Pamela Dean (20 page)

"It's these nineteenth-century poets reading it in their studies," said Thomas from Janet's other side. "Upsets the order of the incidents."

Janet, who had heard the problem of Hamlet's delay discussed since as long as she could remember, was rather taken aback, but decided to reserve judgment. She went on placidly reading her program book, which was stuffed with the pronouncements of famous actors past and present concerning the proper handling of the play and the character, and with the conflicting remarks of directors on the same subject. She was amusing herself with a reflection of how Olivier might have directed Edmund Kean when the lights dimmed.

Before the audience had quite ceased its rustling, a huge and startled voice boomed, "Who's there?"

Janet almost jumped out of her skin, and had the satisfaction of feeling Thomas jerk also. An equally startled voice said roughly, "Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself,"

and Janet, who had dutifully read the footnotes for this scene, suddenly realized what they were saying. The first voice did not unfold itself, but persisted, "Barnardo?" and Barnardo gave in and answered, "He." One of the people on the dark stage uncovered a dim light.

Their voices grew hushed; and Janet forgot where she was.

She discovered at the first intermission that no such happy thing had happened to Thomas or Robin. Robin, perhaps mindful of Molly's canvas bag, had been quiet during the performance, but excused himself immediately to go outside and laugh. The other three, laboring through the crowds in search of something to drink, perched eventually on top of a radiator that had not yet been turned on for the winter, and entered into an acrimonious discussion punctuated by lemonade.

Molly, who was a realist, was perturbed by the fact that the actor playing Hamlet was Korean, while the rest of his putative family was tall and blond. "What'd they do, adopt him?" she said.

Thomas, whose opinions on this subject were remarkably similar to Nick's, dismissed her objections but launched into a tirade of his own, consisting largely of a minutely detailed list of what lines and speeches had been left out and how these omissions were warping the meaning of the play.

Janet thought he was probably right; but she was enjoying the play far too much to worry about it now. She had fallen for the Korean actor, a slight, short, mobile young man with a mane of straight dark hair that might not be Elizabethan (Thomas said Robin thought Hamlet looked like a sailor of those times, but hardly like a prince) but was certainly effective. She didn't blame him for going mad, either. Luckily, it was only a fifteen-minute intermission and they needed five of those just to get back to their seats.

The lights went down. Robin climbed over Janet's knees and sank into his seat just as the sharp, clear voice of Hamlet said, "Speak the speech, I pray you,
as
I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue." Robin made an infuriating snort, but said nothing. The lights came up on the Players in their gorgeous, tawdry clothes—the only Elizabethan clothing in the entire play, everybody else being dressed like a cross between hippies and farmers, another thing that had annoyed both Thomas and Molly.

The play moved toward its high point. Thomas hissed in her ear, "They cut the dumb-show, the idiots," and Robin was heard, during the Closet Scene, to damn Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, and all their intellectual children; but for the most part they were quiet.

Janet found herself most interested in Ophelia and Horatio. She had always considered Ophelia a poor-spirited creature; but this one, with an inflection of her docile lines that Janet had never conceived of, and a delicate way with gesture and facial

expression, delivered the impression of a spirited and sensitive young woman. She was delighted with Hamlet's bawdy remarks, and responded in kind. (Robin was delighted, too, and chortled well into the interior play, which was staged somberly and with a great deal more effect than Janet would have believed it capable of.) As for Horatio, he did not have much to say, but if you watched him over Hamlet's shoulder, as it were, you could see that he was always alert, that nothing escaped him—as, indeed, he had promised; but he had been doing it all through the play, and only now, watching, did you call it to mind. His steady replies to Hamlet's hysteria in the interior play's aftermath, the extremely sharp eye he bent on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when they came to tell him how angry the King was, and especially his wariness and distress when the King exiled Hamlet to England, were like a commentary that pointed up all the important points of this part of the play. He stepped forward to go with Hamlet, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern after the King had dismissed them, and was swiftly waved back by Hamlet. Janet felt for him very much.

