Back and forth they go, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern against the spokesman. Much of it is clever. A few lines lodge in Shakespeare’s memory. The playwright is also more open about the things some boys who play women do than any Shakespeare has heard before him. How he got his lines past the Master of the Revels . . . is a question for another day. Too many other, more urgent, questions, flood Shakespeare’s mind now.
Up on the stage, they do more with coins. Everything keeps coming up heads—against the spokesman, even Guildenstern uses this to his advantage. Then one last coin, which the spokesman tries to keep under his boot. Rosencrantz elbows him away from the golden disk and puts his own foot down on it. Disgruntled—no performance, no possible profit—the spokesman mooches away.
Rosencrantz stoops to retrieve the coin. “I say—that was lucky.”
“What?” Guildenstern asks.
“It was tails,” Rosencrantz answers.
And everything changes.
A richly dressed young woman rushes onstage. If the two strange simpletons are Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, if this play has anything to do with Hamlet, she must be Ophelia. Where the boy burlesquing a woman in the tragedians’ troupe—Alfred, he goes by—is a jape against femininity, and a sour jape at that, this player is astoundingly convincing. Shape, skin, and mannerisms are perfect, though the player does not speak. Shakespeare has seen some fine personations, but none to match this one.
Likewise, the man who hurries after her has to be Hamlet. His fancy doublet is half unlaced, his stockings dirty and ungartered. He grabs her wrist, stares into her face, and sighs like a man coming to pieces inside himself. Then he sighs cavernously, lets her go, and exits with long strides. She lightfoots off in the opposite direction.
Neither Ophelia nor Hamlet notices Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who stand transfixed, gaping at the piteous spectacle they form. After both the other players exit, Guildenstern unfreezes first. He grabs Rosencrantz’s arm. “Come on!”
Too late. Ruffles and flourishes announce another entrance, an important one. In sweep a gray-bearded king and his equally middle-aged queen: Claudius and Gertrude. Attendants trail them. Shakespeare has eyes only for the player acting Gertrude’s part. Beardless boys, with training, can imitate young women well. Women not so young, women with jowls and wrinkles, are far harder to play. Ophelia is marvelously good. For the life of him, he cannot see where Gertrude falls short of perfection.
Claudius greets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by name (though he waves to the one while calling him by the other’s name). And Shakespeare grinds his teeth louder than the woman beside him chomps her nutmeats. Claudius doesn’t just speak—he speaks the words Shakespeare wrote for him in Hamlet. The player in the role has a fine feel for the blank verse, though his accent is as odd as those of the men portraying Guildenstern and Rosencrantz.
Gertrude also speaks well, and with that same accent. And if the player’s voice is not that of a woman nearing fifty, Shakespeare has never heard one that is.
“Abandoned robbers!” he shouts furiously, shaking his fist at the stage. Stoppard hasn’t just robbed him of his characters. He’s lifted a whole great chunk of Hamlet and transplanted it into his play.
When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern respond, they too use blank verse—Shakespeare’s blank verse. Their air of befuddlement, bewilderment, drops away like an abandoned cloak. They are everything their creator could wish them to be . . . except for bestriding the stage in this pilfered piece of play.
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.