Hamnet(99)
There it is again: Hamlet.
Agnes bites her lip until she tastes the tang of her own blood. She grips her hands together.
They are saying it, these men up there on the stage, passing it between them, like a counter in a game. Hamlet, Hamlet, Hamlet. It seems to refer to the ghost, the dead man, the departed form.
To hear that name, out of the mouths of people she has never known and will never know, and used for an old dead king: Agnes cannot understand this. Why would her husband have done it? Why pretend that it means nothing to him, just a collection of letters? How could he thieve this name, then strip and flense it of all it embodies, discarding the very life it once contained? How could he take up his pen and write it on a page, breaking its connection with their son? It makes no sense. It pierces her heart, it eviscerates her, it threatens to sever her from herself, from him, from everything they had, everything they were. She thinks of those poor heads, their bared teeth, their vulnerable necks, their frozen expressions of fear, on the bridge, and it is as if she is one of them. She can feel the shiver of the river, their bodiless sway and dip, their voiceless and useless regret.
She will go. She will leave this place. She will find Bartholomew, mount that exhausted horse, ride back to Stratford and write a letter to her husband, saying, Don’t come home, don’t ever come back, stay in London, we are done with you. She has seen all she needs to see. It is just as she feared: he has taken that most sacred and tender of names and tossed it in among a jumble of other words, in the midst of a theatrical pageant.
She had thought that coming here, watching this, might give her a glimpse into her husband’s heart. It might have offered her a way back to him. She thought the name on the playbill might have been a means for him to communicate something to her. A sign, of sorts, a signal, an outstretched hand, a summons. As she rode to London, she had thought that perhaps now she might understand his distance, his silence, since their son’s death. She has the sense now that there is nothing in her husband’s heart to understand. It is filled only with this: a wooden stage, declaiming players, memorised speeches, adoring crowds, costumed fools. She has been chasing a phantasm, a will-o’-the-wisp, all this time.
She is gathering her skirts, pulling her shawl about her, getting ready to turn her back on her husband and his company, when her attention is drawn by a boy walking on to the stage. A boy, she thinks, unknotting and reknotting her shawl. Then, no, a man. Then, no, a lad – halfway between man and boy.
It is as if a whip has been snapped hard upon the skin. He has yellow hair which stands up at the brow, a tripping, buoyant tread, an impatient toss to his head. Agnes lets her hands fall. The shawl slips from her shoulders but she doesn’t stoop to pick it up. She fixes her gaze upon this boy; she stares and stares as if she may never look away from him. She feels the breath empty from her chest, feels the blood curdle in her veins. The disc of sky above her seems at once to press down on her head, on all of them, like the lid of a cauldron. She is freezing; she is stiflingly hot; she must leave; she will stand here for ever, on this spot.
When the King addresses him as ‘Hamlet, my son,’ the words carry no surprise for her. Of course this is who he is. Of course. Who else would it be? She has looked for her son everywhere, ceaselessly, these past four years, and here he is.
It is him. It is not him. It is him. It is not him. The thought swings like a hammer through her. Her son, her Hamnet or Hamlet, is dead, buried in the churchyard. He died while he was still a child. He is now only white, stripped bones in a grave. Yet this is him, grown into a near-man, as he would be now, had he lived, on the stage, walking with her son’s gait, talking in her son’s voice, speaking words written for him by her son’s father.
She presses a hand to either side of her head. It is too much: she isn’t sure how to bear it, how to explain this to herself. It is too much. For a moment, she thinks she may fall, disappear beneath this sea of heads and bodies, to lie on the compacted earth, to be trampled under a hundred feet.
But then the ghost returns and the boy Hamlet is speaking with it: he is terrified, he is furious, he is distraught, and Agnes is filled by an old, familiar urge, like water gushing into a dry streambed. She wants to lay hands on that boy; she wants to fold him in her arms, comfort and console him – she has to, if it is the last thing she does.
The young Hamlet on stage is listening as old Hamlet, the ghost, is telling a story about how he died, a poison coursing through his body, ‘like quicksilver’, and how like her Hamnet he listens. The very same lean and tilt of the head, the gesture of pressing a knuckle to the mouth when hearing something he doesn’t immediately comprehend. How can it be? She doesn’t understand it, she doesn’t understand any of it. How can this player, this young man, know how to be her Hamnet when he never saw or met the boy?
The knowledge settles on her like a fine covering of rain, as she moves towards the players, threading her way through the packed crowds: her husband has pulled off a manner of alchemy. He has found this boy, instructed him, shown him, how to speak, how to stand, how to lift his chin, like this, like that. He has rehearsed and primed and prepared him. He has written words for him to speak and to hear. She tries to imagine these rehearsals, how her husband could have schooled him so exactly, so precisely, and how it might have felt when the boy got it right, when he first got the walk, that heartbreaking turn of the head. Did her husband have to say, Make sure your doublet is undone, with the ties hanging down, and your boots should be scuffed, and now wet your hair so it stands up, just so?