Hamlet watched Fortinbras's army go by, and standing alone on a bare stage (having shooed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into the aisles, where they fidgeted and alarmed the members of the audience closest to them and made Janet feel like a part of Fortinbras's army herself), he meditated on why he had let his capability and godlike reason to fust in him unused. Janet had always thought of this soliloquy (one of her favorites) as rising steadily in intensity; but he began rather frenziedly and got quieter and quieter. The rustling and murmur of the audience quieted with him; until into a dead silence he said, in a friendly and meditative way, as if he had decided which shirt to wear, "From this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth."

He jumped off the stage, disdaining the ramp, to join Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; grinned at having made them jump; and swept them before him up Aisle 7 and so out. Janet let her breath out. There was a long silence, and then, as the lights went out and the house lights came up, a great deal of applause.

People began to get up. Molly, Robin, Janet, and Thomas sat in a row, looking straight ahead. Janet finally looked at Thomas. He turned his head and regarded her gravely. "It's all downhill from here, you know," he said. "By any normal standards. By some weird sort of tragical morality, it's all uphill. But he's such a devil, Shakespeare. He's going to give us some of the most exquisite scenes of the whole play; and for what?"

"You know," said Robin, as if in answer, "if they do not play the wrong sort of merry hell with the gravediggers, most of this production will answer very well. There's more antic disposition than I'd feared, and you see that they could not cut it all, 'tis too interwoven with the play. Clever Will, a devil indeed, but a most sweet contriver."

"Are you on terms of such familiarity with all your favorite poets?" said Molly.

Robin provided her with an open and delighted grin, and said, "No, indeed; I'd never speak of Miss Austen so, nor Dr. Johnson, nor even Master Coleridge, though he thought better of himself than he ought to have. But our Will, you see, wrote those Sonnets, and after reading of them, it's hard to be formal with him."

"I suppose it's no ruder than calling them by their last names, like the critics do," said Molly. "As if they were suspects in a murder case."

"Are you liking the play?" Janet asked her.

"Oh, yes, a lot. It's wonderful to hear Shakespeare in American accents. Polonius seems a little out of place, though, doesn't he? Like somebody imported for the occasion."

"Claudius might have, I guess," said Janet.

"You science majors are so literal," said Thomas, with a laugh. "He speaks with an English accent not because he comes from England, but because he's of the old school."

"Right," said Molly.

The lights went down abruptly, and out of the darkness the velvety voice of the actor playing Gertrude said, rather raggedly, "I will not speak with her." Horatio's light, flexible tenor, also rather uneven, answered, "She is importunate, indeed distract. Her mood will needs be pitied." Like Hamlet, thought Janet, except that Hamlet was not importunate. The Queen, in a long-suffering voice, said, "What would she have?" and the lights came up.

Janet noted with interest that the quiet Horatio could say quite a lot, when he had to. And then her spirited, sensitive Ophelia whirled in upon them. Janet sat bolt upright, tears starting to her eyes; but what she thought, quite clearly, was,
Hamlet's
not crazy.
This
is how people are crazy here.

The play tore on to its relentless and bloody conclusion; but as Robin and Thomas had said in their different ways, it stopped twice: once in the graveyard, in a scene that made Robin so happy Janet wished Molly would get out the canvas bag; and once again in the great hall, when Hamlet told Horatio what had happened on the way to England. The graveyard scene impressed Janet particularly, both because Hamlet seemed like a different person and because Horatio seemed just the same as usual, having lapsed back into his old taciturnity the moment he and Hamlet were back together. While Hamlet and the Gravedigger and Robin and indeed the rest of the audience laughed happily at the peculiar macabre jokes, Janet watched Horatio eye Hamlet as if he were a friend newly released from the hospital; Horatio looked, in fact, like a man who would be consulting his watch every ten seconds, if he had had one.

When he said, in the second quiet scene, after Hamlet had agreed to the duel with Laertes, whom the audience knew perfectly well to have intentions of not only using an unbated foil, but of poisoning it too, "If your mind mislike anything, obey it," Janet thought, he knows, somehow, that everything is about to go to hell, but his habitual relations with Hamlet won't let him say what he would need to say.

