Hamlet Revenge!

by Michael Innes

  In the buzz of speculation that followed Gott glanced at Lord Auldearn. But the Lord Chancellor said nothing. That a similar joke had been played on himself he did not propose, apparently, to announce. Here, even in dealing with a pointless prank, was the statesman’s impulse to keep mum. But another statesman reacted differently. Gervase Crispin took Elizabeth up sharply: ‘Revenge! That’s odd. I had the same sort of thing myself the other day.’

  Mild curiosity ran round the table.

  ‘Yes. I had a telegram at the House before coming down here, Just two words.’

  This time Lord Auldearn spoke: ‘Two words?’

  ‘Hamlet, revenge!’

  ‘Curious about those messages,’ said the Duke when the men were alone. ‘Who would play a trick like that?’ He looked lazily and amiably round his guests; the very anti-type, thought Gott, of King Claudius of Denmark. ‘Funny thing.’

  ‘A bad thing!’ said the black man suddenly and emphatically. It was his first utterance to the company at large, and everybody started. ‘It is very wicked to send a curse!’

  ‘I don’t know about its being a curse,’ said Timothy Tucker easily. ‘I think it’s just what we call a practical joke; and rather a feeble one at that. It’s curious that a person educated enough to know his Shakespeare should do such a futile thing.’

  ‘Odd the people who do know their Shakespeare,’ the Duke remarked. ‘I discovered this afternoon, for instance, that Macdonald, my head-gardener, knows his inside-out.’

  ‘Macdonald!’ said Lord Auldearn sharply. ‘Mr Gott, was it not Macdonald that we passed coming up the drive?’

  Gott nodded absently. ‘There’s a little more than mere knowledge of Shakespeare involved,’ he said.

  At this Max Cope, who had all the appearance of dozing comfortably in his chair, suddenly burst into high-pitched speech. ‘In fact, it’s “Puzzle find the oyster-wife” – eh?’ And looking cunningly round the table, he ended in the embarrassing giggle of great age. As far as Gott could judge, everyone except Lord Auldearn was bewildered by this. But no one seemed inclined to interrogate the venerable painter. Max slumbered again.

  ‘Cope means’, Gott explained, ‘that Crispin’s message, “Hamlet, revenge”, is not – as you may remember – actually from Shakespeare’s play. It was probably a line in an earlier play, now lost, and is first quoted as a joke in Lodge’s Wits Miserie in 1596: there is a reference there to a ghost that cried miserably in the theatre, like an oyster-wife, “Hamlet, revenge.” It doesn’t follow that our joker has any special erudition, but he does seems to have browsed about in an antiquarian way.’

  As Gott concluded this explanation he looked speculatively at Melville Clay. Clay, it occurred to him, should not have been bewildered by the oyster-wife; during the past few days he had been displaying a pretty thorough knowledge of the roundabouts of the Elizabethan drama. But Clay dissipated this speculation now. ‘Of course!’ he said eagerly. ‘I’d quite forgotten. And there are other references too. It was quite a familiar quip.’

  Gott nodded. ‘Yes. But it doesn’t really help us to the identity of the joker. What about where the messages came from?’

  ‘Mine,’ said Noel, ‘was posted in the West End this morning.’ There was a pause in which all eyes were turned on Gervase Crispin. But Gervase kept silence until directly challenged by the Duke. Even then he spoke with a shade of reluctance.

  ‘My telegram,’ he said quietly, ‘was sent off from Scamnum Ducis.’

  At this it was suddenly clear to everybody that speculation about the messages, pushed forward idly enough, had reached some point of obscure uncomfortableness. Everybody except Piper, who saw nothing in the conversation that would write up, was interested; even Max Cope could be discovered on scrutiny to have one eye open still. But equally, everybody knew that the subject must be dropped. The Duke rose, and taking Cope’s arm, led the way to the drawing-room.

