Work Text:
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
THE GHOST
HAMLET, Princess of Denmark, daughter of the late King Hamlet and Queen Gertrude
QUEEN GERTRUDE, widow of King Hamlet, now married to Claudius
KING CLAUDIUS, brother to the late King Hamlet
POLONIUS, councillor to King Claudius
LAERTES, daughter of Polonius
OPHELIUS, son of Polonius, brother to Laertes
HORATIO, Hamlet’s friend and confidant
ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN, Hamlet’s childhood friends
OSRIC, a courtier
FRANCISCO, BARNARDO, MARCELLUS, guards.
A train window rattles cold against a cheek. The black eyes are half-open but too alert to drowse. One hand has folded itself over the top of a damaged suitcase, pressing hard enough to leave creases on the thinly-mittened palm. The legs are dark brown and tired, well-used, jutting out from under a hand-sewn skirt and folding down into beige socks and battered boots. The heels of the socks are clean but threadbare, and the jacket has been ironed but bears stains of years. Lying over the jacket is an anomaly, an expensive cloak of rich green wool. The other hand, ungloved, twists in its warm fabric, worrying thick threads between its nails.
The traveller’s eyes flick open, staring keenly at the passing trees. The countryside of Germany is lit by a full moon, parting into towns and steeples on either side of the charging train. The clatter of wheels on tracks fills the traveller’s mind, lulling her even as it heightens her anxieties. She is headed North, into bitter cold and bitter mourning. The King of Denmark, her dear friend’s father, has died.
Moonlight filters slowly across the cheek of the traveller, now sleeping fitfully against the window. Her cloak is bundled up to rest her head upon, and as such it yields little warmth. She shifts as fingers of cold grasp her wrists and ankles, stealing into her dreams. Her hair is long and flyaway, browner than the night, lying against the glass in tight-wound coils and casting deep shadows on her forehead. It has not been washed in much too long; this voyage from Wittenberg has taken over a month to afford and another two weeks to complete. But with aching bones and three-day clothes and fingers weary of parting with money, she is nearly at Denmark’s border. She is less than a week from Kronborg, the guardian fortress of the city of Helsingør; she is less than four days from Hamlet’s home.
Hours later Horatio wakes, blows warm breath on her fingers, transfers her mitten from one hand to the other, unbundles her cloak and secures it about her shoulders. She rubs her palms together, wool against flesh, hisses at the slight pain warmth brings to her numbing fingers. The train is beginning to slow. Once she disembarks on Denmark’s soil, on the island of Jylland, it is a brief ferry across a sound to the island of Als, a longer ferry from Als to the island of Fyn, and the final long ferry ride to Sjælland. Once on Sjælland, it is under a day of train-travel to coastal Helsingør. She will arrive completely overtaxed, devoid of all currency, short on sleep and temper; but she will arrive in better shape than Hamlet will be in. Hamlet has lost her father, lost her King, and, justifiably or not, lost any positive perception that remained of her mother. Hamlet wrote Horatio many slanders of the overhasty marriage between Gertrude and Claudius and Horatio knows not what to think; Hamlet despises it, calls it incestuous, but Horatio silently believes it may provide Queen Gertrude comfort as she approaches middle age. Horatio reserves her judgements, since she has met the late King Hamlet but once and Claudius never (Claudius, the man who inherited King Hamlet’s crown--who inherited it instead of Hamlet, something Hamlet must resent--does she?). Horatio, from her previous visits to Helsingør, knows of the members of the Danish court but little of their policies. She knows what she has been allowed to observe, and she couples that to what Hamlet has told her--rather, what Hamlet has complained of--to paint a fuller picture. The names come to her mind freely, some accompanied by faces and some not. Councillor Polonius. Laertes. Ophelius.
It is peculiar to Horatio, how insular the court seems. Its upper echelon, a Queen, a King, their daughter, the King’s brother, the Councillor, and the Councillor’s children, now hopelessly entangled. As near as Horatio can ascertain, the Councillor is employed by the late King’s brother, whom the Queen has married; the Queen’s daughter is also her husband’s nephew, and is all but betrothed to the Councillor’s son. It is not so remarkable, then, that Hamlet desired the liberated realm of Wittenberg, not so shocking that Hamlet’s childhood companion Laertes, daughter of Polonius, changed Germany for France. They, being healthy and well-formed, could escape for a time; Horatio feels stirrings of compassion for the disabled Ophelius, who according to Hamlet has lived nearly his entire life behind fortress walls.