The play ended as it always ended. "You didn't tell me I should bring Kleenex," said Molly thickly to Janet.

"It's a
tragedy,"
said Janet, blowing her nose on a very old wad of dusty tissue from the bottom of her knapsack. "Of course you need Kleenex."

"Lend me some of yours, then," said Molly.

"Allow me," said Robin, and handed her a huge and very clean handkerchief. Janet turned to Thomas for similar aid, and found him blowing his own nose. She was greatly taken aback, but warmed to him enormously.

"It's a happy ending, really," she said to him.

"It is not," said Thomas. "It's only the happiest one could hope for, given the world of the play." He blew his nose again. He looked more human with it reddened and his eyes swollen. "'As this fell sergeant Death is swift in his arrest,'" he said; and suddenly seemed to notice Janet making do with her sodden bit of Kleenex. "I do beg your pardon; here you

go," he said, and presented her with a second handkerchief.

"Good grief," said Janet, accepting it gratefully. "I've never in my life known a boy to have even one handkerchief."

"It's hanging around with Robin and his ilk," said Thomas. "And I suspect they only have them because they come in so handy for theatrical stunts."

"Are we in a hurry," said Molly, "or can we sit here peacefully until the crowds are gone?"

Robin looked at his watch. "We may sit," he said. "We've missed the ten-thirty bus, and will have to take the eleven-thirteen city bus down to the Greyhound station and get home again that way."

"Fine," said Molly. "Now, was that or wasn't it a splendid performance?"

"On the whole, not in the least," said Robin. "But they disgraced their calling less than they might have."

"What was wrong with it?" demanded Molly.

"Thomas?" said Robin. "You were keeping the list."

"I've kind of lost track of it," said Thomas slowly. "It did take fire after the first intermission, don't you think? That was an excellent Hamlet."

"I still say he shouldn't have been Korean," said Molly. "It distracted me. I kept making up adoption scenarios in my head."

"No, but that was one of the best parts," said Thomas, with great earnestness.

"Because it's true, you know—he's not like any of them, he's completely alien to that whole bright, corrupt court. All of them are against him, even the ones who love him, and none of them can help him out of his terrible dilemma, because their minds and spirits are not like his. He is a stranger in his own country and his own family. He hasn't got anybody."

Thomas looked at Janet as Hamlet had looked at Ophelia—as if he had been loosed out of Hell to speak of horrors. But when she let her startled sympathy inform her face, he turned suddenly back to Robin and demanded, "Didn't you feel that, seeing that little dark figure down there all alone among them?"

"He had Horatio," said Robin, fixing Thomas with a grave and anxious look.

"Yes, he did," said Thomas slowly, looking back at him and sounding a little apologetic. "And this was a very good Horatio, I thought. But Horatio can't do anything for him, you know. All he can do is listen. Even when he knows, knows with all his heart, that Hamlet's doom is coming, he can't persuade him of anything. Their minds don't meet, either, really— though you think, if the parts are played right, that they did meet once, when both of them were students. I've thought I'd like to write a play about what they got up to at Wittenberg. I bet they drove everybody right up the wall. But not anymore. Once Hamlet gets home, and everything has gone rotten, there's an estrangement. Did you notice that they deleted the references, except for the antique Roman line, that implied Horatio was Danish, and kept all the ones that imply he's a foreigner? Horatio is a balm to sore feelings, maybe—but he doesn't understand, either. Hamlet's all alone," he finished, with an absolute flatness that was worse to hear than the most violent feeling could have been.

Janet looked at him and worried while the rest of them argued.

"I thought that might be partly Hamlet's fault," said Molly. "I've known people like that, whose intellect set them so far apart they couldn't bother to think how other people felt. And on top of that Hamlet's a prince. It must have been hard for Horatio, too."

"Tragedy of character," said Robin, staring at Thomas.

"Situation," said Thomas instantly. "He's doomed, that's all." "Nobody's doomed,"

said Robin, with great scorn. "Fate awaits our doing."

"We await Fate's."