Chapter 12 #3
He was not a connoisseur of theater, and his mind drifted if the action became too melodramatic or speeches went on too long.
He had seen Hamlet before and thought the action overwrought for the most part.
Kemble’s Hamlet he found wooden and forced, and Ophelia a pitiful dupe.
Bathsheba had chosen well if she wanted a play that was bound to leave theater goers bored, irritated, confused, and a bit disdainful of a foolish girl who would drown herself because a proud, self-absorbed boy had dismissed her.
Cerys had told them all she preferred comic roles.
He was about to witness a tragedy in more ways than one.
Horatio stepped onto the stage, and Dante straightened.
As was the style, the cast wore modern clothing, Horatio in a bottle-green coat, blooming neckcloth, and nankeen breeches conforming to a set of legs that were not male.
Dante studied the white stockings, buckled shoes, and the short, tousled brown wig in the Titus style.
The way the actor fell back, like the step of a dance, and a hand half-uplifted as if to ward off the appearance of the ghost gave it away. Their Horatio was a woman.
Dorsey made a splendid ghost, moaning and stomping across the stage, swinging his head mournfully this way and that, his attitude both torment and confusion as he peered into each actor’s face, searching for his son.
It was a touching gesture, and it was only when the shaken Horatio quizzed the ghost about the country’s fate that Dante realized they had introduced an element he had not seen in the play before, an external political threat from a ruler called Fortinbras.
Garrick’s Hamlet, and all the later productions trying to capitalize on his success, had made the play a study of family politics.
Dorsey’s play was situating the tangled thread of Denmark’s succession inside a larger political foment.
The ghost made his last feints, then disappeared at the sound of a cock crow, produced by the boy named Meek.
Horatio stalked across the stage, debating what to tell his friend of this strange appearance, and Dante placed her.
The one they called Dot, a few years older than Cerys, not as polished of manner or cultured in her speech, but on stage her abrupt manner came across as command.
He was prepared, and yet he wasn’t. The stage cleared.
Meek and another boy brought out a heavy armchair and a tall candleholder, creating a throne room.
Alone, an actor strolled onto the stage, shoulders hunched as if they carried a weight.
The dark gray frock coat was cut for riding, puffed at the shoulders, with the lapel standing up in the fashionable style, but the tall boots and buckskin breeches were carelessly casual.
Two waistcoats obscured the feminine bosom, and the wild curls had been pulled back by a black ribbon.
She wore a black armband around one sleeve, a sign of mourning. Despite the outdoor attire she held a book, and she threw herself into one corner of the stage as if she meant to read in private, but as the other actors entered, her gaze lifted as she watched them all, calculating, assessing.
Cerys was their Hamlet.
Dante reeled, and not only at the attitude she managed to convey, of a young man who was lost, angry, grieving, and resentful all at the same time, but also wary of every step he took and every reaction around him.
He could not take his eyes off her as the others trooped across the stage.
Dorsey’s face had been wiped clear of the lead paint and he now wore a furred coat and crown.
Brilliant, yet obvious, to use the same actor for Hamlet’s father and uncle.
Mame was Queen Gertrude, weary, regal, sharp-eyed, her face drawn with worry as she tried to coax liveliness into her son.
Dorsey’s production included Polonius and Laertes, characters that Garrick had brought back to the play after centuries before him had excised them.
Laertes was one of the young men of the company—Dante couldn’t recall his name—and he and Cerys bristled at each other in exactly the way of young men trying to assert dominance, both of them silently vying to claim Ophelia’s attention.
Ophelia was one of the other young girls, the one with the exotic name.
She hadn’t joined the party for dinners, though she occasionally came to the parlor after.
She was quiet in company, drawing no attention to herself, a confounding choice given that young women the world over strove to claim whatever notice and approval they could, especially that of men.
She had dark skin, darker than Cerys, and he guessed that her ancestors had come not from Africa but points further east, perhaps the result of British forays into India or the realms of the ancient Persian Empire.
On stage, her quiet transformed to a rippling, alert quality, and while her Ophelia had no lines in the scene, she carried on an entire conversation with her Hamlet by glances alone.
Curiosity, hurt, scorn, and recourse to pride appeared in the girl, and for Hamlet, anguish warring with reserve and the refusal to expose his feelings before the crowd.
Dante felt his heart pierced by the sheer longing the two conveyed, a heartfelt connection and understanding that had been halted and horribly mutilated by the crime of the king’s death and the young prince’s resulting despair.
Cerys was already the most interesting, and the most intelligible Hamlet he had ever seen, even before she spoke, rising to deliver her first line, a mocking challenge to her uncle and King with a rude sketch of a bow to accompany. “A little more than kin and less than kind.”
In that one utterance Dante saw how she intended to play the character: a young man of will and fire, railing against the constraints of the world that left him powerless and slowly giving way to the darker impulses of his own heart against the pull of love and the dictates of his own morality.
The play made sense to him in a new way, with Cerys’s fiery, foiled Hamlet at the center.
He had thought Hamlet a spoiled bully for his treatment of women but saw instead the bitter sense of betrayal as the young prince howled at his mother for her change in alliance and tormented Ophelia to test if she would be true.
Ophelia, far from a dupe, played off this Hamlet, trying and failing to draw him from his dark course with forgiveness, tenderness, love.
Garrick’s Hamlet had infamously had a mechanical wig with hair that stood up in terror when the ghost appeared.
Cerys looked as if she wished to throw herself in her dead father’s arms and weep out her storm of grief.
He watched a young prince giving himself over to despair, rage, and the darker demons of his character, refusing to be swayed even as his friends warned him otherwise and his Ophelia scorned to endure his cruelty.
Here was an idealistic youth raging against the greater powers he could not defeat, alienating every softer impulse and affection in pursuit of the goal he had set himself on, and determined to achieve his aim no matter what it cost him.
Dante knew how that felt.
The women in the crowd gasped, and one almost rose to her feet when Hamlet threw back the velvet drapery and stabbed the eavesdropper who turned out to be Polonius, Ophelia’s father.
Even Dante felt a prickle at the audacity.
A woman, even a woman playing a man, committing a murder on stage!
They were all of them completely swept up in the storm of feeling Cerys injected into every word and gesture: rage, grief, resentment, despair, but was it really madness, or simply the fury of one in an inferior place, reeling from the unjust acts of the powerful, who acted only in self-interest?
More than one lady dabbed a handkerchief at her eyes when Ophelia, broken at last by her lover’s rejection and her father’s death, draped flowers around the necks of the king and queen, a warning to them all.
Even Bathsheba sat riveted, her attention fixed on the action.
Dante had never seen Bathsheba transfixed by anything, save perhaps contemplation of her high ambitions.
Was it possible Cerys’s performance would truly win her over?
Small screams rippled through the audience when a maddened Hamlet threw himself into Ophelia’s grave, though the “grave” was no more than a square of black felt cloth thrown on the floor.
The anguish of a young man’s broken heart was palpable, and Bathsheba, as covertly as possible, wiped a gloved finger across her cheek.
Dante leaned forward, forgetting about Bathsheba and everything else, entirely arrested as a newly hardened Hamlet set his mind on revenge.
Dante wasn’t the only one holding his breath as the final tumultuous scene unfolded, with poisoned swords changing hands and the poisoned cup standing in dire foreboding on the small table covered with a purple cloth.
The older widow sitting next to Lady Diana shrieked when the Queen reached for the dread goblet: “Gertrude, no! You’ll die! ”