The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  A skinny, white-bearded man in somber black enters: Polonius. He too comes out with Shakespeare’s lines:

  And I do think, or else this brain of mine

  Hunts not the trail of policy so sure

  As it hath used to do, that I have found

  The very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy….

  He, Claudius, Gertrude, and the attendants exit together.

  Guildenstern and Rosencrantz stand alone on the stage once more. They look wildly in all directions, as if wondering what has just happened to them. When a cheapjack, gimcrack building falls down and men scramble and stagger from the ruins, their faces bear such expressions of horrified amazement. London is full of buildings like that. Shakespeare has seen such expressions before. Rarely has he seen them done so well in the theatre.

  “I want to go home,” Rosencrantz says, and the plaintiveness in his voice pierces Shakespeare to the root.

  The two players talk on. They are not, or they seem not to be, in Hamlet any more. They have returned to the other play, the bizarre play, the one they inhabited until Claudius and Gertrude and Polonius swept them up and carried them away and…left them high and dry. They might be nothing more than a couple of twigs abandoned, for the moment, by the tide. What can they do, where can they go, by themselves? Nowhere, not till that impetus, or some impetus, seizes them again.

  Watching them abandoned there, Shakespeare feels his rage against this Tom Stoppard all at once fall away. “Sweet Jesu!” he whispers. Almost, almost, he crosses himself. His father followed the Romish faith in secret. Some leanings that way linger in him still. But to show them…to show them is to ask for a nasty end to his days.

  He knows that. How can he not? Even so, he nearly betrays himself, so vast is his astonishment. No wonder his rage falls by the wayside. He has no room for it within himself, not any more. He suddenly sees why Stoppard has appropriated Hamlet for his own purposes. The stranger has found questions in drama Shakespeare knows he never would have dreamt of for himself, not if he were to live another 300 years and more.

  Up on the stage, Guildenstern is saying, “A man standing in his saddle in the half-lit half-alive dawn banged on the shutters and called two names. He was just a hat and a cloak levitating in the grey plume of his own breath, but when he called we came. That much is certain—we came.”

  How many messengers and knights and nobles and constables and other such folk has Shakespeare written into his plays? More than he can remember. More than he can count if he could remember. What do they do? Whatever the action requires of them. They come on stage. They say their lines and make their motions. Sometimes they exit.

  Sometimes they die.

  In a way, that is as it should be. The play could not advance without them. But never has Shakespeare thought to wonder what the world—the world of the play, the world within the play, the world as a whole—might look like through the eyes of such a personage. A playwright is but a lesser God. How do his smaller, less favored creatures live—do they live?—when his eye is not fully on them?

  Like this Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, perhaps?

  They are damned. And the worst of their damnation is, they know not that they are damned. They cannot cry, with poor dead Kit’s Faustus, Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. They have to try to kick against the pricks, until…the play is ended.

  Shakespeare waits to see how Stoppard chooses to end what he has begun. As he waits, as he watches, he sees things that escaped him earlier. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not quite the pair of identical zeds—unnecessary letters—he first took them to be. Rosencrantz has no real notion anything is wrong. Guildenstern sometimes does, but he cannot see what his troubles are or do anything about them. Which is the worse, the baser, futility? One more thing to ponder.

  And, whenever the action calls for them, both Danes fall back into Hamlet’s story, in which they are trapped like flies in sticky pine sap. Their diction and manner change. They have sudden purpose—Shakespeare’s purpose. But, although they are Hamlet’s schoolmates and thus longtime acquaintances, he is no more sure which is which than was his uncle before him.

  The tragedians and their spokesman also flutter on the fringes of the plot. They have more self-knowledge than Guildenstern or Rosencrantz: they know what they do. They know it from the inside out, too. Some of the words the playwright puts in the spokesman’s mouth…

  “You don’t understand the humiliation of it—to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable—that somebody is watching….” he howls. After a confused response (what else?) from Rosencrantz, he adds, “Don’t you see?! We’re actors—we’re the opposite of people!”

