Hamlet Revenge!

by Michael Innes

  They were pacing silently down one of Scamnum’s famous avenues, the high, impenetrable hedges stretching interminably as in a dream; the pedestalled statues, a whole Olympus of marble deities dimly marshalled in extended file on either side, ghostly against the dark, cañon-like cypress-walls. At the end of the vista, etched in moonlight, stood one of Peter Crispin’s minor eccentricities, a picturesque cow-house. A cow-house is not a common amenity in a formal garden, but Peter Crispin had liked to have his curiosities within an easy walk. When there were visitors at Scamnum he had been accustomed to give orders that cows be installed; and his friends, taking their first stroll, would exclaim in dutiful delight when the animals were discovered commodiously lodged in what had outwardly all the appearance of a ruined priory. And now the cow-house was picturesque still, but a cow-house no longer: they kept chemical manures there. Just beyond it, concealed by a high wall, ran the main road to King’s Horton.

  Elizabeth had paused for a moment by an untenanted pedestal. ‘The Pandemian Venus,’ she said. ‘My grandmother had it removed because she thought it was particularly indelicate. Like Dr Folliott, Giles, in Crotchet Castle.’ The light irony was Crispin; Giles, after all, might have been Elizabeth’s tutor.

  Six more statues to the cow-house. And there were those horrid words of Nave’s: ‘Twenty-two…a high degree of infatuation, a high degree of bewilderment, and a painful lack of knowledge as to how to proceed…’ Noel, twenty-two; Gott, thirty-four. Thirty-four and twenty-one, eighty-four and seventy-one.

  Three statues to the cow-house, ‘Auldearn went off suddenly,’ said Gott, baulking badly.

  ‘He heard of something important.’ It was an absent but possibly ominous reply.

  Two statues…one statue…round the cow-house.

  ‘Elizabeth–’ began Gott.

  Elizabeth laid a hand on his arm. ‘Look!’

  The figure of a man had appeared from behind the bogus priory. There was a low whistle, some small object flew over the boundary wall in the moonlight, there was an answering whistle and the figure had vanished. A moment later there came the smooth crescendo and diminuendo of a high-powered car.

  ‘Some servants’ intrigue,’ said Gott.

  ‘With a Daimler waiting?’ There had come into Elizabeth’s voice – astoundingly – a far-away echo of the Duke’s lazy indifference. ‘No; it’s something we’ve had occasionally at Scamnum ever since my enterprising mother hit on making daddy an Elder Statesman.’ She gave a little puckered smile. ‘A species of excitement your austere art sniffs at, Giles. Spies.’

  And in the early hours of Monday morning the Black Hand put up its most effective show. Suddenly and hideously in the darkness the whole great fabric of Scamnum re-echoed to the uproar of a tremendous bell. It reverberated through the corridors and flooded a hundred lofty rooms, first in peal after solemn peal and then in a wild gallop, grotesquely loud. And as the startled household hurried out of bedrooms and along corridors, and while the Duke, a surprisingly commanding figure at the head of the main staircase, was shouting that there was no danger of fire, the bell abruptly ceased – to be replaced a moment later by a thunderous but oddly familiar human voice:

  ‘Ere the bat hath flown

  His cloister’d flight, ere, to Black Hecate’s summons

  The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums

  Hath rung night’s yawning peal, there shall be done

  A deed of dreadful note…’

  Echoing bewilderingly from every direction, the speech could yet be distinguished as coming from somewhere below. It was Gott who, with a sudden gesture of enlightenment, ran downstairs. The voice grew in menace:

  ‘Come, seeling night,

  Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,

  And with thy bloody and invisible hand

  Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond

  Which keeps me pale! Light thickens…’

  Silence. Gott remounted the stairs. ‘The radio-gramophone,’ he said. ‘Turn a knob and get as much volume as you like. And it changes its own records. First record, a carillon chime – the horror of the ringing bell. Second record, Mr Clay recording from Macbeth. Another petty jest.’