  Fresh arrivals were expected and the party was keeping together to welcome them. The Duchess contrived to establish one large circle and start a general discussion of the play. For a time it ran on practical lines: dresses, make-up, the next day’s rehearsals. Then it took a historical turn and the talk narrowed to those with special knowledge: Gott, the slightly uncomfortable specialist; Lord Auldearn, with rather more than a smattering of everything; Melville Clay, genuinely learned in the histories of all Hamlets that had ever been; and the Duchess, fresh from intensive reading. Garrick’s trick chair that overturned automatically on his starting up in the closet scene, the performance on board the Dragon at Sierra Leone in 1607, Mrs Siddons and other female Hamlets, the tradition that Shakespeare’s own best performance was as the ghost: the talk ran easily on. Mrs Terborg gave a formidably perceptive account of Walter Hampden’s celebrated Hamlet in New York in 1918. Elizabeth remembered how Pepys had once spent an afternoon getting ‘To be, or not to be’ by heart. And this gave the Duchess her chance. She immediately turned Clay to presenting Mr Pepys delivering the soliloquy to Mrs Pepys. Anything that Anne Dillon had once been used to impose on obscure young men at Hampstead she would never hesitate to impose on the great and the famous at Scamnum.

  There can be nothing more trying to an actor than being required to extemporize before a drawing-room – even a drawing-room of quick and sympathetic spirits. But Clay showed no trace of annoyance; the difficulty of the odd task had wholly possessed and absorbed him in a moment. He stood with knitted brows for perhaps twenty seconds, and then – suddenly – Pepys was in the room. And Gott, with no great opinion of the wits of actors, had the feeling that this two minutes’ tour de force – for it lasted no longer – was one of the most remarkable things he had ever seen. Anyone might know his Pepys and his Hamlet, but instantly to produce the sheer and subtle imaginative truth that was Clay’s picture of Pepys as Hamlet was a miniature but authentic intellectual triumph. Looking round the room amid the ripple of delighted exclamations, Gott saw Lord Auldearn’s eyes narrowed upon Clay as upon something suddenly revealed as formidable; saw that Charles Piper’s mind was racing as a writer’s mind will race when something extraordinary has occurred. And the thing had even got across to old Max Cope; the painter was cackling with delight. Only the intelligent Hindoo was looking intelligently bewildered. No doubt he had – following the weird system of education imposed upon his country – been examined both in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Pepys’ Diaries. But this sudden telescoping was beyond him.

  For the Duchess all this led up to something else. She now turned to a subject she had already frequently debated with Clay: Garrick’s Hamlet, and particularly his first encounter with the Ghost.

  ‘On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;

  ‘Twas only that, when he was off, he was acting,’

  quoted the Duchess.

  ‘Yes, but this wasn’t natural. It’s clear he took it too slowly; theatrically, you would put it. The St James’ Chronicle said so; even Lichtenberg said so – and Lichtenberg was an enthusiast.’

  Here, thought Gott, was a man who could talk his own shop in a mixed company, without a trace of self-consciousness. And everybody was interested.

  ‘And Garrick overstressed mere physical terror. That was Johnson’s opinion, Fielding’s opinion.’

  ‘One sees you see it,’ the Duchess let fall.

  And Clay was obviously seeing it. He was on his feet still, his brow again knitted, his eye upon David Garrick on the stage of Drury Lane nearly two hundred years ago. ‘The cloak and the big hat,’ he said softly, ‘it was all built up from them.’

  In an instant Noel was out of the room, to return with an enveloping opera cloak and a soft black hat – a hat with a monstrously exaggerated brim such as undergraduate devotees of the Muses delight to wear. ‘The hat’s not what it was,’ he explained cheerfully; ‘it and I have been pitched into the St Anthony’s fountain together before now. B
ut it may serve.’

  Clay took the cloak at once and threw it round himself; then he jammed the hat apparently at random on his head. Gott felt sub-acute discomfort in himself; divined it in others. They were confronted by something grotesquely incongruous: a man in exquisite evening dress, set off by the black and scarlet of a twentieth-century dandy’s cloak, with a parody of a Montparnasse hat perched on his head – and now proposing to convert this elegant drawing-room, with its Whistlers, Dillons, and Copes, its Ming and ’Tang, into the battlements of Elsinore. But Clay, with a glance round at the lighting, had stepped to a door and flicked at the switches to get the effect he wanted: one area of subdued light in a farther corner of the darkened room. ‘Horatio,’ he called gaily, ‘remember your lines!’ And he took up his position in the little circle of dim illumination.