Ophelius. Hamlet speaks of him with murky affection. Horatio has never met him, lacks knowledge of all but the basics of his aspect. She knows much of Laertes; she is a courtly fighter, a fencer, a speaker, a travelling swashbuckler with several paramours. She dons blue men’s breeches, crops her hair, and carries proudly her aquiline nose and brave brown eyes. When speaking of her Hamlet’s voice wanders like a river, caressing climbed trees and skinned knees and shared laughter. Such is the youth of aristocrats. They were children together, and like two vines sprouted from one seed, in the base of each one’s being rests a sliver of the other. It was sensible, the late King Hamlet thought, that they would one day be knit into one family; and upon the blooming adolescences of first Hamlet and then Ophelius, a marriage was presumed, and by the Queen all but arranged. Horatio knows not Ophelius’s feelings on the matter, but she has ascertained Hamlet’s well enough; Hamlet’s voice jars bitterly against Ophelius’s notes, sowing and harvesting resentment fast as the stroke of a scythe. God erred in His creation of the two, she claimed, that the man is weak and the woman strong. She explained that as Laertes learned the arts of the sabre and foil with as much agility and force as the arts of the waltz, Ophelius and his father Polonius held discourse with doctors and astrologers. No cure has ever been found for the youth’s lame foot, and no explanation, save the movements of the stars or the punishment of God, has ever been offered him. Hamlet believes Ophelius should have been a woman, whom she regards as little better than an incomplete man, and she laughs sourly over the conceit that, to compensate for its lack of the female deformity, his body forced on him a deformity of the limb. Horatio is loathe to contradict, but she finds this line of thought lacking; to her, the world is an ordered machine from its plants to its peoples to its poles to its surrounding stars, and what moves between the lands and the seas of the great globe on which they rest hinge on a delicate balance. Nothing is made poorly; neither man nor woman nor any other configuration of human soul can therefore be incomplete--only incomplete inasmuch as it is not done learning.
But Hamlet wishes she had been born a boy, longs for the title of King, pines for the unquestionable qualification of Son. Crucially, she desires not boyhood nor maleness but rather the allowances made for that sex: the deference paid to them, their undeniable safety, their ability to rove the world at liberty, to read what they like for satisfaction of their curiosities, to prick who they like for the amusement of their passion. So she says. But Horatio, in the busy but silent chambers of her mind, secretly suspects another reason bracing and underlying all these: that Hamlet’s feelings for Laertes strayed over the bounds of natural love between women and into eroticism reserved for men. This defect is more unforgivable than Ophelius’s clubfoot since it sits within the soul. Ophelius is made more virtuous for suffering his deformed body, and knows he will be welcomed into Heaven as a man made whole. But Hamlet must shoulder her deformed spirit not just throughout this life but after it.
Hamlet’s ill-fitting mantle makes her an altered creature; she is aware that no amount of insisting she be called Prince rather than Princess will incite the Danish people to refer to her as King. She languishes, she tells Horatio, in a shackled state, not allowed the only thing she wants.
But there have been many allowances made to Hamlet.
Hamlet has been allowed her absolutes, just as she has been allowed her emotion, her relaxation, her fabrics and fine feasts and claret wines, just as she has been allowed her palace and her grounds and her travels, just as she has been allowed her opulent libraries and her windowed bedchambers and her scented baths in steaming water. When her voice pours out it spills liberal, erratic, demanding--insightful, of course--but over-loud. Her status allows her volume, her untainted physicality endows her with movement, the love of her parents permits her leisure; her wealth gifts her with education and opportunities Horatio has perpetually lacked.
Horatio’s words are few and well-chosen, as if each one were paid for dear. She is mirthful, but she is measured and tried in the ways that the Princess is not. She has known what it is to clean an outhouse, patch a coat, bandage a bloody knuckle, coax out of scraps a full meal. She knows what it is to scrimp and save her coin for months on end; she knows what it is to hold a cracked roll of bread above a hollow stomach and decide between purchasing a coursebook or a meal. She holds a scholarship to the university of Wittenberg, one she has worked for since she first held quill to page, and there she has fed herself on the knowledge and companionship of her fellow-students, of her elders, of the novels that became like friends.
Now, she finds herself far from home and frigid, clutching a breaking suitcase full of well-worn clothes. When the train halts, she stands and exits on prickling feet and stiff legs, unprepared to manoeuvre the unfamiliar Danish city without Hamlet by her side. She massages her muscles before urging them to move, following the scent of the sea and adhering to her map and to streetlights, keeping a letter opener that glints like a blade tucked readily in one hand. She makes herself part of the crowd, unobtrusive.
She arrives at the dock unaccompanied but accosted, and with practiced Danish purchases passage on the ferry, haggling the price down when the ticket-seller attempts to cheat her. As she boards the boat, smelling brine and hearing the crashing of waves all around her, her thoughts turn from Hamlet and her court and walk down the less-kempt Helsingør streets to where the poorer citizens take cover. Marcellus and Barnardo, who hover between acquaintances and friends, float to the front of her mind. They are oft-laughing, oft-drinking; they are aging men with greying beards and twinkling eyes, and for decades now have served the royal family as castle guards. Horatio has met them several times and swapped stories with them, and though she has laughingly chided them for their mead-borne superstitions, in troth she likes them greatly. They are Danish by naturalisation and not by birth, and like her both inside and outside the palace they are outsiders.
There is an outcry, a massive heave-ho, and the ferry is unmoored. Churning water, it drifts off from the dock as Horatio drifts off in thoughts; her hair whips her face like ropes as she pulls her cloak taut against chill air.