We Haven't Got There Yet

But, after a heartbeat or two, it is not so familiar as all that. The players keep the sharp, unfamiliar accent they used on stage. They also keep the sharp, unfamiliar syntax that suffuses the parts of their play Shakespeare did not write. There sits the one who acted Ophelia, bantering easily with the rest. No boy ever born owns such firm, full, rosy-teated breasts.

Shakespeare blushes to the roots of his hair. It is not as if he has never seen a woman—oh, no. But a woman player? He has never dreamt of such a strange, abnormous beast. She covers herself and scratches and curses as casually as any of the men.

One of those men—the one who played poor, damned Guildenstern—notices Shakespeare. “Who the fuck’re you, Charlie?” he snaps.

Hesitantly, Shakespeare gives his name. Then, when the player cups a hand behind his ear to show he has not heard, Shakespeare gives it again, this time loud enough to pierce the din.

Silence slams down. All eyes swing his way. He has played before plenty of larger houses, but never one so attentive. “Wow! Oh, wow!” breathes the player who acted Ophelia. That is a woman’s voice. Once you see past the enormity of the notion (and once you see those ripe breasts), it becomes obvious.

“Does look a little like him—damned if it doesn’t,” says the fellow who played the tragedians’ spokesman. Several others from the company nod. Shakespeare wonders how they know, or think they know, what he looks like.

Before he can ask, the one who played Rosencrantz says, “Man, I never expected . . . this. But hey, I never expected any of this.” Again, several in the company nod. To Shakespeare, the man still sounds as bewildered as he did delivering his lines on the stage.

The player who was Guildenstern sets hands on hips. “Okay, William Shakespeare, what the hell d’you want with us? Why’d you barge in here, anyway, and how much did you pay the hired muscle outside?”

“I matched your threepence,” Shakespeare answers automatically, noting hired muscle for future use. Only then does he come back to the main question: “Why came I? To offer my praises to your clever Master Stoppard. See I him here before me?”

“Well . . . no,” says the woman who was Ophelia. Her laugh sounds distinctly nervous, those of the other players even more so. “They brought us over to London for the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern centennial, and then. . . .” Her voice trails away. She looks around the Rose’s cramped, mildewed tiring room.

“Then all this weird shit comes down on us,” one of the tragedians says. The rest of the players nod again, this time in almost perfect unison.

A couple of sentences, and they give Shakespeare more questions than he knows what to do with. He tries one: “The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern . . . centennial?”

“Isn’t that a word yet?” the woman asks, which sparks more questions. She goes on, “Means the hundred-year anniversary.”

“Yes,” Shakespeare says—acknowledgment, not agreement. His mind races faster than a horse galloping downhill. Try as he will, he can’t mistake her meaning. If Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is dead itself—a century dead!—then Hamlet must be older yet. But his head had only a little more hair, and that only a little less gray, when he wrote it. An impossibility—an impossibility he has just seen staged. “How came you hither?” he inquires.

“Good question. If there are no more questions, class dismissed,” says the man who played Rosencrantz.

“Proof is left to the student. That’s what the old geometry books said, right?” adds the fellow who played Guildenstern. Maybe the responses mean something to them. Or maybe they truly are as witstruck by the strange fate that has entrapped them as were the characters they portrayed.

“We were in London,” the young woman says. “And then we were in . . . London.” She says the same name twice. By the way she says it, the second London—this London—may lie beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, or whatever is farther away than that, from the one she knows.

“When will you return thither?” Shakespeare asks.

The players eye one another. Now they all shrug together. “We don’t know,” says the graybeard who played Claudius. On the stage, he effortlessly ordered Guildenstern and Rosencrantz about. Now he is as much out of his depth as they feigned being.

Which leads Shakespeare to his next question, as inexorably as Hamlet’s disappearance led Guildenstern to open the fatal letter: “Will you return thither?”

They look at one another again. They also look at Shakespeare—as if they hate him. And if they do, who can blame them? Are some questions not better left unfaced? “We don’t know,” the graybeard says once more, in a voice like ashes.

“If we don’t know what happened to us, how are we supposed to know what’s going to happen to us?” The player who performed as Rosencrantz might have lifted his line from the play. He might have, but he hasn’t.