Hamlet Revenge!

by Michael Innes

  ‘No; that is one of the points that have emerged. Very little make-up is possible on a platform stage. And that makes it important that people should be like their parts to begin with.’

  ‘Mr Clay’, said Mr Bose, ‘is very like the Melancholy Dane.’

  ‘Yes; but I doubt if Gervase Crispin is at all like Osric. And Bunney, whom we’ve had to call in, is an unconvincing Gentleman of the Guard. And the Vicar, unfortunately, is peculiarly unlike a Doctor of Divinity – though he is one. And think of Lord Auldearn: was Polonius that sort of disconcerting mingling of Shakespeare and Caliban?’

  This was neat enough: the Lord Chancellor, with his domelike forehead, heavy jaw, and characteristic lurch, suggested just this combination. But Mr Bose was rather shocked. ‘Lord Auldearn’, he said emphatically, ‘is a very good man, a learned and enlightened prince! He is a little infirm because of his great years. In my country we consider great years very holy.’

  Convicted, thought Gott, of a barbarian lapse and gently reproved. But Mr Bose, with politeness, continued the theme just as if he had not been shocked. ‘Lady Elizabeth, I think, does not look her part. She is too beautiful, is she not?’

  This was percipience. Could one, after fifty years in India, say anything as understanding as that of an Indian drama? It went straight to a point round which Gott had been fumbling for days. Ophelia, so hopelessly under the weather throughout the play, should be forlornly pretty; never more than that. And Elizabeth’s looks would not knit themselves to the part; they spoke too clearly of a spirit with which poor Ophelia could not be credited. What was Elizabeth’s beauty? It was not something that could be dissociated from uncommon qualities of mind; but it was not, again, the highest and always tragic sort of beauty – heavy, fateful, perversely crossed by melancholy or intellect. It was not Rosamund, Cordelia, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi. In fact, there was no real place for Elizabeth in the Elizabethan age; she represented something of later birth – an invention of Fielding’s, or Meredith’s. And this astounding revelation of deficiency in the Elizabethan drama, so casually indicated by Mr Bose, was perhaps the chief intellectual shock which Giles Gott experienced during these by no means uneventful Scamnum days. Now he looked at his watch. ‘Time to begin,’ he said briskly.

  Hamlet has thirty speaking parts, two or three of which are nearly always omitted. With bold doubling, one can give the play with nineteen speaking players. In addition, one needs a few supers: a Dumb-show King and Queen, two servants, and if possible an extra Player, Lord, and Lady. There is no crowd, but in Act Four, Scene Five, everybody not actually on the stage must be prepared to stand off and shout to represent ‘Danes’.

  These were the Scamnum arrangements. It would have been easy to avoid doubling; there was no lack of minor amateur talent available for the smaller parts. But partly because the original plan had been for an entertainment by Scamnum, and more particularly because Gott was concerned to avoid that common source of amateur disaster, an over-crowded green-room, the cast had been kept down. It would finally stand in the programme like this:

