We Haven't Got There Yet

The poet is not the only one to realize something is rotten in the state of Denmark. In front of him, a short, squat, pockmarked man turns to the woman beside him and says, “Have we not seen this before, Lucy?”

“Is it so?” Lucy replies. “Never can I keep all of them straight in my head, but they do help the days spin by.”

“That they do,” the pockmarked man agrees. “A fine furry robe the king’s got, eh? One like it and even you’d not complain of cold on a winter’s night.” Lucy’s sniff says she won’t admit she complains about anything.

A skinny, white-bearded man in somber black enters: Polonius. He too comes out with Shakespeare’s lines:

And I do think, or else this brain of mine

Hunts not the trail of policy so sure

As it hath used to do, that I have found

The very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy. . . .

He, Claudius, Gertrude, and the attendants exit together.

Guildenstern and Rosencrantz stand alone on the stage once more. They look wildly in all directions, as if wondering what has just happened to them. When a cheapjack, gimcrack building falls down and men scramble and stagger from the ruins, their faces bear such expressions of horrified amazement. London is full of buildings like that. Shakespeare has seen such expressions before. Rarely has he seen them done so well in the theatre.

“I want to go home,” Rosencrantz says, and the plaintiveness in his voice pierces Shakespeare to the root.

The two players talk on. They are not, or they seem not to be, in Hamlet any more. They have returned to the other play, the bizarre play, the one they inhabited until Claudius and Gertrude and Polonius swept them up and carried them away and . . . left them high and dry. They might be nothing more than a couple of twigs abandoned, for the moment, by the tide. What can they do, where can they go, by themselves? Nowhere, not till that impetus, or some impetus, seizes them again.

Watching them abandoned there, Shakespeare feels his rage against this Tom Stoppard all at once fall away. “Sweet Jesu!” he whispers. Almost, almost, he crosses himself. His father followed the Romish faith in secret. Some leanings that way linger in him still. But to show them . . . to show them is to ask for a nasty end to his days.

He knows that. How can he not? Even so, he nearly betrays himself, so vast is his astonishment. No wonder his rage falls by the wayside. He has no room for it within himself, not any more. He suddenly sees why Stoppard has appropriated Hamlet for his own purposes. The stranger has found questions in drama Shakespeare knows he never would have dreamt of for himself, not if he were to live another 300 years and more.

Up on the stage, Guildenstern is saying, “A man standing in his saddle in the half-lit half-alive dawn banged on the shutters and called two names. He was just a hat and a cloak levitating in the grey plume of his own breath, but when he called we came. That much is certain—we came.”

How many messengers and knights and nobles and constables and other such folk has Shakespeare written into his plays? More than he can remember. More than he can count if he could remember. What do they do? Whatever the action requires of them. They come on stage. They say their lines and make their motions. Sometimes they exit.

Sometimes they die.

In a way, that is as it should be. The play could not advance without them. But never has Shakespeare thought to wonder what the world—the world of the play, the world within the play, the world as a whole—might look like through the eyes of such a personage. A playwright is but a lesser God. How do his smaller, less favored creatures live—do they live?—when his eye is not fully on them?

Like this Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, perhaps?

They are damned. And the worst of their damnation is, they know not that they are damned. They cannot cry, with poor dead Kit’s Faustus, Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. They have to try to kick against the pricks, until . . . the play is ended.

* * *

Shakespeare waits to see how Stoppard chooses to end what he has begun. As he waits, as he watches, he sees things that escaped him earlier. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not quite the pair of identical zeds—unnecessary letters—he first took them to be. Rosencrantz has no real notion anything is wrong. Guildenstern sometimes does, but he cannot see what his troubles are or do anything about them. Which is the worse, the baser, futility? One more thing to ponder.

And, whenever the action calls for them, both Danes fall back into Hamlet’s story, in which they are trapped like flies in sticky pine sap. Their diction and manner change. They have sudden purpose—Shakespeare’s purpose. But, although they are Hamlet’s schoolmates and thus longtime acquaintances, he is no more sure which is which than was his uncle before him.