  Shakespeare starts laughing and finds he can’t stop. The woman crunching nutmeats edges away from him. So do the pockmarked man and his ladylove Lucy. They don’t think it’s funny. They think he’s funny, and in no good fashion. He feels sorry for them. They must never have performed.

  As Rosencrantz and Guildenstern likewise recoil, the spokesman dons calm like a mantle. And, as with a mantle, who knows what that calm conceals? “Think, in your head, now, think of the most…private…secret…intimate thing you have ever done secure in the knowledge of its privacy….”

  He waits. Rosencrantz looks guilty. Shakespeare no doubt looks guilty, too. So do most of the groundlings around him. Who wouldn’t, thinking of something like that? A born innocent, maybe. Or a born liar.

  “Are you thinking of it?” the spokesman asks softly. He springs at Rosencrantz like a lion. “Well, I saw you do it!”

  “You never! It’s a lie!” Rosencrantz says, but his voice is hopeless, doom-filled. He staggers away. Only when the spokesman pursues no farther does he realize the other man couldn’t have. He giggles in relief.

  So does half the crowd. Shakespeare would, but his mouth has gaped into a new O of admiration. How many players has he sent up on stage to love, to rage, to sin? Perhaps worst of all, to plot sins yet uncommitted? How many tens of thousands of eyes watched them feign both passions and solitude?

  Once or twice, he has played with this. As You Like It, with boys pretending to be maidens pretending to be youths…But, most of the time, while he writes he acts as if what is happening inside the audience isn’t layered so closely with what happens up on the stage.

  Meanwhile, this play goes on. “We only know what we’re told, and that’s little enough,” Guildenstern protests. “And for all we know it isn’t even true.”

  The spokesman only shrugs. “For all anyone knows, nothing is.” One more line to set the Master of the Revels’ teeth on edge!

  As the tragedians begin to rehearse the play with which Hamlet hopes to catch the conscience of the king, Guildenstern asks, “What is this dumbshow for?”

  “It makes the action that follows more or less comprehensible,” the spokesman explains. “You understand, we are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.”

  Beside Shakespeare, the woman with the bottomless sack of nutmeats screws up her face. “What’s that?” she says, as if the air will tell her. He quite likes the double mockery with the more than doubled deprecation. It is not his language, even if it is English—the intrusion of his language into this different one makes that plain. But, as the players can manage with his speech, so he can with theirs. And Tom Stoppard knows all its tricks.

  The tragedians’ pantomime includes two spies sailing off to England. Because of a letter, they meet their deaths at the hands of the English king. This fails to register fully on Guildenstern or Rosencrantz, though Rosencrantz wonders. What did he say early on? How do I know? We haven’t got there yet.

  But they will.

  And they do. They begin the third act (which will plainly be the last—strange structure, thinks Shakespeare, who is used to plays with five) on a ship. Hamlet is with them, too, as he must be—asleep, at the moment.

  Guildenstern comes as close to understanding as he ever does: “Free to
move, speak, extemporise, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact—that we, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bearing a letter from one king to another, are taking Hamlet to England.”

  Everything he says is true. None of it does him any good. He is trapped in the drama. Does he remember the tragedians’ pantomime, now when remembering might save him? He does not, nor will he and his comrade be saved.

  Sure as sure, he and Rosencrantz sleep. Sure as sure, Hamlet lifts their letter and substitutes his own. Sure as sure, the tragedians and their spokesman emerge from barrels by the rail. They are playing the tune they used when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern first met them. Shakespeare nods—a pretty touch, that.

  “Incidents! All we get is incidents!” Rosencrantz cries. “Dear God, is it too much to expect a little sustained action?!”