  CLAUDIUS King of Denmark Edward Crispin

  HAMLET Prince of Denmark, son to the late,

  and nephew to the present King Melville Clay

  POLONIUS Principal Secretary of State Ian Stewart

  HORATIO friend to Hamlet Charles Piper

  LAERTES son to Polonius Noel Gylby

  ROSENCRANTZ

  GUILDENSTERN } formerly fellow-students

  with Hamlet Thomas Potts

  Timothy Tucker

  OSRIC a fantastic fop Gervase Crispin

  A Gentleman Rupert Traherne

  A Doctor of Divinity Samuel Crump

  MARCELLUS

  BARNARDO

  FRANCISCO } Gentlemen of the Guard Richard Nave

  Edward Bunney

  Peter Marryat

  First Grave Digger Murdo Macdonald

  Second Grave Digger Gervase Crispin

  FORTINBRAS Prince of Norway Andrew Malloch

  A Norwegian Captain Peter Merryat

  English Ambassador Richard Nave

  Messenger Vanessa Teborg

  Sailor Timothy Tucker

  GERTRUDE Queen of Denmark, mother

  to Hamlet Anne Crispin

  OPHELIA Daughter to Polonius Elizabeth Crispin

  Players Andrew Malloch, Gervase

  Crispin, Anna Merkalova,

  Diana Sandys

  Dumb-show King Giles Gott

  Dumb-show Queen Stella Terborg

  A Lord Henry Biddle

  A Lady Lucy Terborg

  Attendants

  The GHOST of

  Hamlet’s father Noel Gylby

  This represented, Gott believed, a body manageable within the space available. Just thirty people all told would have business behind the scenes: the nineteen speaking players, the seven supers (including Gott himself as the Dumb-show King and two footmen dressed in Tudor liveries as ‘attendants’), Mr Bose as prompter, the Duke’s man and two professional dressers, male and female, brought down from London. A vexed question at the moment was whether there should be a thirty-first in the person of Max Cope. Cope was working on two sketches: one from the minstrel gallery at the back of the audience’s part of the hall; the other from a corner of the upper stage, where he would be tolerably unnoticeable and get an interesting angle on the front stage. He was undecided still as to which he would work at on the night. Gott wished him safely away in the minstrel gallery, but as it would doubtless be by Cope’s picture that the Tragedy of Hamlet played at Scamnum Court would go down to posterity he could hardly insist.

  The cast, as the cast in any amateur theatricals must always be, was odd in one or two prominent places and shaky in several minor ones. Lord Traherne, as a Gentleman, unfortunately lost the character the moment he stepped on the boards, and became instead an awkward, though gentlemanlike, schoolboy. Peter Marryat, one of the untried late arrivals with two small parts, appeared dangerously half-witted. He was absent-minded enough, Clay declared, to begin his Norwegian Captain’s speech while making his brief appearance as Francisco in the first scene – and obstinate enough, Gott added, to carry firmly on with it to the end. Stella Terborg was fairly safe in a silent part; but as her business was that of being poisoned in the dumb-show by someone uncommonly like a Black Hand she might very conceivably break through the convention with a scream. The more formidable Vanessa as a boy messenger, and Diana Sandys as a boy player who should speak the prologue in the play scene, both had parts less considerable than their competence deserved. Gervase Crispin had rather too much; it was doubtful if his foppery as Osric and his clownery as the second Grave-digger would be as distinct as was desirable. And Noel was rather an unfledged Ghost. The part had been marked originally for Dr Crump, the Vicar of Scamnum Ducis; but when Dr Crump found it involving an acrobatic disappearance down a trap, followed by a longish crawl beneath a three-foot stage, he had retreated to the more familiar business of officiating at Ophelia’s burial. Noel, however, was shaping well. Being the orthodox Crispin six feet, and a master of the precocious bass, favoured on public-school parade-grounds, he had the essential qualifications. All in all, Gott reiterated to himself, things should go well.

  And this first dress-rehearsal on Saturday afternoon began excellently, Peter Marryat gave it a good start, by some terrific effort speaking Francisco’s eight dispersed lines correctly and in the right place. Bunney, although he insisted on delivering himself according to his own theory of Elizabethan pronounciation, was a surprisingly military Barnardo. Sir Richard Nave, in life a most drily unpoetical person – as who must not be, the Duchess said, that wants to improve sex? – brought out the lyrical strain in Marcellus well enough. Noel’s Ghost, coached by Clay, stalked and turned on the upper stage as if on fifty yards of frosty battlement.

  The first scene, however, tells one little of how the play will run. It is a tremendous start and the
interest it instantly commands has to be caught up and sustained in the succeeding council scheme. Once that is got compellingly under way the play is launched. And now it was going as Gott wanted it to go. The right atmosphere was being generated.

  Gott’s Hamlet was not the Hamlet in which Clay was accustomed to play on the professional stage. It belonged to what Malloch dubiously called ‘the new historical school’. It was a Hamlet in which, through all the intellectual and poetical elaboration of the piece, a steady emphasis was given to the basic situation of wary conflict between usurper and rightful heir. The sense of desperate issues, of wits matched against wits in a life-and-death struggle, was to be perpetually present. The battle of mighty opposites – one side the ‘crafty king and his equally crafty minister Polonius; on the other the single figure of the more formidably because more intellectually cunning prince – this was to be the heart of the Scamnum Hamlet. Whereas Clay’s usual Hamlet sprang in considerable part from the ruminative minds of Goethe and Coleridge, Gott’s sprang not a little from the minds of Shakespeare’s full-blooded predecessors.

