Hamlet Revenge!

by Michael Innes

  ‘Lord Scales?’ said Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt, looking dubiously round the hall for one of Scamnum’s plentiful peers.

  ‘In The Second Part of King Henry VI. And they used another gallery above that, maybe, just for blowing trumpets and so forth. But what is chiefly interesting is what happened below the upper stage, on the level of the front stage or platform proper. That’s where a curtain comes in. They simply hung a curtain from the gallery and the result was something very like a modern stage on a smallish scale right at the back of the platform. It was just a deep recess, with its own entrances, and across which they could draw and undraw a curtain. It’s called the rear stage. And just as the upper stage was used for “aloft” – Juliet’s balcony, city walls and that sort of thing – so the rear stage was “within”: Prospero’s cave in The Tempest, Desdemona’s bedroom in Othello–’

  ‘Or the Queen’s bedroom in Hamlet!’ said Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt with sudden enormous intelligence.

  ‘Wrong, as a matter of fact.’ It was Gervase Crispin who had strolled up and who spoke. ‘The Queen’s bedroom will be played on the front stage because the rear stage is needed for Polonius hiding behind the arras. Hamlet stabs through the curtain, pulls it back – and finds the corpse.’

  ‘I think’, said Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt, ‘that Shakespeare is sometimes rather dreadful.’

  Gervase laughed gruffly. ‘Not so dreadful as some of the others. Tell Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt about the Jew’s trapdoor, Noel.’

  ‘There’s a trap-door between the upper stage and the rear stage. We know it should be there from Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. The Jew sets a sort of man-trap in his “gallery” – the upper stage, that is. He arranges a concealed hole in the floor, with a nice boiling cauldron underneath. Then he falls through it himself, the curtain of the rear stage is withdrawn – and there he is nicely cooking in his own pot.’

  Piper had joined the group. ‘But there’s no trap-door here, is there?’ he asked. ‘It’s not necessary in Hamlet?’

  ‘Hamlet only needs a trap in the front stage. But Gott had the upper stage one built in, all the same. It’s there’, Noel added as Malloch and Gott approached once more, ‘to satisfy nice antiquarian sensibilities.’

  Timothy Tucker strolled up. ‘You know, this is very suggestive.’ He waved his hand around and addressed Gott. ‘It gives me an idea. You remember Spandrel’s idea when he published Death Laughs at Locksmiths? It was a story that all turned on skeleton keys. So Spandrel bought up about three thousand yards of copper wire and enclosed a foot with every copy. And soon everyone was trying to make their own skeleton keys to pick their own locks–’

  ‘Encouraging criminality,’ said Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt severely.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Sir Richard Nave with equal severity; ‘on the contrary, a healthy resolving of suppressed criminal tendencies in fantasy.’

  ‘Skeleton keys are apparently all nonsense anyway,’ said Tucker easily. ‘But what strikes me is this. Here’s a perfect material setting for a mystery: upper stage, rear stage, trap-doors, and what not. Why not write it up, Gott, and we could issue it with a cut-out model of the whole thing – Banqueting Hall, Elizabethan stage, corpse, and all? Toy-shops have the kind of thing: “Fold along the dotted line,” you know. I dare say we could run to coloured cardboard and a bright scrap of curtain. Everybody would set up his own model and study the mystery from that.’

  The publisher wandered away. ‘Dear me,’ said Malloch, ‘Mr Tucker seems to think you greatly interested in sensational fiction.’

  Noel, having suffered so much on account of Crucible, was ruthless. ‘Mr Gott,’ he explained courteously, ‘is the pseudonymous author of the well-known romances, Murder among the Stalactites, Death at the Zoo, Poison Paddock, and The Case of the Temperamental Dentist.’

  Malloch turned to Gott with no appearance of surprise. ‘This is most interesting. But in Death at the Zoo, now: I readily believe that the creature could be trained to fire the fatal shot. But the training of it by means of the series of sugar revolvers to swallow the real revolver? I asked Morthenthaler – you know his Intelligence in the Higher Mammalia? – and he seemed to think…’

  It was Gott’s turn to groan. To have an expert scrutiny of his stage remorselessly followed up by an equally expert scrutiny of his fantastic hobbyhorse was a stiff beginning to the day’s exertions. But just as Malloch was showing dangerous signs of proceeding from the natural history of Death at the Zoo to the toxicology of Poison Paddock, a diversion appeared in the form of the Duchess carrying a telegram.

