Hamlet Revenge!

by Michael Innes

  Gott’s hand, groping for a cigarette-case in the pocket of his dinner-jacket, closed upon a proof of the printed programme that would be distributed on Monday night. ‘The play produced by Giles Gott, MA, FBA, Hanmer Reader in Elizabethan Bibliography, Fellow of St Anthony’s College.’ Everyone else had been shorn of distinction; Claudius was ‘Edward Crispin’ and as Polonius the Lord Chancellor of England was plain ‘Ian Stewart’ as he had been in Hampstead long ago. But with her producer the Duchess – with a sound eye for effect, no doubt – had piled it all on. And Gott recalled the slightly satirical eye of Professor Malloch in the drawing-room. He was up to the neck in it and it must go through.

  His mind turning to ponder over detail, he climbed back to the upper terrace at the eastern end of the main building. Here there is a colonnade, lit at night by a vista of subdued lights in the entablature. Under the lights was the Lord Chancellor. And Gott suddenly saw that his own speculations and doubts of a moment before were something of infinitesimal significance in the world.

  Lord Auldearn was pacing absorbedly up and down, with a strange, forward-lurching gait that suggested more than the beginnings of physical decay. Indeed, he seemed very old; older by ten years than when he sat gaily talking to his hostess at dinner. In his hand was what appeared to be an official document. On his face sat an utter gravity, the utter gravity of a great savant or a great statesman in some crisis of thought or action. Gott watched him for a long moment; then turned round and retreated as he had come.

  3

  Looking back on the days immediately preceding the play Gott was to see them – and that despite the practical bustle with which they were filled – as an orgy of talk. Serious, pseudoserious, and idle, relevant to Hamlet and irrelevant, general and tête-à-tête, sustained and fragmentary; there was talk in every category. Most of it was talk that would naturally fade from the mind in a day. But soon circumstances were to compel Gott to dredge up every accessible scrap of it from oblivion, to sift and search it as he had never perhaps sifted and searched before.

  Saturday morning saw an encounter with Charles Piper in their common bathroom. ‘I can usually’, said Piper over the turning of taps, ‘get five to eight hundred words out of a hot bath.’

  ‘Often’, replied Gott, unwarily stepping into the position of a fellow-author, ‘I get a new start from brandy and muffins.’

  ‘Really…and muffins? I never heard of that.’ Piper eyed Gott as one might eye a suddenly perceived object of minor but authentic interest in the Victoria and Albert Museum. ‘And what’, he asked with sober interest, ‘brought you to detective stories?’

  ‘Moral compulsion. The effort to give a few hours’ amusement as a sort of discount on many hours’ boredom.’

  Piper dropped this response after a moment’s consideration into some mental pigeon-hole – was it Evasion or Unsuccessful Humour or Academic Psychology? – and proceeded to further interrogation. ‘Would you say’, he asked solemnly, ‘that fiction proper and narrative melodrama are absolutely distinct kinds?’

  ‘I doubt if there is necessarily an absolute line. Dickens wrote a mix-up of novel and melodrama – and very successfully.’ Gott paused to turn on the shower. ‘Of course fiction commonly uses a finer brush all through. It avoids labels except where they are functionally necessary: Hot, Cold. Melodrama runs on big splashy labels: Bath Mat. None of your aristocratic restraint.’ And Gott pointed to the unembellished cork surface at his feet.

  Piper, again with a pause for the docketing procedure, turned from question to statement. ‘I think myself that they come from different parts of the mind. Fiction belongs to what’s called the Imagination. Melodrama belongs to the Fancy; it’s a bubbling up of the suppressed primitive, a subconscious on holiday, fantasy.’

  ‘I think that’s a novel notion,’ said Gott, looking at Piper with an innocent and admiring eye. But Piper, delaying only to record Irony in his invisible notebook, pursued his thought.