  Into this newer reading of the play, Clay – though it had meant much work – had thrown himself with enthusiasm. And now in the second scene the result was beginning to unfold itself. Here in Claudius and Hamlet were two men who must fight to the death; here was the opening of a duel that would be instantly clear to any Renaissance audience. And as the action proceeded it came to Gott that he was watching not merely a careful and competent amateur Hamlet but a Hamlet which was – as far as its embodiment of this main conflict went – positively remarkable. Clay was a great actor, a fact Gott had barely realized before this Scamnum venture, though he knew him to be brilliant and successful enough. And – what was something more remarkable – the Duke of Horton was a great actor as well. He had been startling on his few and scrappy appearances at rehearsal earlier; he was astounding now. And the play as a result was catching the drift that Gott designed. The meditative Hamlet was revealed as only a facet of the total man; the Queen and Ophelia were pushed back; the play showed itself as turning predominantly from first to last on Statecraft. And it was the statesmen who were important; on the one side the dispossessed Hamlet; on the other Claudius and Polonius.

  Gott watched the play unfold with the discriminating delight with which one studies an infinitely complicated thing that one has studied long. Mysterious power of dramatic illusion! Here was Melville Clay fronting the Duke of Horton and Lord Auldearn on a bogus Elizabethan stage in this bogus Gothic hall – and impossible not to believe that the fate of a kingdom lay at issue between them.

  ‘The play’s the thing

  Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King!’

  Hamlet’s voice rang out in triumphant anticipation of his plot. The first part of the dress-rehearsal was over.

  Nave came up in the interval, watch in hand. ‘How quickly it moves!’

  ‘As quick as the talkies,’ said Clay.

  Gott nodded. ‘The talkies help. They bring the ear up with the eye again. And you notice how the speeding-up is carried over from the play? Everybody’s brisker. Look at the Duke – bustling about like a works manager.’

  ‘I should be inclined to put it’, said Nave, ‘that there is rather a species of rebound. They have all been acting, and now they fall back more than they commonly allow themselves on what they would call their real selves. The carry-over from the excitement of the play brings out what used to be called the ruling passion – or what your Elizabethans called the predominant humour.’

  Nave’s science was young and pushing, and the man was always ready to preach, even in a bustling pause for rehearsal. Now, as Clay hurried away, he continued to talk to Gott. ‘Look at young Gylby. He’s after that girl Sandys. He’s twenty-two, I suppose, and she’s probably the first girl he’s ever become extensively aware of – such, Mr Gott, are our extraordinary educational conventions! And the result? A high degree of infatuation, a high degree of bewilderment, and a painful lack of technical knowledge as to how to proceed. But masquerading as a projection of sixteenth-century superstition has loosened him up. He’s come back to his dominating purpose with a bound, and is achieving a markedly enhanced degree of sexual efficacy.’

  Gott was somewhat too old-fashioned a person to relish the psychologists’ terminology. But he had to admit the justice of the observation. Noel was taking Diana Sandys very seriously. And at the moment, clad still in the Ghost’s gleaming armour and with his helmet on his arm, he was going about his business with all the directness of a knight in some distinctly pre-Tennysonian Arthuriad.

  ‘Do you know anything of the girl?’ asked Nave.

  ‘Miss Sandys? She’s a school acquaintance of Elizabeth’s, and rather older. And, come to think of it, she too is a psychologist.’ He looked with just sufficient whimsicality at Nave to make the coming thrust pass inoffensively. ‘Or rather an applied psychologist, working on the mass subconscious in the interest of soaps and stockings and patent foods. Copy-writing, I believe it’s called.’

  Nave nodded coolly. ‘Well, advertising is one of the more harmless perversions of science, after all. And whatever she is, she’s as hard as nails.’ The tone indicated that, for Sir Richard Nave, to be hard as nails was one of the major maidenly virtues. And now abruptly he changed the subject. ‘By the way, what exactly are the relations between the Player King and Player Queen?’

  Gott, perhaps because he was obscurely disturbed, failed for an instant to grasp the question. And Nave, misinterpreting the hesitation, added: ‘I ask as an old friend of the family.’

  ‘Gervase Crispin and Mme Merkalova? I am not in their confidence.’