  ‘Giles,’ she said briskly, ‘Tony Fletcher, the First Grave-digger, has mumps. I’ve sent for Macdonald and if you approve I’ll ask him. Everybody would be delighted, I think; and with luck I can persuade him.’

  Gott considered. ‘I don’t know that Macdonald is just the cut of a Shakespearean clown. I rather suspect him of being something much more like Prospero. But the Doric would be pleasant – and a real feast for Bunney’s box. Try him by all means. Here he is.’

  ‘Macdonald,’ said the Duchess, ‘I wonder if you would play the Sexton?’

  Macdonald reflected, ‘Your Grace will be meaning the First Clown?’

  ‘Yes. The Grave-digger.’

  ‘I could dae’t,’ said Macdonald, with conviction but without enthusiasm.

  ‘And will?’

  ‘Weel, ma’am, I dinna ken that I can rightly spare the time. Wi’ twa ignorant new laddies aye speiring aboot matter o’ elementary skill, and wi’ the green-hooses like to be half-pillaged o’ blooms…’

  ‘But we’re really relying on you, Macdonald. There’s nobody else who can possibly get it up.’

  There was a remote gleam of interest in Macdonald’s eye. ‘I’m no Kempt or Tarlton, your Grace, and I rather misdoot the songs. But there’s no question but it’s an interesting pairt. And wi’ a verra richt-thochted reference to the gardening craft – though ill-confoonded wi’ ditching and grave-making. And I’d hae to consult wi’ Mr Goot here on the queer reference to Yaughan…’

  ‘Why, Macdonald,’ exclaimed Gott, ‘you know the part already.’

  ‘I hae a common reader’s knowledge o’ the text,’ replied Macdonald with dignity. ‘And though the time’s short, your Grace, I’ll no say ye no. I’ll awa’ to study it noo, and hae a guid pairt o’ the lines by the afternoon.’ And Macdonald composedly withdrew.

  ‘Macdonald’, said Noel, ‘knows the Elizabethan clowns and the cruces Shakespearianae; a village Gott, in fact; a mute, inglorious Malloch; a pedant guiltless of his pupils’ blood.’

  ‘Mr Gylby’, explained Bunney to Lord Auldearn, ‘is paraphrasing Gray’s celebrated Elegy.’

  4

  By tea-time on Sunday Gott found his anxieties about the play lightened. His mind was now concentrated on this definite point and that; his more comprehensive doubts had dwindled. He felt that the tragedy of Hamlet was winning. That first lurking sense of uneasiness; the embarrassed feeling that the house-party was making itself a motley to the view; the apprehension lest some emanation of personification of Scamnum, like a ghostly Sir Thomas Bertram, might abruptly appear and bring all to a huddled and ignominious close – these things were gone. Instead, some thirty people had agreed to put an antic disposition on – and were enjoying it. The Duchess had worked hard; Mrs Terborg had talked amateur theatricals through the centuries: Elizabeth Kenilworth, Voltaire’s Ferney, Mme de Staël’s Coppet, Doddington under Foote, the Russian Imperial Court – she had talked, in fact, all she knew, which was a lot. The Black Hand, moreover, had gone out of business; or those favoured by its communications chose to be silent. And Macdonald’s last moment accession to the company – calculated stroke of a clever hostess that it was – was an immense success. Behind stage during rehearsals, the head-gardener held a sort of court. And he repeated the Shorter Catechism and ‘The Cotter’s Satur
day Night’ for the benefit of Bunney and – as he later discovered with some indignation – the black box.