  ‘I see the difference in my own waking and dream life. My waking life is given to imaginative writing – writing in which the chief concern is values. But my dreams, like melodrama, are very little concerned with values. The whole interest is on a tooth and claw level. Attack and escape, hunting, trapping, outwitting. A consciousness all the time of physical action, of material masses, and dispositions as elements in a duel. And, of course, the constant sense of obscurity or mystery that haunts dreams. If I wrote melodrama it would be out of dreams.’

  ‘And what of Shakespeare’s drama of primitive intrigue, Hamlet? Is that an example of the melodramatic and the imaginative working together?’

  Piper meditated. ‘Perhaps’, he said, ‘it’s a failure on that account. The melodramatic material taken over by Shakespeare may not have been susceptible–’

  But this was a theme on which Gott conducted some dozen laborious discussions with some dozen more or less laborious undergraduates every year. During some part of Piper’s following remarks, in consequence, he was guilty – like the Great Lexicographer in similar circumstances – of abstracting his mind and thinking of Tom Thumb.

  ‘…And I should find it irresistible,’ said Piper.

  Gott nodded comprehendingly. ‘Irresistible.’ But Piper was not deceived. He made his invisible note, Donnish exclusiveness; inattentive to outside opinion, and patiently began again.

  ‘I probably suppress the melodramatic in myself: I don’t read it, for one thing. But it’s there waiting to bubble up. And as it doesn’t get into my writing it would like, I think, to get into my life. If a sort of Ruritania came my way – cloak and sword adventure – I should jump at it. And, as I say, in real life I should find your sort of business – neatly disposing of a corpse and so on – irresistible.’ Piper adjusted the large horn-rimmed glasses through-which he normally contemplated the world. ‘As irresistible’, he added conscientiously, ‘as a lovely and willing woman.’ He threw open the bathroom window. ‘Do you do deep breathing? I always do.’

  It was possible, said the Duke as he hovered indecisively between the kidneys and the bones, that his mother might come over from Horton Ladies’ for the play. Diana Sandys, sitting beside Anna Merkalova, observed that the dowager Duchess was a very strict old lady. Piper made his note, All girls cats by twenty; Noel looked reproachfully at Diana; Elizabeth looked speculatively at Gott. Bunney, surrounded by an irreproachable American breakfast, was interested. ‘How old?’ he asked the Duke.

  ‘Eh? Oh – ninety-four.’

  Bunney’s eyes widened. ‘Vigorous?’

  ‘Uncommon.’

  ‘Not – deaf, by any chance?’

  Mrs Terborg was looking sternly at her countryman over her coffee. The Duke replied that his mother was certainly not deaf, but added that she now lived in almost unbroken retirement. Bunney nodded inexplicably. ‘Most important!’ he said. ‘Do you think she would co-operate? Ninety-four and living out of the world; you see how important that is?’ He looked almost pleadingly at the Duke. ‘Your mother is probably substantially uncontaminated.’

  ‘Uncontaminated!’

  ‘Uncontaminated.’ Bunney made brief calculations. ‘I think,’ he said – his eye fixed meditatively on Timothy Tucker – ‘she will almost certainly say hijjus. And indjin,’ he added – looking at Mr Bose. Suddenly a gleam came into Bunney’s eye. ‘She may even say gould! It would be a big thing to find a gould.’ He turned to Gott as to a fellow sage. ‘You remember Odger maintains gould to have died with the late Lady Lucy Lumpkin in 1883?’

  The Scamnum running breakfast was now at its busiest. Some twenty people were scattered round the big tables; three or four more were foraging among the hot plates. But Bunney had now attracted the attention of the whole company. And he expanded under notice. ‘Your butler is an interesting man,’ he told the Duke, ‘a most interesting man. He was born, you know, in Berkshire, and so were his parents. But almost certai
nly the family came from Kent. There are certain slack vowels…’ And just as interest in Bunney was dissipating itself he succeeded in recalling it abruptly. ‘Bagot was good enough to co-operate last night. I asked him to repeat the Lord’s Prayer.’

  The Duke looked blankly at his guest. ‘Asked Bagot to repeat the Lord’s Prayer! Really, Dr Bunney, you must meet my head gardener, Macdonald. You would interest each other.’