  And then quietly, without any attempt at dramatic illusion, and as a teacher might enunciate Shakespeare from behind a lectern, Clay spoke Hamlet’s lines as they follow on the noise of revelry borne up to the battlements:

  ‘The king doth wake tonight and takes his rouse,

  Keeps wassail and the swagg’ring upspring reels:

  And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,

  The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out

  The triumph of his pledge…

  And, obediently, from the midst of the little audience came the voice of Piper as Horatio:

  ‘Is it a custom?’

  Clay looked across and smiled – still Melville Clay reciting quietly in the Scamnum little drawing-room:

  ‘Ay marry is’t,

  But to my mind, though I am native here

  And to the manner born, it is a custom

  More honoured in the breach than the observance.’

  And as the speech proceeded Clay imperceptibly, like a cinematograph trick – faded out and Hamlet – David Garrick’s Hamlet – grew into being. Shakespeare in the eighteenth century – here was another scholar–actor’s subtlety indefinably but lucidly conveyed. Gott, watching fascinated, heard beside him Bunney’s gasp of astonishment as the very vowels and consonants came over with the shading of 1750. The knotty, difficult speech, that throws the hearer’s mind into a half-darkness of its own, proceeded – accompanied by an increase of mere physical blackness. A turn of the shoulder began to hide the lower part of the face; an inclination of the head brought the hat over the eyes. For a moment there was a mouth, a nose only; then blackness save for two eloquently moving hands. The voice searched on:

  ‘…these men,

  Carrying I say the stamp of one defect,

  Being nature’s livery, or fortune’s star …’

  One hand disappeared; then the other: the speech ended in darkness answering darkness, the voice dying away in the impenetrable obscurity of the final lines:

  ‘…the dram of evil

  Doth oil the noble substance of a doubt,

  To his own scandal.’

  The cloak had fallen annihilatingly round the immobile figure. There was a long moment’s silence in which Gott had time for the fleeting reflection that Miss Terborg Two might well make this juncture occasion for another scream. Then Piper’s voice:

  ‘Look, my lord, it comes!’

  No one missed the actual presence of the Ghost in the minute that followed. With the rapidity of an athlete Clay had whirled round upon himself and stiffened as instantly into a convention of retarded motion at once wholly theatrical and wholly terrifying. The hat had slipped to the ground, the cloak fallen back. Legs straddled, left arm flung wide and high, right arm bent with the hand hanging down and the fingers wide apart, the whole trembling figure of the man answered to the fixed, glaring terror on the face. Second after second of absolute silence crawled by. Then, on the hiss of an outgoing breath, came speech:

  ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!’

  With what seemed shattering rapidity there followed Melville Clay’s own musical laugh. The lights snapped on. The actor was patting Noel’s hat into shape with ironical precision. He had not turned a hair. ‘Garrick,’ he said, ‘was more effective, of course; but that was the idea.’

  Gott looked round the room. Lord Auldearn had disappeared. Nearly everybody seemed to be under the influence of a species of stage shock: the evocation, and more the abrupt dissipation of a piece of supreme theatre, had left the audience somewhat in the air. It was the Duke who lowered the tension. ‘You know, if I were the Ghost I think I’d be the more scared of the two!’ The Scamnum drawing-room recovered its momentarily shattered identity; congratulation, comment, animated discussion flowed on.

  Nevertheless, Gott felt a hint of constraint in the air. Elizabeth was looking, in some remote way, troubled; the Duchess was working particularly hard; the Duke had retreated a little further into the light-comedy part he seemed to cultivate. And there was a perceptible feeling of relief when the purr of cars on the drive announced the distraction of arrivals by the evening train.

  Ten-thirty at night is not a wholly polite hour at which to arrive for a long weekend: explanations, previously offered no doubt by letter, were reiterated now. Lord and Lady Traherne had been giving one of their colonial parties: never such oceans of colonials as this year! Sir Richard Nave had been lecturing to the Society for Improving Sex on ‘The Psychological Basis of Matrilinear Communities’. Professor Malloch had been conducting viva-voce examinations in his native Aberdeen, The Marryats had felt that a week away from London so early would be an experience, but things turned up so that only five days were possible. Tommy Potts explained that in Whitehall now one was worked like a nigger; one might as well be in the second grade. Pamela Hogg had been stepping into the midday train when she had had the most frightful news about Armageddon – intelligence obscure and even alarming until one realized that the matter concerned a horse. Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt had been demonstrating at the Albert Hall against something ill-defined but outrageous. An undevotional-looking banker was loud in laments at having missed the midday service: Paris–Croydon, it turned out to be – and the sequel of a novel and apparently remarkably hazardous route by land and water. A sparkling lady in full evening-dress declared herself as having come straight from her old governess’ funeral. A podgy MP, unconscious of a faint residual smear of lipstick on his bald head, murmured obscurely of committees.