  Clay, beautiful in a brocaded dressing-gown, nodded easily. ‘I thought the voice had a homely ring,’ he said. ‘I made that record a long time ago, and I think it was a mistake. What was that most apposite quotation?’

  Vanessa Terborg turned from calming Stella, her master passion for showing herself always on the spot roused at once. ‘“The clangour of the angels’ trumpets and the horror of the ringing bell.” Well, I don’t think anybody’s scared.’ Her eye went back firmly to her sister.

  Gott doubted the assurance of others besides the timid Stella. He was scared himself. The mind that could contrive so violent an effect was a mind that thought in terms of violence.

  5

  (3,4) The Queen’s closet hung with arras, represented by the rear-stage curtain

  The QUEEN and POLONIUS

  POLONIUS: A’ will come straight. Look you lay home to him,

  Tell him his pranks have been too broad to bear with.

  And that your grace hath screened and stood between

  Much heat and him. I’ll silence me even here.

  Pray you be round with him.

  HAMLET (without): Mother, mother, mother!

  QUEEN: I’ll war’nt you,

  Fear me not. Withdraw, I hear him coming.

  [POLONIUS hides behind the curtain of the rear-stage.

  HAMLET enters.]

  HAMLET: Now, mother, what’s the matter?

  QUEEN: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.

  HAMLET: Mother, you have my father much offended.

  QUEEN: Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.

  HAMLET: Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.

  QUEEN: Why, how now, Hamlet?

  HAMLET: What’s the matter now?

  QUEEN: Have you forgot me?

  HAMLET: No, by the rood not so,

  You are the queen, your husband’s brother’s wife,

  And would it were not so, you are my mother.

  QUEEN: Nay then, I’ll set those to you that can speak.

  [Going.]

  HAMLET (seizes her arm): Come, come, and sit you down, you shall not budge,

  You go not till I set you up a glass

  Where you may see the inmost part of you.

  QUEEN: What wilt thou do? thou wilt not murder me?

  Help, help, ho!

  POLONIUS (behind the curtain): What, ho! help, help, help!

  HAMLET (draws): How now! a rat? dead, for a ducat, dead.

  [He makes a pass through the curtain.]

  POLONIUS (falls): O, I am slain!

  QUEEN: O me, what hast thou done?

  HAMLET: Nay, I know not,

  Is it the king?

  [He lifts up the curtain and discovers POLONIUS, dead.]

  QUEEN: O, what a rash and bloody deed is this!…

  Aged royalty, perhaps with royalty’s instinct for keeping clear of anything a trifle odd, had decided not to come after all. So decorations had been put away; young ladies, hearing the news when half-way to the drawing-room, had scurried back to their rooms to change into more intriguing frocks; Bagot had had a busy half-hour putting away the plate which Scamnum produces only for members of a Reigning House. And now in the hall the Dowager Duchess was sitting in the front row in solitary state, on her right hand the two empty chairs that had been destined for the ‘real’ Duchess and the ‘real’ Duchess’ lady. The Dowager was formidable enough in herself and Gott received with relief Noel’s report that the old lady seemed disposed to take out most of the play in sleep. It was a quite unexpurgated
Hamlet.

  Peter Marryat had caused some anxiety. After dinner he had declared that he felt all muddled, and piteously inquired of Noel as to which was the one that came first: Francisco or the Norwegian Captain? And Noel having recklessly decided that the answer might be found in a good stiff brandy, the first scene had at moments conveyed the impression that the sentries of Elsinore were a trifle too familiar with the regimental canteen. But as Claudius’ court was well known to be in a condition of festivity and swagg’ring upstart reels, this might have passed as the stroke of a venturesome producer; indeed, Gott could see in Malloch’s eye the prospect of its being humorously so represented in many Common-rooms hereafter. But there had been no major mishaps. The first part of the play had run rapidly and well and ended in a thunder of applause.

