull, casually unearthed by the gravedigger. Yorick’s fame grew out of being the line which accompanied what is, perhaps, the single most recognizable, iconic image in literature: a man in black considering a human skull. Show some form of that picture to most moderately educated people – and plenty who aren’t – and they’ll know the man is Hamlet. Such things don’t find their way into the popular consciousness by accident, and trivial though the line may sound, it speaks to the heart of the play: a man compelled by circumstances outside his control to confront his own mortality.

  In order to extend this idea, to make Hamlet’s reflections on life and death more dynamic, we brought Yorick – or a version of him – back to life. Whether this works as a device or not, I’ll leave to you to decide, but I’ll say why I like it, and I can do so without boasting because I’m pretty sure it was originally David’s idea. We wanted this to be a story of passion, of hard or bad decisions, and of love, all driven by the pace of a modern thriller.

  Hamlet is not a mystery in the contemporary sense because we quickly learn who the bad guys are and we are pretty sure we know how things will end up. It’s a thriller because thrillers focus on the “how” of a story, on its pace and its pressure on the protagonist. But we didn’t want to lose that crucial image of the man with the skull, staring down death, trying to make sense of it. Inserting Yorick into the story as a foil for Hamlet, to goad him into action, to inject a little bleak and bawdy humor that would undercut his posturing, but also to show unflinchingly the enormity of what he did was, I thought, a neat way of extrapolating elements which are present in Shakespeare’s play and indeed in the title character himself but which might otherwise get ponderous in our version of the story.

  It isn’t the original, but then in all likelihood, neither was Shakespeare’s, and our purpose was never to replicate or replace that original, but to create something new which grew out of it, a journey – if you like – through a familiar story which sees it from a different perspective.

  A.J. Hartley

  Hamlet, The Background

  Shakespeare produced plenty of work based around his own, sometimes biased, interpretation of history. This is not one of them.

  There is no indication in the text to suggest in which century Hamlet takes place. We’ve set it around the time the play was written, at the start of the seventeenth century, in part to reflect Hamlet’s conflict between present and past as a child of the Renaissance. But this is an interpretation of the original, just like the common depiction of Hamlet as a medieval student in tights. Whatever period one chooses for the play you will find no historical prince of Denmark named Hamlet, no King Claudius, no conflict resembling that between the state and its Norwegian neighbour. Even the names Shakespeare uses for his principal characters – Polonius, Claudius, Laertes, Gertrude, Ophelia – rarely suggest any Nordic origins.

  While stories of wronged sons seeking revenge on their father’s murderer are common from the earliest of times, a single source suggests itself for the tale of Hamlet. The story was recorded around the end of the twelfth century by the historian Saxo Grammaticus, a clerk to Absalon, the fearsome warrior-bishop who expanded the Danish empire in the Baltic, converted to Christianity some of the last Pagan Viking communities in the region, and founded Copenhagen.

  Grammaticus recounts the tale of Amleth, a Danish prince, whose fate mirrors much of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Amleth’s father is killed by his own jealous brother who then marries his widow ‘capping unnatural murder with incest’ as Grammaticus writes, in an echo of the play. The suspicious Amleth is then sent to England with a letter that is his own death warrant. He alters the missive to ensure his own escape and the death of his retainers, then returns to Denmark and murders his uncle. Later, after further adventures, he dies in battle.

  It is a folk story, probably one that Grammaticus recorded after hearing it on his travels with Absalon. There are none of the psychological nuances of the play – Hamlet’s hesitation over his revenge, and his multifaceted relationship with his uncle, for example. As usual Shakespeare applied his genius to a simple, raw original and reinvented it as a complex and textured tragedy that goes far beyond mere revenge.

  If the history behind Hamlet is fictitious at least the geography does bear some resemblance to the real world. Elsinore is an Anglicisation of Helsingør, a town in eastern Denmark, set on the narrow straits of the Øresund which separate the country from Sweden. The place was never the permanent seat of the Danish monarchy but there is a large and impressive castle, Kronborg, widely touted by the local tourist trade as ‘Hamlet’s’. There have been occasional performances of the play within its walls, with stars ranging from Laurence Olivier to John Gielgud, Christopher Plummer and more recently Jude Law.

  In truth though today’s edifice is picturesque and largely Renaissance in style, with none of the dark, enclosed atmosphere one associates with Hamlet. Its predecessor, known as Krogen, was probably very different, a forbidding military fortress built to enforce the duties payable by shipping using the straits to reach the wealthy Baltic nations.

  A little of that forbidding bastion remains, and with it a reminder of the violent, Viking past that would have been part of the fictional Hamlet’s heritage, one that, in our version, he longs to shrug off. Deep within the bowels of the beautiful Renaissance chateau of today lies the hulking statue of a Viking warrior, with a long beard, a metal helmet, burly arms crossed, broadsword on his lap, shield by his side. This is the slumbering hero Holger Danske, the Danish King Arthur, ready to awaken and fight for Denmark in her hour of need.

  David Hewson

  About the Authors

  A.J. Hartley is the New York Times best-selling author of the Will Hawthorne fantasy series and several thrillers, as well as the Darwen Arkwright books for younger readers. He is the Russell Robinson Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

  Twitter: @authorajhartley

  Facebook: AJ Hartley

  Web:
ajhartley.net

  * * *

  David Hewson is the best-selling author of more than 20 novels, including the Nic Costa crime series and a trilogy of books based on the hit Danish television show The Killing. His most-recent novel, The House of Dolls, begins a new series set in Amsterdam.

  Twitter: @david_hewson

  Web: www.davidhewson.com