  ‘The Lord’s Prayer,’ affirmed Bunney, beaming round. ‘It affords a number of interesting collocations of speech-elements. Bagot was good enough to co-operate, and here it is.’ And stooping down to his feet, Bunney produced the black box and flicked a switch. The table fell silent in somewhat shocked expectation. Then the black box spoke, in a high falsetto.

  ‘I will not cry Hamlet, revenge,’ said the black box.

  There was a startled pause and then a dry voice spoke from down the table. ‘An unfamiliar version, my dear sir.’ This was Sir Richard Nave.

  ‘Kentish or Berkshire, Dr Bunney?’ This was Professor Malloch: both these had arrived since the mysterious messages had been in prominence.

  Bunney was staring at his machine much as Balaam may have stared at his ass. Noel took it upon himself to enlighten the new arrivals. ‘If Miss Terborg will steel herself, I’ll explain. It’s the Black Hand. He was operating yesterday and here he is again. Only he seems to have changed his mind; quite turned over a new leaf, in fact. He will not cry “Hamlet, revenge.”’

  ‘Why should he change his mind, I wonder?’ It was the competent Mrs Terborg who took up the theme. The previous evening, no doubt, she had realized as Gott had done that the Black Hand was generally disturbing; now she saw the advantages of giving the subject an airing on a whimsical plane. ‘I think Black Hands ought to pursue a more consistent policy if they want to impress. Not that Dr Bunney doesn’t seem impressed.’

  ‘It’s a comfort to think’, Miss Terborg One carried on briskly, ‘that even if we don’t discover the identity of the Black Hand Dr Bunney will be able to identify his grandfather’s and grandmother’s home-town.’

  ‘I think it’s creepy,’ said Miss Terborg Two.

  Gott, Noel, Nave, and Malloch made their way to the Banqueting Hall together. It was rather awkward, Noel felt, about Malloch. Crucible, Noel’s publication, did not usually much concern itself with the merely learned of the world; it contented itself with occasional shadowing of all such under the generic figures of a certain Professor Wubb and his assistants Dr Jim-jim and Mr Jo-jo. But it had taken notice of Professor Malloch; in fact it had reviewed his Hamlet study, The Show of Violence. And Malloch had written a dry little reply. Confronted now by Malloch as a guest at Scamnum, Noel was disposed to see this reply as having been, in a way, a compliment. At the time, it had seemed an incitement: Professor Malloch and Professor Wubb had in consequence been ludicrously interwoven in certain editorial paragraphs of Crucible. Noel had just read these over in bed and although they still seemed funny – Noel’s editorials were usually considerably gayer than the productions of his contributors – they had struck him as distressingly childish as well. And here was Malloch in the flesh; dry, courteous, incredibly learned, and apparently a constant and critical reader of Crucible from cover to cover. It was really very awkward.

  ‘And the story’, Malloch was saying, ‘of the hydrocephalic children at the funeral of the girl who used to torture the cats – I wonder if the writer took medical advice?’

  ‘I suppose he is a little unbalanced,’ said Noel uncomfortably. ‘Ah, yes. But I mean advice on the likelihood of the story. Nave, do you read Mr Gylby’s journal? There was a story about hydrocephalic children…’ And Malloch proceeded to enlist the physician in the task of demolishing the pathological basis of Crucible’s last masterpiece. Yes, he was incredibly learned; he seemed to know more about it all than Nave himself. That was always their way, Noel thought. Accumulate enormous stores of information – always the right factual brick ready to throw at you. Meanwhile, anxious Crispin courtesy was the rule. Respectfully, he drew attention to a magnificent Fantin-Latour on the wall. Whereupon, Malloch made certain knowledgeable observations on Fantin-Latour.

  Gott had taken up another semi-medical theme with Nave.

  ‘Have you noticed the American twins? It’s impossible to tell them apart – until they begin talking. Vanessa is distinctly intelligent and Stella is almost witless. That’s unusual, is it not?’