  And now the audience, who in the interval had been wandering all over the stage and hall, to the accompaniment of that quite deafening chatter which is the hall-mark of large and polite parties, had been shepherded back to their seats; Bunney had set his black box going on the floor beside the Dowager; the players had returned to the green-room and Tommy Potts, who had turned out to be skilful in such things, heralded Act Three, Scene One with a flourish on a trumpet. A second flourish and the rear-stage curtain was drawn back on ‘The lobby of the audience chamber’. The King and Queen, with Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, came on in a little confabulating, plotting knot; and behind them came Ophelia. The second half of the play was launched.

  3.1 bristles with technical difficulties; Gott, standing off-stage in his costume as Dumb-show King, was following it intently. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had come off – heads together, plotting still. And the King’s voice continued, tense and secret yet carrying clearly through the hall:

  ‘Sweet Gertrude, leave us too,

  For we have closely sent for Hamlet hither,

  That he, as ’twere by accident, may here

  Affront Ophelia:

  Her father and myself, lawful espials,

  Will so bestow ourselves, that seeing unseen,

  We may of their encounter frankly judge…’

  The Queen came off; Ophelia was set with her book at the faldstool; the King spoke the ticklish guilty aside that prepares for his remorse in the prayer-scene; he and Polonius concealed themselves. Hamlet came on; walked far up the front stage.

  ‘To be, or not to be…’

  To the actor, this is the most formidable speech in drama, formidable because it has established itself at the heart of English poetry, and every word is a legend. Now it came, grave and level, from Melville Clay:

  ‘For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

  Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

  The pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay,

  The insolence of office…’

  Slowly Hamlet was rounding the great stage, the rhythm of his movement answering the rhythm of the speech. Now he was approaching Ophelia:

  ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

  And thus the native hue of resolution

  Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

  And enterprise of great pitch and moment

  With this regard their currents turn awry,

  And lose the name of action…’

  He had seen Ophelia; there followed, Gott thought, the most beautiful lines in the play:

  ‘Soft you now,

  The fair Ophelia – Nymph, in thy orisons

  Be all my sins remembered.’

  And now the moment had come which was to tax the utmost limit of Clay’s technique. Without direct word spoken, it had to come to the audience that Hamlet had recognized of a sudden that Ophelia’s presence was part of a plot. From that moment he would be speaking to her – savagely – with the skin of his mind; all his faculties concentrated on his lurking enemies. This sudden understanding – because it is prepared for only by a fragment of business buried six hundred lines before – is extraordinarily difficult to convey. The point can be made broadly by the King or Polonius accidentally giving their presence away; but there is no warrant for that. It can be – and often is – ignored; but then Hamlet’s brutality becomes revolting. If the thing is to be perfectly effective Hamlet must recollect.

  Clay recollected. He froze.

  ‘Are you honest…are you fair?’

  The words came as if from one in trance. And each succeeding speech, while tremendous in itself, was yet queerly automatic. The surface of the mind ran on, to finish in threadbare railing: women and their painting! For all the forces of the man were now concentrated elsewhere. Here was a Hamlet for whom only one fact was any longer real: the presence of his enemies hidden somewhere here about him; plotting, preparing their final trap. Here, in fact, was the Hamlet of the historical school come rather terrifyingly to life.

  He was gone. If Gott had been given to conventional gestures he would have mopped his brow. And now Ophelia’s voice – Elizabeth’s voice – was moving clearly and tragically through her final soliloquy:

  ‘O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!

  The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,

  Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,

  The glass of fashion, and the mould of form…’

  The King and Polonius were out of hiding again, heads together, Polonius eager to be hiding once more:

  ‘My lord, do as you please,

  But if you hold it fit, after the play,

  Let his queen-mother all alone entreat him

  To show his grief; let her be round with him;

  And I’ll be placed (so please you) in the ear

  Of all their conference. If she find him not,

  To England send him; or confine him where

  Your wisdom best shall think.’

