This thieving Stoppard, whoever he may be, answers the question by not answering it. He cares not a fig for what the audience needs to know. And, somehow, he makes the audience care not a fig with him.
When one of these players declares he’s won this game seventy-six times in a row, damned if titters don’t go up from the crowd. The claim is obviously impossible. Any fool knows a coin will not turn up heads seventy-six straight times. And any fool knows no one will be fool enough to let himself lose a game seventy-six straight times. Which makes Shakespeare and anyone else at the Rose with a groat’s worth of wit wonder why these players play this game this way.
And Shakespeare suddenly wonders whether this Stoppard will tell his auditors what they need to know. Whoever the rascal is, he plainly has a cozening heart. Shakespeare almost admires him. With reluctance, he does admire him—but for the title, the unknown poet hasn’t stolen anything from him.
Yet.
No. Not poet. Playwright. The two players—the one still steadily losing coins, the other as steadily winning them—speak prose, not blank verse. Shakespeare curls his lip at that. By their dress, by their manner, these men seem too highly placed in life to speak prose. Prose, to his way of thinking, is for gravediggers and other such base mechanicals. He has a long-practiced knack for putting ideas into verse. He’s always thought any other playwright would have it, too.
Little by little, he also notices they speak a peculiar kind of prose. He has no great trouble following what they say, but more often than not wouldn’t say it that way himself. No one sentence in their disjointed maunderings about why the coins keep coming up heads seems any too odd by itself. Taken all together, they leave him frowning even more than he is already.
The players have an odd accent, too. Shakespeare has heard a good many in his time, but he can’t place this one.
After the count reaches eighty-eight, the nameless fellow who is winning says, “I’m afraid—”
“So am I,” the other, also still nameless, breaks in.
“I’m afraid this isn’t your day.”
“I’m afraid it is.”
What does that mean? Does it mean anything? Why would the player who is losing a fortune fear this is his day? What can be worse than that? If he is afraid to find out, maybe Shakespeare also should be.
When the count reaches ninety-one, the one who is losing snaps, “You don’t get my meaning. What is the first thing after all the things you’ve forgotten?”
“Oh, I see,” the one who is winning answers brightly. The beat he waits is well timed. “I’ve forgotten the question.”
Shakespeare snorts laughter. The woman murdering nutmeats beside him doesn’t stop chewing, but her eyes slide his way. Even as her jaw works, the corners of her mouth turn down. He sees something funny that she’s missed, and she dislikes him for it.
A bit later, the one who is losing says, “There was a messenger . . . that’s right. We were sent for.”
Shakespeare leans forward again. If they are sent for, someone has a reason to send for them. He wants to know who. He wants to know why. The playwright has intrigued him that much, anyhow. But then, maddeningly, the players go off at another tangent.
That also irks a groundling standing near Shakespeare. He throws a small cabbage at the men up on the stage. The one who keeps winning gold pieces ducks and comes out with his next line as if nothing has happened. Shakespeare smiles in spite of himself. He cannot imagine a player who lets heckling faze him.
“We were sent for,” says the player who is winning.
“Yes,” the other man agrees.
“That’s why we’re here.” A beat. “Travelling.”
“Yes.”
The player who is winning all at once takes fire. “It was urgent—a matter of extreme urgency, a royal summons, his very words: official business and no questions asked—lights in the stable-yard, saddle up and off headlong and hotfoot across the land, our guides outstripped in breakneck pursuit of our duty. Fearful lest we come too late!”
This is exciting stuff—or it would be, except that the losing player’s pause makes the excitement leak away like air from a pricked pig’s bladder. “Too late for what?” he asks.
“How do I know? We haven’t got there yet,” the winning player comes back in calm, reasonable tones.
“Well, hurry along then, and go somewhere, you dunghill grooms!” someone bawls at them from the packed mass around the outthrust stage.
Whatever else the players may do, they don’t hurry—or go anywhere. The one who is winning thinks he hears a band. Shakespeare and the rest of the audience hear nothing. The one who is losing offers up something that sounds like a logical proposition at a university debate . . . but it is utter madness. He invites the other player to demolish it. The other player ignores him.
Just when Shakespeare decides the band is another bit of madness, real instruments begin to play backstage. Out comes as sorry a troupe of tragedians as Shakespeare has ever seen. They tootle and bang away, just far enough from staying right on tune to be annoying.
Next to Shakespeare, the woman with the nutmeats chews to the beat of the drum. He is sure she has no idea she is doing it. Her fat-padded face shows fresh interest: the two strange simpletons won’t be all this play has to give, anyhow. And Shakespeare too stares more intently, remembering the title of this piece. He’d brought just such a tatterdemalion set of actors to Elsinore. Could these be . . . ?
Their boy, who will play the female roles, is a monstrous, tarted-up libel on womanhood. By contrast, the fellow who is obviously their leader swaggers enough to make Burbage jealous. But Burbage has earned his swagger; he heads a real company, not this scurvy convocation.
The leader wants the troupe to perform for the two simpletons. He wants them to perform for anybody, and the simpletons happen to be there.
“We can do you a selection of gory romances, full of fine cadences and corpses, pirated from the Italian; and it doesn’t take much to make a jingle—even a single coin has music in it,” he declares grandly, with a sweeping wave Burbage would admire. The members of the troupe flourish and bow, raggedly. “Tragedians, at your command,” the spokesman says.
“My name is Guildenstern, and this is Rosencrantz,” says the man with the bulging leather sack. Now—at last!—they own names. Shakespeare is about to explode. These prose-prattling mountebanks, his characters? The fellow with the empty sack whispers in his friend’s ear. Friend nods and speaks again: “I’m sorry—his name’s Guildenstern, and I’m Rosencrantz.”
Ragged laughter rises in the Rose. Shakespeare joins in. He is too startled to stop himself. How can a man not know his own name? The befuddled soul on stage seems to have no trouble at all, and to be too troubled to have the faintest idea how troubled he is.
If his—Rosencrantz’s—trouble troubles the tragedians’ spokesman, that worthy likewise gives no sign. He merely replies, “A pleasure.” He goes back and forth with Rosencrantz, still trying to talk him out of cash in exchange for a performance. At last, after a weary bow, he says, “Don’t clap too loudly—it’s a very old world.”
That only bewilders the woman beside Shakespeare. He wishes it struck no chord in him. How many times has he played in shows that won nothing but catcalls and cabbages? How many times has he wished he could play in any show at all? Even a hurled cabbage may still have good bits. Along with a stale roll, it can make a supper of sorts. And, to a man out of sorts, even a supper of sorts looks good.