  But Nave would not admit Gott’s system of reticences. ‘In other words, you share the general impression that she’s his mistress? But that’s just what’s curious. I don’t see quite the mechanisms one would expect. A Russian woman in such a situation, and moving in this sort of society, would insist on certain conventions – a little extra distance and formality between them – which would make the matter conveniently plain to the instructed, and leave the uninstructed equally conveniently ignorant.’

  ‘Dear me,’ said Gott, honestly feeling that he knew less of polished ungodliness than a romancer ought, ‘you instruct me, Sir Richard.’

  ‘Instead of which they are – well, not exactly as close as innocent lovers, but as thick as thieves.’

  Gott laughed. ‘If Gervase Crispin wanted to make the biggest haul in England, he’d have to crack his own safe. I hardly suppose the lady can be his accomplice in crime.’

  The later hours of Saturday afternoon saw the arrival of another bevy of guests. Tea on the cedar-lawn, with the players moving about in their costumes still, had the appearance and proportions of a charity pageant. Gott had the impression that Lord Auldearn, viewing the swelling throng, was none too delighted. And presently he had what seemed confirmation. Auldearn, who had been talking earnestly to the Duke, swung round and approached him.

  ‘Mr Gott, I have to go away. In anything you do tomorrow somebody must read my part. I shall be back on Monday morning – God willing.’ And with this abrupt speech Lord Auldearn disappeared into the house. Twenty minutes later he stepped into his car and was whirled down the drive. The Duchess, Gott thought, was not undisturbed; there was something like an extra dash of resolution in the ready gaiety with which she was going round. And the unwonted briskness which he had noticed in the Duke after rehearsal was gone. The master of Scamnum was vaguer than ever.

  Noel had lured his Diana away to croquet; she was pinning up the Ghost’s closet-scene dress – a sort of dressing-gown – to prevent its getting in his way. Pamela Hogg, the Armageddon woman, was fascinating Tommy Potts with equine lore. Mrs Terborg sailed about, knowing most people; discovering with others common friends in Paris, Vienna, Rome; skilfully circulating Vanessa among judiciously selected intellectuals, sk
ilfully circulating Stella among less warily chosen Propertied Oafs. And by all these things Gott was obscurely troubled.

  Dinner that night was an expansive affair. Bagot, unable to cope with introducing the first course, was of the technical opinion that it was a banquet. His master, contemplating a wife diminished into the middle distance, was just discernibly of the opinion that it was a bore. Max Cope, observing Gott’s eye on the Duke, transferred his own gaze significantly to the panelling over the fireplace. Gott saw the point. There hung Kneller’s portrait of the first Duke: an oldish man, competently painted, competently turned out as a Restoration type – and with over the keen features the same veil of indifference that now distinguished the eighth Duke at the head of his table. Gott looked round for this queer habit of the will in the other members of the family. Gervase had nothing of it. Noel, a Crispin in some collateral line, was going to have it one day. And Elizabeth? Elizabeth was a Crispin rather than a Dillon, but it was not there nevertheless. A hereditary characteristic, perhaps, latent in the female. And for the remainder of the meal Gott contemplated a very simple fact. He was not, and never had been, disturbed about the Tragedy of Hamlet played at Scamnum Court. It was not in his nature to be disturbed by such an affair, and any anxieties he felt were transferred anxieties. Fuss over x while preparing to plunge at y.

  Curious how the keyed mind would cling to inessentials, to the merely practical consequences, all the corollaries on less bewildering planes. A Fellow of St Anthony’s, for instance, could not marry a Duke’s daughter and get away with it – be as he had been. Either, Gott knew, he would have to quit, or inevitably on old Empson’s retirement he would be President. Elizabeth, now at college because she had an eccentric mother, would be planted in the President’s Lodging, entertaining dons’ wives, undergraduates, itinerant Bunneys.

  Irrelevant anxieties – and wandering later through the moonlit gardens with Elizabeth he continued to start them in his mind. Twenty-one and thirty-four. Thirty-one and forty-four, forty-one and fifty-four, seventy-one and eighty-four… And – more formidable still – it had once been six and nineteen. Elizabeth had been a familiar creature then; now, walking beside him where he could remember balancing her on her first fat pony, she was remote as the stars and secret as the farther hemisphere of the moon.