  The practical business of those final days, with all the actors assembled, was, of course, that of fitting everything together. The principal characters were already well-drilled and the main tones of the production, Gott felt, were satisfactorily established. Melville Clay, with infinite tact, had perfected what was in effect a first-rate amateur Hamlet: quiet, with a minimum of business and movement, relying chiefly on the formal beauty of the verse and prose. In that virtuoso display of his in the little drawing-room he had glided imperceptibly in sixteen lines of blank verse from an enunciation merely academic to the full compass of a great actor in the grand tradition. On the stage in the Banqueting Hall it was as if he had found, somewhere in that progress, just the right point at which to halt for the purpose on hand. With this nursing of the company by an acute theatrical intelligence, with the ready acquiescence of the others in Clay’s simplified dramatic formula, with the absence of disturbing professional association which the novel staging would ensure, the play was likely to go well. All the principal players had amateur experience: the Duke had done that sort of thing – in Greek as far as he could remember – at school; the Duchess had played Portia to the satisfaction of Mr Gladstone; Piper had been in the OUDS – and so on. Nevertheless, to get a large amateur cast to run smoothly through a long play, far more rehearsal than that available would be necessary. There were bound to be hitches; Gott and Clay between them were busy foreseeing and eliminating what they could.

  Much was to depend on the rapidity and continuity of action which the reconstructed Elizabethan stage made possible. The play was to begin at nine o’clock; there was to be one interval only, taken at the end of the second act; it was to be over just before midnight. There was no scenery to change, and few properties to manipulate. Now on one and now on another of the three stage spaces – front stage, rear stage, upper stage – the action would run smoothly forward. As the first scene, ‘The Battlements of Elsinore’, ended on the upper stage, Claudius and his court would enter in procession for Scene Two, ‘The Council Chamber in the Castle’, on the front stage. And as soon as the last characters in this scene had made their exit the curtain of the rear stage would be drawn back, revealing Laertes and Ophelia in Scene Three, ‘A Room in the House of Polonius’. The curtain would no sooner be drawn again on this than Hamlet and his companions would appear ‘aloft’ for the meeting with the Ghost in Scene Four. In this way the play was assured something of the impetus it enjoyed three hundred years ago. An audience accustomed to the constant dropping of a curtain over a proscenium-arch and to a succession of elaborate stage sets might be disconcerted for a time, but they would be seeing Hamlet played in the manner in which Shakespeare himself had played in it.

  No expense – as Bunney commented – had been spared. The hall had been divided in golden section by a tapestried partition in the centre of which, and fronting the larger area, had been inset rear stage and upper stage, with a sort of dwarf turret crowning all, and with the front stage projecting far up the hall to the tiers of seats arranged for the audience. In the part of the hall behind the partition, there had been adequate room for all behind-stage necessities, including a green-room and a number of dressing cubicles. The hall was thus a self-contained unit, a complete playhouse in itself. Once the play began, no scurrying about between hall and the main buildings of Scamnum would be necessary.

  Just before the Saturday afternoon rehearsal, Gott was busy with a final review of properties. It was surprising, he was finding, how little paraphernalia – costumes apart – were either necessary or desirable when producing in the old way. A property too much and the non-representational character of the stage would be marred, with an uncomfortable result as of a fragmentarily set-up scene. Moreover, it was necessary to keep the front stage as bare as possible. The Elizabethan producer had cared almost nothing for continuous visual illusion; he would thrust a mossy bank – or even a lady in bed – out upon the front stage in the middle of a scene without a tremor. But a modern audience must not be unnecessarily disconcerted, and there must be as little shifting of properties on the open front stage as possible. Gott had finally reduced the front-stage properties to two thrones, with two benches added for the play scene, and a table added to that again in the last scene of all – furniture which servants could whisk on and off unobtrusively enough. To all intents and purposes the front stage was to be simply a bare platform throughout.

  The rear stage was different; behind its curtain one could move on and off anything one liked. Here, therefore, there would be more properties: different tapestries in different scenes, and various pieces of Scamnum’s most exquisite Jacobean furniture. Gott was contemplating the rear stage as set for the King’s prayer scene when the Duchess entered.

  ‘Giles, we can take that ungainly monster’ – and she pointed to a bulky prie-dieu which took up a good deal of the scene – ‘back to its home. I’ve got the most perfect faldstool – and a much better crucifix too.’ As she spoke two footmen came in bearing a crate. ‘I remembered the faldstool at Hutton Beechings, and I rang up Lucy Hutton and she’s sent it and the crucifix as well.’

