The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Oh Bradley, I knew I’d just bore you! And now I won’t see you again for months, I know you!’

  ‘Shut up. That dreary stuff about Hamlet and his ma and pa you can get out of a book. I’ll tell you which one.’

  ‘So it’s not true?’

  ‘It is true, but it doesn’t matter. A sophisticated reader takes such things in his stride. You are a sophisticated reader in ovo.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘Of course Hamlet is Shakespeare.’

  ‘Whereas Lear and Macbeth and Othello are – ’

  ‘Aren’t.’

  ‘Bradley, was Shakespeare homosexual?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh I see. So Hamlet’s really in love with Horatio – ’

  ‘Be quiet, girl. In mediocre works the hero is the author.’

  ‘My father is the hero of all his novels.’

  ‘It is this that induces the reader to identify. Now if the greatest of all geniuses permits himself to be the hero of one of his plays, has this happened by accident?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is he unconscious of it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Correct. So this must be what the play is about.’

  ‘Oh. What?’

  ‘About Shakespeare’s own identity. About this urge to externalize himself as the most romantic of all romantic heroes. When is Shakespeare at his most cryptic?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘What is the most mysterious and endlessly debated part of his œuvre?’

  ‘The sonnets?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Bradley, I read such an extraordinary theory about the sonnets – ’

  ‘Be silent. So Shakespeare is at his most cryptic when he is talking about himself. How is it that Hamlet is the most famous and accessible of his plays?’

  ‘But people argue about that too.’

  ‘Yes, but nevertheless it is the best known work of literature in the world. Indian peasants, Australian lumberjacks, Argentine ranchers, Norwegian sailors, members of the Red Army, Americans, all the most remote and brutish specimens of mankind have heard of Hamlet.’

  ‘Don’t you mean Canadian lumberjacks? I thought Australia – ’

  ‘How can this be?’

  ‘I don’t know, Bradley, you tell me.’

  ‘Because Shakespeare, by the sheer intensity of his own meditation upon the problem of his identity has produced a new language, a special rhetoric of consciousness – ’

  ‘I’m not with you.’

  ‘Words are Hamlet’s being as they were Shakespeare’s.’

  ‘Words, words, words.’

  ‘What work of literature has more quotable lines?’

  ‘Oh what a noble mind is here o’erthrown.’

  ‘How all occasions do inform against me.’

  ‘Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice.’

  ‘Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I.’

  ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile.’

  ‘Something too much of this. As I was saying. The thing is a monument of words, it is Shakespeare’s most rhetorical play, it is his longest play, it is his most inventive and involuted literary exercise. See how casually, with what a lucid easy grace he lays down the origins of modern English prose – ’

  ‘What a piece of work is a man – ’

  ‘Hamlet is nearer to the wind than Shakespeare ever sailed, even in the sonnets. Did Shakespeare hate his father? Of course. Was he in love with his mother? Of course. But that is only the beginning of what he is telling us about himself. How does he dare to do it? How can it not bring down on his head a punishment which is as much more exquisite than that of ordinary writers as the god whom he worships is above the god whom they worship? He has performed a supreme creative feat, a work endlessly reflecting upon itself, not discursively but in its very substance, a Chinese box of words as high as the tower of Babel, a meditation upon the bottomless trickery of consciousness and the redemptive role of words in the lives of those without identity, that is human beings. Hamlet is words, and so is Hamlet. He is as witty as Jesus Christ, but whereas Christ speaks Hamlet is speech. He is the tormented empty sinful consciousness of man seared by the bright light of art, the god’s flayed victim dancing the dance of creation. The cry of anguish is obscure because it is overheard. It is the eloquence of direct speech, it is oratio recta not oratio obliqua. But it is not addressed to us. Shakespeare is passionately exposing himself to the ground and author of his being. He is speaking as few artists can speak, in the first person and yet at the pinnacle of artifice. How veiled that deity, how dangerous to approach, how almost impossible with impunity to address, Shakespeare knew better than any man. Hamlet is a wild act of audacity, a self – purging, a complete self – castigation in the presence of the god. Is Shakespeare a masochist? Of course. He is the king of masochists; his writing thrills with that secret. But because his god is a real god and not an eidolon of private fantasy, and because love has here invented language as if for the first time, he can change pain into poetry and orgasms into pure thought – ’

