We Haven't Got There Yet

The tragedians and their spokesman also flutter on the fringes of the plot. They have more self-knowledge than Guildenstern or Rosencrantz: they know what they do. They know it from the inside out, too. Some of the words the playwright puts in the spokesman’s mouth . . .

“You don’t understand the humiliation of it—to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable—that somebody is watching. . . .” he howls. After a confused response (what else?) from Rosencrantz, he adds, “Don’t you see?! We’re actors—we’re the opposite of people!”

Shakespeare starts laughing and finds he can’t stop. The woman crunching nutmeats edges away from him. So do the pockmarked man and his ladylove Lucy. They don’t think it’s funny. They think he’s funny, and in no good fashion. He feels sorry for them. They must never have performed.

As Rosencrantz and Guildenstern likewise recoil, the spokesman dons calm like a mantle. And, as with a mantle, who knows what that calm conceals? “Think, in your head, now, think of the most . . . private . . . secret . . . intimate thing you have ever done secure in the knowledge of its privacy. . . .”

He waits. Rosencrantz looks guilty. Shakespeare no doubt looks guilty, too. So do most of the groundlings around him. Who wouldn’t, thinking of something like that? A born innocent, maybe. Or a born liar.

“Are you thinking of it?” the spokesman asks softly. He springs at Rosencrantz like a lion. “Well, I saw you do it!”

“You never! It’s a lie!” Rosencrantz says, but his voice is hopeless, doom-filled. He staggers away. Only when the spokesman pursues no farther does he realize the other man couldn’t have. He giggles in relief.

So does half the crowd. Shakespeare would, but his mouth has gaped into a new O of admiration. How many players has he sent up on stage to love, to rage, to sin? Perhaps worst of all, to plot sins yet uncommitted? How many tens of thousands of eyes watched them feign both passions and solitude?

Once or twice, he has played with this. As You Like It, with boys pretending to be maidens pretending to be youths . . . But, most of the time, while he writes he acts as if what is happening inside the audience isn’t layered so closely with what happens up on the stage.

Meanwhile, this play goes on. “We only know what we’re told, and that’s little enough,” Guildenstern protests. “And for all we know it isn’t even true.”

The spokesman only shrugs. “For all anyone knows, nothing is.” One more line to set the Master of the Revels’ teeth on edge!

As the tragedians begin to rehearse the play with which Hamlet hopes to catch the conscience of the king, Guildenstern asks, “What is this dumbshow for?”

“It makes the action that follows more or less comprehensible,” the spokesman explains. “You understand, we are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.”

Beside Shakespeare, the woman with the bottomless sack of nutmeats screws up her face. “What’s that?” she says, as if the air will tell her. He quite likes the double mockery with the more than doubled deprecation. It is not his language, even if it is English—the intrusion of his language into this different one makes that plain. But, as the players can manage with his speech, so he can with theirs. And Tom Stoppard knows all its tricks.

The tragedians’ pantomime includes two spies sailing off to England. Because of a letter, they meet their deaths at the hands of the English king. This fails to register fully on Guildenstern or Rosencrantz, though Rosencrantz wonders. What did he say early on? How do I know? We haven’t got there yet.

But they will.

And they do. They begin the third act (which will plainly be the last—strange structure, thinks Shakespeare, who is used to plays with five) on a ship. Hamlet is with them, too, as he must be—asleep, at the moment.

Guildenstern comes as close to understanding as he ever does: “Free to move, speak, extemporise, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact—that we, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bearing a letter from one king to another, are taking Hamlet to England.”

Everything he says is true. None of it does him any good. He is trapped in the drama. Does he remember the tragedians’ pantomime, now when remembering might save him? He does not, nor will he and his comrade be saved.