  ‘It’s not a crucifix,’ said Gott when they had unpacked. ‘It’s a plain iron cross, which is perhaps better. And the faldstool is exquisite. They’ll do both for the King in the prayer scene and for Hamlet to point to at “Get thee to a nunnery”. By the way, has Yorick’s skull come? I’ve decided I don’t want any bones; only the skull.’

  ‘Old Dr Biddle is coming over to dinner and bringing it with him.’ Dr Biddle was the local practitioner, and he had promised to provide whatever remains of Yorick were required. ‘And, incidentally, he’s very keen to walk on. Do you think he could?’

  Gott nodded. ‘Certainly he can… There are plenty of spare costumes and he’ll make a most convincing attendant lord or venerable counsellor. I thought of putting Mr Bose on’ – Mr Bose was the black man – ‘but I am afraid he would look a little outré; something strayed in from a cinquecento Adoration of the Magi. As it is, he’s a capital prompter; knows the text backwards and has terrific concentration. I don’t think his mind will stray for a split second throughout. See where he comes.’

  ‘He would make a capital Ghost,’ said the Duchess, and seeing that the approaching Hindu had heard something of this remark, added: ‘Mr Bose, you should be the Ghost. Your movement is not earthly.’

  Mr Bose smiled – and his smile was something on which Charles Piper might have sat up all night elaborating paragraphs. It had at once the subtlety of Mona Lisa and the spontaneous gaiety of a Murillo beggar-boy; it was remote and utterly intimate, limpid and fathomless – the paragraph would have to be stuffed with such contradictions. And above all it was a sort of disembodied smile, just as the motion to which the Duchess had referred was a sort of disembodied motion. In his fictions Gott sometimes permitted himself a mysterious Oriental who was credited – on what he had described to Piper as the Bath Mat principle – with moving like a cat. Mr Bose moved not in the least like a cat, but strictly like a spirit, an esprit who had been caught by a spell and constrained to talk a giggling, difficult English, to charm and puzzle and alarm. Mr Bose giggled delightedly now.

  ‘I do not go tramp, tramp about your place, Duchess? It is because I do not eat too much, I think!’ Mr Bose radiated his quintessence of gaiety. He could give to mere facetiousness, Gott reflected, a something that made the finest Western irony gauche. And when he took a plunge into seriousness, talking with alarming suddenness and simplicity of the soul, he made one feel – as Noel put it – a great pink lout. Yet Mr Bose was a Bath Mat Oriental as well; he was ingratiating and he was wily, undoubtedly wily. And if one were surrounded by millions of Mr Boses most certainly one would feel that only the wiliness counted.

  ‘But in winter’, Mr Bose was proceeding more seriously, ‘perhaps I shall eat
an egg. I have my father’s permission for an egg – if constitutionally necessary.’ Mr Bose looked dubiously into the future; the possibility plainly troubled him. He stood on one leg, his habit when feeling unhappy.

  ‘I was saying’, Gott remarked, ‘that you are better than the best professional prompter. You know every line of the play.’

  Mr Bose forgot the threatening diet and giggled again with delight. ‘In my country our education is very largely memory – very largely. A Brahmin of the old school would not teach from books; much is thought too sacred to be written in any book. It is part of our training to learn by heart many thousands of lines of sacred texts. And so memory is developed. Very quickly I know an English text by heart; but to know what it means – that is more difficult. So I found, studying for the BA degree at University of Calcutta. Now I understand nearly everything – even Chaucer and much of Mr James Juice.’ Mr Bose sparkled to the Duchess in modest pride.

  But Gott was apprehensive lest Mr Bose, despite his efficiency as a prompter, might be feeling out of it. ‘I’m sorry’, he said when the Duchess had moved away, ‘that you’re not in the play. But you wouldn’t fit the colour-scheme, would you? I wonder if the Grand Mogul or somebody had an ambassador at the court of Elsinore?’ Mr Bose, Gott knew, delighted in banter of this sort. And now Mr Bose laughed.

  ‘One day at the Duchess’ place I will play Othello. The dusky Moor! And meantime I learn much – very much. If the Queen, though, had a little black boy…but that was later, was it not? And on this old sort of stage you cannot disguise people – eh? Black cannot be made white, nor old young, nor plain lovely?’