  Nave nodded. ‘Distinctly so. They’re clearly identical twins’ – he searched for the technical word – ‘uniovular. That means that they have an identical hereditary equipment. If their intelligence is markedly unequal it’s an extraordinary interesting thing psychologically, because the difference must be an accident of nurture or environment. I must have a talk with them.’

  The psychologist was plainly interested. But Gott had a problem of his own. ‘They are physically identical to the naked eye – but would they be that microscopically, so to speak? What about fingerprints, for instance?’

  Nave, who was probably unaware of Gott’s hobby, looked vaguely surprised. ‘I’m really not sure. But I should think…’

  Malloch, walking behind with Noel, interposed: ‘Galton investigated the fingerprints of uniovular twins. He found that, although remarkably similar, they were never indistinguishable.’

  Gott abandoned an interesting possibility. Noel, pacing beside the invincible Malloch, could almost be heard to groan. At the door of the hall he positively embraced the hovering figure of Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt.

  And now one of Gott’s nervous moments had arrived: his stage was to undergo its first expert scrutiny.

  ‘Ah,’ said Malloch, ‘the Fortune.’

  ‘Yes. The hall being rectangular, I thought it best to take something like the Fortune as a model.’

  Malloch looked dubious. ‘I should have been inclined to take the Swan. However unreliable De Witt’s drawing may be…’

  And the two authorities drifted away in a courteous battle of technicalities.

  Meanwhile Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt’s voice rose in a squeal of protest. ‘But there’s no curtain!’

  Noel grinned. ‘Oh yes there is – a little one there at the back.’ And the amusements of delivering himself in his old tutor’s best lecture-room manner suddenly striking him, he continued gravely: ‘It is necessary to remember that the Elizabethan theatrical companies originally presented their plays in the yards of London inns–’

  ‘In public-houses?’ exclaimed Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt. ‘A most disorderly arrangement!’

  ‘So the puritan faction thought. They produced manifestos and protests about it which you would probably find technically interesting. Well, as I say, the players simply put up a platform in the yard of an inn and acted on that. The expensive part of the audience sat looking down from the galleries or rooms of the inn–’

  ‘Or sat on the platform itself,’ interposed Nave, who had abandoned the scholars.

  ‘Or sat on the platform on three-legged stools beside the actors,’ agreed Noel, ‘the nasty one spitting tobacco and crying “filthy, filthy!”

  ‘Disgusting,’ said Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt.

  ‘And the common people simply stood on the ground round the platform; they were called the groundlings.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt blankly.

  ‘I think because they stood on the ground. They were also occasionally called the understanders–’

  ‘Understanders?’

  ‘Perhaps a joke. Well, the platform was surrounded on three sides by the audience, and the fourth no doubt abutted on certain rooms that the actors used for dressing-rooms, entrances, and exits, and so forth. When they began to build theatres of their own what they built was still uncommonly like a platform in an inn-yard. Here it is.’ And Noel led the way forward and assisted Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt to mount the l
ow platform which projected from the middle of the hall. ‘This platform is the front stage, where most of the action of a play takes place. It ought to be under the open sky, just as an inn-yard was. And, as you see, we shall try to get a similar effect on Monday by lighting it from directly above with arc-lamps. The audience, sitting round the hall, will be more or less in shadow. Gott felt a bit dubious about a modern audience feeling comfortable in a full light.’

  ‘The effect’, remarked Nave, ‘should be rather like a boxing-ring in a stadium.’

  ‘Boxing!’ said Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt, in tones that conveyed whole manifestos against Degrading Spectacles.

  Noel nodded. ‘Yes. Only here the platform or arena isn’t actually islanded in the audience. On one side it runs back to what is the really interesting part of the theatre, You remember I said that in the inn-yard one side of the platform abutted on certain rooms and so forth? Well, the players used a bit of the galleries in that quarter as well. They liked to be able to act on two levels. So they used the first gallery at the back of the stage for “aloft” and that sort of thing. The upper stage, it’s called. Enter Lord Scales upon the Tower, walking: then enter two or three citizens below.’