  At which, of course, the pirates attack. There is a mad scramble, people screeching and running and fighting and jumping in and out of barrels. Some of it sets the groundlings howling with laughter. Will Kempe would play well in such buffoonery, Shakespeare thinks. Kempe has left the craft, though, and fallen on hard times. He was a great name in London theatre. He is…nobody. It can happen to anyone.

  The pirates are beaten back. Hamlet goes missing—as he must, for his place in the remaining action lies in Elsinore. Is he any freer than Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, or only better written?

  Without Hamlet, but still with that letter, his hapless schoolmates struggle on. Guildenstern opens the letter. He discovers, to no one’s surprise but Rosencrantz’s and his own, that it means their deaths, not Hamlet’s.

  “But why? Was it all for this?” He turns to, and on, the tragedians’ spokesman. “Who are we?”

  “You are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. That’s enough.”

  Guildenstern stabs the spokesman, who dies, horribly. Even Shakespeare is impressed. Then, to the tragedians’ applause, the fellow revives. The prop knife—any company will have one—is revealed for what it is.

  “We’ve done nothing wrong. We didn’t harm anyone,” Rosencrantz says desperately. “Did we?”

  “I can’t remember,” Guildenstern says.

  Rosencrantz gathers himself. “All right, then. I don’t care. I’ve had enough. To tell you the truth, I’m relieved.” He falls through a trap door and is gone.

  “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, when we could have said—no. But somehow we missed it.” Guildenstern looks around. He stands all alone on the front of the stage. “Rosen—? Guil—?” Like Rosencrantz before him, he prepares for the inevitable. “Well, we’ll know better next time. Now you see me, now you—” A different trap opens beneath him. He too disappears.

  A curtain opens, showing the tableau from the end of Hamlet. Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet all lie dead, the Prince of Denmark in Horatio’s arms. Fortinbras stands off to the side. In come two English ambassadors. One of them delivers Shakespeare’s lines:

  The ears are senseless that should give us hearing

  to tell him his commandment is fulfilled,

  that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

  “He never gave commandment for their death,” Horatio answers, and goes on with his speech. Musicians play through his words, louder and louder—yet again, the tragedians’ tune. One phrase, though, Shakespeare makes out very plainly: “Purposes mistook fallen on the inventors’ heads.”

  The curtain closes again. The players step out through it for their bows and applause. They win—some. Shakespeare claps till his palms burn. The stout woman who’s eaten through the performance edges away from him again. She makes for the exit. So do almost all the groundlings, and their betters in the galleries. The Rose empties like a basin.

  Shakespeare goes the other way. He has to get backstage.

  He is acquainted with the bruiser at the tiring-room door. “Now, Master Will…” The fellow shuffles his feet in faint embarrassment. “‘Let no one in,’ they told me. And a fine, fat threepenny bit they gave me, too, to see that I hearkened.”

  “Surely, Ned, they meant but the general,” Shakespeare says. “I share the craft, and I’m fain to gratulate ’em on work well done.”

  “‘Let no one in,’ they said.” The bruiser is not inclined to bend. He has his reasons: “With a threepenny bit behind it, that carries weight.”

  “The scales should balance, then,” Shakespeare says with a sigh, and hands him another silver threepence. He pays three times as much to reach the tiring room as he did to get into the Rose. But he doesn’t begrudge the coin…too much.

  Ned weighs it in his hand. Has he the gall to insist the scales should better than balance? Have I the gall to name him Judas-rogue if he should? Shakespeare wonders. He is glad it does not come to that: Ned shrugs broad shoulders and opens the door he guards. “Come on, come on. Balance they do. If the players grumble, I’ll tell ’em you sneaked past me.”

  Inside, the after-the-play chaos seems hearteningly familiar. Half-dressed players scrub makeup from their faces and talk in loud voices of what has just gone well and what not so well—and of anything else that pops into their heads.

