Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!
-Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto I, 4-6
I
Hamlet stands outside the throne room, watching the two envoys conversing. His father has seen fit to send him with the diplomatic mission to England, and they are waiting for an audience with the king.
He is not sure of the exact nature of their mission, or perhaps it is simply that he cannot remember it now. He is thirteen years old, and he is twenty-six now, and oblivion is preferable to a false memory.
Outside it is brighter than most days at Elsinore, but little sunlight penetrates the stone and hangings of the English castle. Denmark is not dismal to him; now it is more than dismal, it is infernal, not Dis but Caïna.
Hamlet does not remember many things anymore, but those that he does remember are clear, isolated, always in the present.
The hanging in one corner of the room billows inward and is swept aside - Hamlet did not realize that it covered an entrance - and two people enter. Hamlet is not familiar with the fashions of the English court; nor, in fact, with those of the Danish, but some things he has absorbed, spongelike. Even if the man's clothes give Hamlet no idea of his rank, he has the same bearing as a Danish lord: self-important, flattering, and far too high to notice a thirteen-year-old boy without prior notice of his being the Prince of Denmark. He passes Hamlet and goes on to speak with the envoys.
The other person is another thirteen-year-old boy who is not the Prince of Denmark, and so is beneath the lord's notice. He lags behind and stops a few feet from Hamlet. The two boys measure each other with their eyes, then Hamlet says with open curiosity "Give thee good day, sirrah - who art thou?"
The other boy gives him a poisonous look. "I am Edmund of Gloucester. Who is't that asks?"
"Hamlet of Denmark, I." He is puzzled at the offense, but realizes that it is on account of "sirrah" and "thou". He does not know where Gloucester is, and doubts that Edmund knows where Elsinore is. "Wilt thou not be my friend?": not smiling, because he knows smiles deceive, but candidly.
The doors to the throne room open, and the envoys are admitted. Hamlet remains in the anteroom: he does not need instruction in the art of policy.
II
The ship runs softly aground, all lines flying loose and sails slackening. Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are rowed through the choppy Channel waters, in a ship's boat with an ensign passing for a royal barge, and to the beach under the cliffs of Dover. It is a day of mist and rain.
"Halt! Who goes there?" The voice comes muffled to them as they reach the top of the cliff. The speaker steps out of the fog: he is a sentry in uniform, and before the fog fills the space behind him they see the army.
"We are Danes," says Rosencrantz.
"We've come to see the king," says Guildenstern.
The soldier laughs. "There's no king in England." Hamlet looks out from the cliff, but he cannot see the ship. He follows Rosencrantz follows Guildenstern follows the soldier through the mist.
They walk through the army camp. It is strangely quiet, and there is no one to watch their passing. The sentry brings them to a tent with several soldiers and officers outside, the first people they have seen in the camp. He speaks in a quick undertone to one of them, who then announces loudly, "My lord of Gloucester, here stand some Danes who do desire to speak with you." There is a response, inaudible to them, and then they are admitted.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern enter first, but it is at Hamlet that the man at the map-covered desk looks, staring past the other two. "Who art thou?" he says.
"We are Guildenstern and Rosencrantz."
"Who is't that asks?" Hamlet whispers. He is suddenly, completely on edge, hyper-aware.
"We have a letter." Edmund takes it, breaks the seal and reads it, holding it up in front of his face so they cannot see it. He summons a guard, gives him a command they cannot hear. The guard grins, a painful break in the tense solemnity, and says something indistinct about rope. Then Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are taken away.
"I know thee not, sir," says Hamlet. "If ever was Hamlet of Denmark that knew Edmund of Gloucester, I am not he, I deny it. Thou shade--" He stops.
"No shade I, but an thou know'st me not, wilt thou not so now?" Edmund's eyes are fixed on Hamlet's, serious.
Without it is misty and darkening, and the distant crash and murmur of the sea makes it difficult to hear. Hamlet has never held it a baseness to speak fair, as Denmark's statists do.
III
The sun never shines, for all the time that Hamlet is in England. If he did not remember that day thirteen years ago, he might think it never shone there at all; that day is the bright Sunday in a succession of gray and dreary Mondays, or the ray of light in misty Limbus, Acheron-bounded. But there is never such a day again.
He fights with the English forces against the French, though he does not know the cause of war. In the press of battle there is little use for skill at fencing: he finds himself opposite death - la morte, since French - but is spared when an English soldier beats down the man's rapier and kills him. It is surreal, to be saved so, because he knows the man would have killed him, perhaps he did in another life, and he cannot help but feel that there is a divinity that shapes a man's end, rough-hew it how he will.
He is given his own tent, a little way off from the rest of the camp and near Edmund's and the other general's. It is really only a courtesy to the cast-ashore prince of a foreign power: he does not command even one other soldier.
He writes to Horatio, once, sitting at Edmund's desk on a rainy evening. It is a short letter, saying only that he will return when the war is over and that he has much to tell him that he cannot confide to paper. The half-darkness and the sound of the rain are narcotic, and when Edmund comes in he finds Hamlet asleep with his head on the desk. He rests his hand at the nape of Hamlet's neck and twists his fingers in his hair while he reads the letter.
The letter's last line: ...but when I am returned, repair thou to me with as much haste as thou wouldst fly life. Farewell. He that thou knowest thine--
It is never sent.
Hamlet is there after the last battle, when the prisoners are taken away. One is a lady in finery, but the other two are men in rags, and he is lost until he sees that one's are the shreds and patches of a king's robes. The second is in fool's motley; he makes Hamlet think of Yorick, though his costume and expression are tattered and somber, as if he too has been twenty-three years in the earth. The world is still an infinite jest, but he is already among the lost people and it is no longer his place to laugh at it.
"Whither goest thou?" Hamlet calls after him.
The fool turns to look at him. "To my grave."
"Nay, nay, a fool should not be grave, not thee--"
"Dost know why a man maketh his grave? Why, to wait out doomsday; not to 'queath his corse to his daughters and leave his soul howling."
"Thou knave," cries Hamlet, "a man maketh not his own grave." The fool is gone, only the lady and the king go on, and two soldiers are dragging him back. "Save if he be mad," he whispers. He has been following ghosts again.
It is not long after when Edmund steps close behind him and wraps one arm tightly around his shoulders, pressing full against him and putting his mouth to Hamlet's ear. "Dost thou not remember the letter?" he says in a low voice. "It called for thy death, Hamlet of Denmark." There is the sting of a dagger at Hamlet's neck, and he understands. He remembers changing the letters, but it is a false memory.
Tant'è amara che poco è più morte.
-Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto I, 7