  Sandwiches, whisky, hot soupy stuffs as if after a dance; some three dozen people, almost crowding the little drawing-room, laughing, chattering, exclaiming, eddying: was it, Gott wondered, what Elizabeth had called it – a barbarian holiday? Or was it really a polite society, with sufficient of a common code – tastes, attitudes, assumptions, intentions – to go through with this elaborate affair in front of it pleasedly and confidently? Did the Lord Chancellor of England and Pamela Hogg belong to a structure still sufficiently solid, sufficiently homogeneous for the one to play Polonius before the other? Or had the Duchess fabricated the idea of such a society out of the novels of her girlhood – and was the whole thing going to be an uneasy sham? What did Lord Auldearn think of this growing gathering? But Lord Auldearn was still invisible.

  Gott disengaged himself from Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt, who wanted him to sign some sort of manifesto or petition to the government of Brazil; dodged Professor Malloch, advancing with technical Shakespeare-scholarship in his eye; dodged Sir Richard Nave, discoursing blandly of the twilight of the Christ mythus, and slipped out upon the terrace. An uncertain moonlight was haunting the gardens, glittering on a sheet of water far below, adding folds and shadows to the silhouette of Horton Hill beyond. The babble of voices floated out through the windows; Gott strolled down broad steps to find silence on the farther terrace below. He stopped where the long flow of balustrade was broken by a massive, dimly outlined marble – a Farnese Hercules perhaps – and let his eye travel along the line of the downs. He was worried about this play.

  Yes, decidedl
y there was some uncomfortableness in the air; an uncomfortableness which must not grow if disaster was to be avoided. And it had its origin, he now felt, in the trivial foolishness of the mysterious messages. To begin with, the whole Hamlet plan was a little out – a whim imposed on this Scamnum world rather than something growing naturally from it. He himself had been to Scamnum often enough, but always before he had shed here his professional role of scholar and antiquary. Talking and contriving Elizabethan theatre in the Duchess’ drawing-room was disturbing; it induced a self-consciousness such as a Fellow of the Royal Society would feel if asked down to demonstrate the peculiarities of atom and electron. Centuries ago that sort of thing would have marched: when Fulke Greville and Giordano Bruno disputed on the Copernican theory in the drawing-rooms of Elizabethan London; when the noble family of Bridgewater moved through the stately dance and rhetoric of Milton’s Comus at Ludlow Castle. But now show was shop; and theatricals were theatricals – and the basic attitude of a scurrying contemporary society to them was that expressed by Sir Thomas Bertram when he put a stop to such nonsense in Mansfield Park.

  Leisure had gone. Of these people gathered here the abler were absorbed in the increasingly desperate business of governing England, of balancing Europe. And the others were not so much leisured as laboriously idle: fussing over Armageddon or demonstrating against brothers in Brazil. All in all, the Tragedy of Hamlet played at Scamnum Court, however seriously taken up by the persons chiefly committed, had to come to birth in a precariously viable air. True, the Duchess had carried out a sort of air-conditioning process with some subtlety. Tucker, Piper, the American ladies so ingeniously materialized from Henry James: these blended with Scamnum – or with the aspect of Scamnum the Duchess was concerned to emphasize – well enough. And here Gott arrived at the view that it was not after all so much a matter of the people as of the place. In its comparatively brief two hundred years of existence this enormous mansion had contrived to become heavy with tradition; and it was not a tradition – despite its Whig pretension of accepting whatever interested or amused – that squared readily with eccentricity. Just as the whole physical pile frowned down upon Peter Crispin’s Gothic hall, so the spirit of the place frowned rather upon the play that was to be performed there. Hence the effect upon the house-party of the scraps of typescript: they gave just that hint of a lurking, unfriendly presence which was needed to start this other feeling of a lurking incongruity in the whole affair – the incongruity which had been felt again when Melville Clay performed his dazzling tricks in the drawing-room.