  Polonius, his plan to hide in the Queen’s closet settled, withdrew. The King turned full to the audience and raised a dramatic hand in keeping with the rhetorical menace of his concluding couplet:

  ‘It shall be so.

  Madness in great ones must not unwatched go!’

  He stepped within the rear stage and the curtain closed.

  3.2.

  3.3.

  3.4. …Again the rear-stage curtain had closed on the King, this time as he knelt at his vain prayers by the faldstool. At once the Queen and Polonius took the front stage for the closet scene.

  Mr Bose, crouched in his place to the side of the rear stage, was following the speech of the invisible players, syllable by syllable. Polonius’ injunction to ‘lay home’; Hamlet’s call for admittance; the rustle of the rear-stage curtain as Polonius slipped through from the front stage to ‘silence himself’…

  The altercation between Hamlet and the Queen grew. The Queen’s cry rang out:

  ‘Help, help, ho!’

  From the rear stage came the echoing voice of Polonius:

  ‘Help, help!’

  Mr Bose, his eye fixed on his text, stirred in his seat. A pistol-shot rang through the hall.

  PART TWO: DEVELOPMENT

  Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows,

  Why this same strict and most observant watch?.

  What might be toward, that this sweaty haste

  Doth make the night joint-labourer with the day:

  Who is’t that can inform me?

  1

  Mr John Appleby of Scotland Yard was at the theatre. Being the new sort of policeman he was at the ballet, waiting for Les Présages to follow La Boutique Fantasque. Being paid the old sort of wage, and having the most modest of private fortunes, he was sitting in what his provincial childhood had known as the Family Circle. But being unmarried he was unaccompanied by a family, and being serious and shy, he was with
out the distraction of a female friend. As a consequence, he was able to devote the interval to reflections on ballet as Pure Muscular Style. Appleby contrived to read the latest books on such things. He was just meditating the awkward case of Japanese tumblers – they were certainly not ballet, but might they not be Pure Muscular Style too? – when the lights were lowered and Tschaikowsky’s music, heavy with observations on the Mysterious Universe, filled the theatre.

  The constant patrons, who treat the stalls so impressively after the manner of a drawing-room, were strolling and edging back to their places. The woman next to Appleby shut her chocolate-box and stowed it under the seat. Portentously, the curtain rose on Masson’s sub-Dantesque stage: hit or miss, Appleby thought, whether you were excited or felt that here was a nice design cruelly run in the wash.

  The puce ladies, vaguely Spanish from the neck down; the green and brown gentlemen, ever so slightly ashamed of themselves (one ashamedly and philistinely suspected) from the neck up; Action, in pleasing pleats and extracting miraculous grace from impossible angularities…they were all at it again, thought Appleby – who was half-way to being a hardened amateur. And certainly it was exciting; Pure Muscular Style – in stately capital letters – scarcely put the matter excitingly enough. The trouble was that these galvanic figures were obscurely up to something, insinuating something, endeavouring – the fatal image would come – like the deaf and dumb to utter through a laborious periphrasis of gesture. And now, against the backcloth, the gentlemen were leaping from wings to wings in three unbelievable hops; now they were charging across the same path in couples, the ladies held out in front of them, head high, like battering-rams. And all, evidently, with the largest cosmic intent…articulative, like the music, of the Nature of Things. But the oftener you came, thought Appleby, the less satisfactorily did it build up, the more did you get your pleasure from the fragmentary movements – the exquisite precision, for instance, of the pas de deux which the programme called Passion. Yet what delighted him most in Les Présages was something essentially dramatic, the entrance of Fate. It was a pity that Fate was got up like a queasy Ethiopian in off-black; it was a pity that he had to make that merely pantomime exit backwards on his heels. But his entrance perfectly blended the dramatic and the choreographic.