  ‘Bradley, wait, please, do stop, I’m not understanding you – ’

  ‘Shakespeare here makes the crisis of his own identity into the very central stuff of his art. He transmutes his private obsessions into a rhetoric so public that it can be mumbled by any child. He enacts the purification of speech, and yet also this is something comic, a sort of trick, like a huge pun, like a long almost pointless joke. Shakespeare cries out in agony, he writhes, he dances, he laughs, he shrieks, and he makes us laugh and shriek ourselves out of hell. Being is acting. We are tissues and tissues of different personae and yet we are nothing at all. What redeems us is that speech is ultimately divine. What part does every actor want to play? Hamlet.’

  ‘I played Hamlet once,’ said Julian.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I played Hamlet once, at school, I was sixteen.’

  I had closed the book and had my two hands flat on the table. I stared at the girl. She smiled, and then when I did not, giggled and blushed, thrusting back her hair with a crooked finger. ‘I wasn’t very good. I say, Bradley, do my feet smell?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s charming.’

  ‘I’ll put the boots on again.’ She began to point one pink foot, thrusting it into its purple sheath. ‘I’m sorry, I interrupted you, please go on.’

  ‘No. The show’s over.’

  ‘Please. What you were saying was marvellous, though I can’t really understand much of it. I do wish you’d let me take notes. Can’t I now?’ She was zipping up the boots.

  ‘No. What I was saying is no good for your exam. That’s esoteric lore. You’d plough if you tried to utter that stuff. In fact you don’t understand any of it. It doesn’t matter. You’d better just learn a few simple things. I’ll send you some notes and one or two books to read. I know what questions they’ll ask you and I know what answers will get you top marks.’

  ‘But I don’t want to do the easy stuff, I want to do the difficult stuff, besides, if what you say is true – ’

  ‘You can’t conjure with that word at your age.’

  ‘But I do want to understand. I thought Shakespeare was a sort of business man, I thought he was really interested in making money – ’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘But then how could he – ’

  ‘Let’s have a drink.’

  I got up. I felt suddenly exhausted, almost dazed, damp with sweat from head to foot as if I were outlined with warm quick – silver. I opened the window and a breath of slightly cooler air entered the room, polluted and dusty, yet also somehow bearing the half – obliterated ghosts of flowers from distant parks. A massed – up buzz of various noise filled the room, cars, voices, the endless hum of London’s being. I opened the front of my shirt all the way down to the waist and scratched in my curly mat of grey hair. I turned to face Julian. Then I went to the walnut hanging cupboard and brought out glasses and the sherry decant
er. I poured out sherry.

  ‘So you played Hamlet. Describe your costume.’

  ‘Oh the usual. All Hamlets dress the same, don’t they. Unless they’re in modern dress, and we weren’t.’

  ‘Do what I ask please.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Describe your costume.’

  ‘Well, I wore black tights and black velvet shoes with silvery buckles and a sort of black slinky jerkin with a low opening and a white silk shirt underneath that and a big gold chain round my neck and – What’s the matter, Bradley?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I thought I looked a lot like a picture I saw of John Gielgud.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Bradley, he’s an actor – ’

  ‘You misunderstand me, child. Go on.’

  ‘That’s all. I enjoyed it ever so much. Especially the fight at the end.’

  ‘I think I’ll close the window again,’ I said, ‘if you don’t object.’ I closed it and the London buzz became indistinct, something internal, something in the mind, and we were alone in a warm small thingy solitude. I stared at the girl. She was dreamy, combing her layers of greeny – golden hair with long fingers, seeing herself as Hamlet, sword in hand.

  ‘“Here thou incestuous murderous damned Dane – ” ’

  ‘Bradley, you must be a mind – reader. Look, do tell me something more about what you were saying, couldn’t you sort of put it in a nutshell?’

