When we had thought our command performance for the Poimen was our last and ultimate test, Kemp and the others had chosen King Lear for a variety of reasons, but perhaps because Lear’s infinitudes and nihilisms are more manageable—by man or any species—than Hamlet’s ever-expanding paradoxes.
I’ve seen the play a hundred times and performed in it, usually as Rosenkrantz, more than half that number of times, but it always knocks me on my ass.
In all of Shakespeare’s other plays, the characters that are larger than the play being performed—Falstaff, Rosalind, Cleopatra, the night porter in the Scottish Play, Mercutio—are either killed off or contained before they escape the deliberately confined double-sphered space of the play and theater. Not so with Hamlet and Hamlet. The play is about theater, not revenge, and is both the ultimate experience of theater and the ultimate comment on theater, and the strangely expanding consciousness of Hamlet—who begins as a student character prince about twenty years old and, “within a few weeks in the time of the play, ages to a wise man in his fifties at least— makes no pretense of following any story line other than Hamlet’s wildly leaping thoughts.
I strutted and fretted my enjoyable moments on the stage. The Muse’s cabiri bots still were not working (Tooley had found that all their organic parts were missing), so we extended the usual stage and acted on without lighting, which would have been redundant in the bright sunshine anyway—and tried to make our entrances and exits without looking up at the hovering shells and tentacle-mouths of the three Demiurgos.
My last scene was one that had been sometimes omitted in our shorter performances of the play—act 4, scene 4, where we encounter Fortinbras’s army on our way to the sea to sail to England, where Guildenstern and I are supposed to deliver Hamlet up to his execution but, according to offstage events, Hamlet will steal King Claudius’s execution request and substitute Guildie’s and my names instead, so presumably this is my swan song, and my last words to Alleyn… Hamlet… are “Will’t please you go, my lord?” but Hamlet is pleased to stay and to give what I call his “even for an eggshell” soliloquy. It’s especially odd, and I thought so this day under the shadow of the slowly shifting Demiurgos, that Hamlet seems to be praising Fortinbras, who is little more than a quarrelsome killing machine.
I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O,from this time forth
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!
In other words, Hamlet—the paragon of human consciousness and occasional conscience (although he showed little enough of that when he stabbed stupid-but-innocent Polonius through the arras curtain and announced to his mother that he was going to lug the guts to another room)—was praising bloody action in a thug’s nature rather than his own sublime awareness of morality and mortality.
And then the thought hit me like a stab between the ribs—Where the fuck is Heminges?
Still in Rosenkrantz costume, I ran up the ramp into the Muse and began throwing open hull hatches and sliding down ladders without my feet touching the steps.
Heminges was right where I expected him to be, in the Muse’s tiny room, but I hadn’t expected the heavy spade—the one the gravedigger was to use in his upcoming encounter with Hamlet—in his hands. He’d obviously already taken half a dozen swings at the Muse’s blue globe—the meta-glass was chipped and a few hairline cracks already extended from the niche where the spadeblade had fallen—and he was winding up to take another overhand swing when I leaped at him.
Heminges was fueled by a fanatic’s rage—I could see white froth at the corners of his open mouth—but I was heavier, stronger, and younger than the professional Iago. I grabbed the spade, we whirled, and I forced him back against the bulkhead, but not before I’d glimpsed the Muse… the physical Muse, whoever or whatever she was… floating in the red halo of her own hair, her newly young breasts almost touching the metaglass directly beneath the spade’s damage, her arms passively down by her naked hips, her palms forward, as if she were awaiting the next and final spade blow almost with anticipation.
Heminges and I lurched around the small compartment with the comic clumsiness of two grown men fighting each other to the death. All four of our hands were gripping the long spade handle chin-high between us. Neither of us spoke; both of us grunted. Heminges’s breath smelled of the whiskey we synthesized and broke out only after a successful performance.
Finally my youth and terror-augmented strength—combined with a lucky knee applied briskly to his codpieced balls—turned the tide and I forced Heminges against the bulkhead again and then up, up, the spade handle under his chin, until his toes left the deck. He hung there close to helpless. One final concerted press forward and I’d crush his Adam’s apple with the handle, or just choke the fucking fool to death.
Instead of smashing his larynx, I panted, “What are you doing?”
His eyes, already wide, grew as round as the dragoman’s but much madder. “I…break…the globe…” he panted, breathing whiskey fumes all over me, “and the fusion reactor goes critical. We… blow… those alien… cock-suckers… to hell.”
“Bullshit,” I said, dropping him so his feet hit the deck but not relenting the pressure of the spade handle against his throat. If I slammed it up under his chin, it would snap his neck. “Nothing can make the reactor explode. Tooley told me so.”
He tried to shake his head but it only resulted in the spade handle rubbing more skin from his already reddened neck. “She… told me… it would,” he gasped. His staring eyes were looking over my shoulder.
I released the pressure and turned to look at the Muse, the spade now hefted loosely in my hands. “How did she tell you?” I asked Heminges without turning to look at him. He was no threat. He’d slid down the bulkhead and was sprawled on the deck, panting and wheezing.
“Through dreams,” he managed at last. “She gets… into… my dreams. If the reactor goes critical, we can blow a hole in this Demiurgos sphere and all the air will rush out and…”
He stopped. He must have realized then how insane that idea sounded. As if the Demiurgos’s home—the ultimate Creation of the Creators—could be so easily damaged.
I did not speak to him then, but looked directly into the Muse’s blue eyes when I spoke. “Did you really tell him that? Did you really get into his dreams and tell him he could do this? If you can turn this ship… yourself… into a hydrogen bomb, you sure don’t need this aging Iago to help you do it. What the fuck are you up to, woman?”
The Muse smiled sadly at me but no voice came from the speaker grills on the wall.
I turned back to Heminges, stood over him, and handed him the spade. “Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes are almost finished with their scene,” I said. “Gough will be going on with his pickaxe without you. He’d just fucking love to take your part and deliver your lines. He’s always thought he’d make a better First Clown than you. I doubt if the goddamned Demiurgos will notice that there’s an assistant gravedigger missing.”