  But, after a heartbeat or two, it is not so familiar as all that. The players keep the sharp, unfamiliar accent they used on stage. They also keep the sharp, unfamiliar syntax that suffuses the parts of their play Shakespeare did not write. There sits the one who acted Ophelia, bantering easily with the rest. No boy ever born owns such firm, full, rosy-teated breasts.

  Shakespeare blushes to the roots of his hair. It is not as if he has never seen a woman—oh, no. But a woman player? He has never dreamt of such a strange, abnormous beast. She covers herself and scratches and curses as casually as any of the men.

  One of those men—the one who played poor, damned Guildenstern—notices Shakespeare. “Who the fuck’re you, Charlie?” he snaps.

  Hesitantly, Shakespeare gives his name. Then, when the player cups a hand behind his ear to show he has not heard, Shakespeare gives it again, this time loud enough to pierce the din.

  Silence slams down. All eyes swing his way. He has played before plenty of larger houses, but never one so attentive. “Wow! Oh, wow!” breathes the player who acted Ophelia. That is a woman’s voice. Once you see past the enormity of the notion (and once you see those ripe breasts), it becomes obvious.

  “Does look a little like him—damned if it doesn’t,” says the fellow who played the tragedians’ spokesman. Several others from the company nod. Shakespeare wonders how they know, or think they know, what he looks like.

  Before he can ask, the one who played Rosencrantz says, “Man, I never expected…this. But hey, I never expected any of this.” Again, several in the company nod. To Shakespeare, the man still sounds as bewildered as he did delivering his lines on the stage.

  The player who was Guildenstern sets hands on hips. “Okay, William Shakespeare, what the hell d’you want with us? Why’d you barge in here, anyway, and how much did you pay the hired muscle outside?”

  “I matched your threepence,” Shakespeare answers automatically, noting hired muscle for future use. Only then does he come back to the main question: “Why came I? To offer my praises to your clever Master Stoppard. See I him here before me?”

  “Well…no,” says the woman who was Ophelia. Her laugh sounds distinctly nervous, those of the other players even more so. “They brought us over to London for the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern centennial, and then….” Her voice trails away. She looks around the Rose’s cramped, mildewed tiring room.

  “Then all this weird shit comes down on us,” one of the tragedians says. The rest of the players nod again, this time in almost perfect unison.

  A couple of sentences, and they give Shakespeare more questions than he
knows what to do with. He tries one: “The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern…centennial?”

  “Isn’t that a word yet?” the woman asks, which sparks more questions. She goes on, “Means the hundred-year anniversary.”

  “Yes,” Shakespeare says—acknowledgment, not agreement. His mind races faster than a horse galloping downhill. Try as he will, he can’t mistake her meaning. If Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is dead itself—a century dead!—then Hamlet must be older yet. But his head had only a little more hair, and that only a little less gray, when he wrote it. An impossibility—an impossibility he has just seen staged. “How came you hither?” he inquires.

  “Good question. If there are no more questions, class dismissed,” says the man who played Rosencrantz.

  “Proof is left to the student. That’s what the old geometry books said, right?” adds the fellow who played Guildenstern. Maybe the responses mean something to them. Or maybe they truly are as witstruck by the strange fate that has entrapped them as were the characters they portrayed.

  “We were in London,” the young woman says. “And then we were in…London.” She says the same name twice. By the way she says it, the second London—this London—may lie beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, or whatever is farther away than that, from the one she knows.

  “When will you return thither?” Shakespeare asks.

  The players eye one another. Now they all shrug together. “We don’t know,” says the graybeard who played Claudius. On the stage, he effortlessly ordered Guildenstern and Rosencrantz about. Now he is as much out of his depth as they feigned being.

  Which leads Shakespeare to his next question, as inexorably as Hamlet’s disappearance led Guildenstern to open the fatal letter: “Will you return thither?”

  They look at one another again. They also look at Shakespeare—as if they hate him. And if they do, who can blame them? Are some questions not better left unfaced? “We don’t know,” the graybeard says once more, in a voice like ashes.