  ‘Hamlet is a piece à clef It is about someone Shakespeare was in love with.’

  ‘But Bradley, you didn’t say that, you – ’

  ‘Enough, enough. How are your parents.’

  ‘Oh you are a tease. They’re much as usual. Dad’s out at the library all day, scribble, scribble, scribble. Mum stays at home and moves the furniture about and broods. It’s such a pity she never had any education. She’s so intelligent.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody sorry for them,’ I said. ‘They’re marvellous people, both of them, marvellous people with real private lives of their own.’

  ‘Sorry. I must have sounded awful. I suppose I am awful. Perhaps all young people are awful.’

  ‘Lay not that flattering unction to your soul. Only some.’

  ‘Sorry, Bradley. I say, I do wish you’d come and see the parents oftener, I think you do them good.’

  I felt some shame in asking her about Arnold and Rachel, but I wanted to be, and now was, sure that they had said nothing damaging about me.

  ‘So you want to be a writer?’ I said. I was still leaning back against the window. She was pointing her alert secretive little face at me. With her mane of hair she looked more like a nice dog than like Royal Denmark. She had crossed her legs now, one lying horizontal upon the other, showing off the purple boots and a maximum amount of pink tights. Her hand played at her neck, opening another button, questing within. I could smell her sweat, her feet, her breasts.

  ‘I feel I can. I’m ready to wait. I won’t rush into it. I want to write hard dense impersonal sort of books, not a bit like me.’

  ‘Good girl.’

  ‘I certainly won’t call myself Julian Baffin – ’

  ‘Julian,’ I said. ‘I think you’d better go.’

  ‘I’m so sorry – Oh Bradley, I have enjoyed this. Do you think we could meet again before long? I know you hate to be tied down. Aren’t you going away?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then please let me know sometime if we can meet.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I must be off – ’

  ‘I owe you a thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A thing. In return for the buffalo lady. Remember?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t like to remind you – ’

  ‘Here.’

  I took two strides to the chimney piece and picked up a little oval gilt snuff box, one of my most treasured pieces. I gave it into her hand.

  ‘Oh Bradley, how frightfully kind of you, it looks so sort of elegant and valuable, and something’s written on it, A Friend’s Gift, oh my dear, how nice! We are friends, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bradley, I am grateful – ’

  ‘Off you go. Out, out.’

  ‘You won’t forget all about me – ?’

  ‘Out.’

  I saw her to the front door and closed it immediately after her as soon as she had stepped outside it. I went back into the flat, into the sitting – room, and closed the door. The room was sweet with heavy dusty sunlight. Her chair was where it had been. She had left her copy of Hamlet behind on the table.

  I fell on my knees and then lay full length face downward on the rug in front of the fireplace. Something very extraordinary indeed had just happened to me.

  Part Two

  What it was that had happened the percipient reader will not need to be told. (Doubtless he saw it coming a mile off. I did not. This is art, but I was out there in life.) I had fallen in love with Julian. At what point during our conversation I realized this fact is hard to determine. The consciousness darts back and forth in time like a weaver and can occupy, when busy with its mysterious self – formings and self gatherings, a very large specious present. Perhaps I realized it when she said, in that beautiful resonant tone of hers, ‘Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice.’ Perhaps it was when she said ‘Black tights and black velvet shoes with silvery buckles’. Or perhaps it was when she took her boots off. No, not as early as that. And when I had had that mystical experience, looking at her legs in the shoe shop, had that been a veiled realization of being in love? It had not seemed so. Yet that too was part of it. Everything was part of it. After all, I had known this child since her birth. I had seen her in her cradle. I had held her in my arms when she was twenty inches long. Oh Christ.

  ‘I had fallen in love with Julian.’ The words are easily written down. But how to describe the thing itself? It is odd that falling in love, though frequently mentioned in literature, is rarely adequately described. It is after all an astounding phenomenon and for most people it is the most astonishing event that ever happens to them: more astonishing, because more counter – natural, than life’s horrors. (I do not of course refer to mere ‘sex’.) It is sad that, like the experience of bereavement, the experience of love is usually, like a dream, forgotten. Furthermore, those who have never fallen desperately in love with someone whom they have known for a long time may doubt whether this can occur. Let me assure them that it can. It happened to me. Was it always there cooking, incubating, in the warm inwards of time, as the girl grew and filled out into bloom? Of course I had always liked her, especially when she was a little child. But nothing really had prepared me for this blow. And it was a blow, I was felled by it physically. I felt as if my stomach had been shot away, leaving a gaping hole. My knees dissolved, I could not stand up, I shuddered and trembled all over, my teeth chattered. My face felt as if it had become waxen and some huge strange weirdly smiling mask had been imprinted upon it, I had become some sort of god. I lay there with my nose stuck into the black wool of the rug and the toes of my shoes making little ellipses on the carpet as I shook with possession. Of course I was sexually excited, but what I felt transcended mere lust to such a degree that although I could vividly sense my afflicted body I also felt totally alienated and changed and practically discarnate.

  Of course the mind of the lover abhors accident. ‘I wonder by my troth what thou and I did till we loved’ is a question intimate to his amazement. My love for Julian must have been figured before the world began. Surely it was lovers who discovered astrology. Nothing less than the great chamber of the stars could be large and steady enough to be context, origin, and guarantee of something so eternal. I realized now that my whole life had been determinedly travelling towards this moment. Her whole life had been travelling towards it, as she played and read her school books and grew and looked in the mirror at her breasts. This was a predestined collision. But it had not only just happened, it had happened
aeons ago, it was of the stuff of the original formation of earth and sky. When God said ‘Let there be light’ this love was made. It had no history. Yet too my awakening consciousness of it had a history of bottomless fascination. When, how, did I begin to realize the charm of this girl? Love generates, or rather reveals something which may be called absolute charm. In the beloved nothing is gauche. Every move of the head, every tone of the voice, every laugh or grunt or cough or twitch of the nose is as valuable and revealing as a glimpse of paradise. And in fact lying there absolutely limp and yet absolutely taut with my brow on the ground and my eyes closed I was actually not just glimpsing but in paradise. The act of falling in love, of really falling in love (I do not mean what sometimes passes by this name), floods the being with immediate ecstasy.

  I am not sure how long I lay upon the floor. Perhaps an hour, perhaps two or three hours. When at last I pulled myself up into a sitting posture it appeared to be afternoon. It was certainly another world and another time. Of course there was no question of eating anything, I should instantly have been sick. Sitting on the floor I reached out and drew towards me the chair upon which she had sat and leaned against it. I could see my own sherry untouched upon the table, hers half drunk. A fly was drowned in it. I would have drunk it fly and all, only I knew I could keep nothing down. I clasped the chair (it was the tiger lily one) and stared at her copy of Hamlet. The pleasure of picking that up and fingering it, perhaps seeing her name written in the front, was hundreds of years ahead in a delightful future of perfectly satisfying preoccupations. There was no hurry. Time had already become eternity. There was a huge warm globe of conscious being within which I moved with extreme slowness, or which perhaps I was. I had only to gaze, to stretch my hands out slowly like a chameleon. It no longer mattered where I looked or what I did. Everything in the world was Julian.

  Some readers may feel that what I am describing is a condition of insanity, and in a way this is true. Were it not reasonably common, men could surely be locked up for such a change of consciousness. However it is one of the peculiarities, perhaps one of the blessings, of this planet that anyone can experience this transformation of the world. Also, anyone can be its object. What a commonplace girl, the reader may say: naive, ignorant, thoughtless, not even particularly beautiful. Or else you have misdescribed her. I can only say that until that moment I could not see her. And I have tried, as an honest narrator, to reveal her so far only dimly, through the casual blinded consciousness of the person that I was. Now I could see. Can any lover doubt that now he sees truly? And is the possessor of this enlivened vision not really more like God than like a madman?