AT THE DANISH COURT

                         (with Romeo, Bleeding Macbeth and Hamlet’s Sister)



                                           by Paul Bailey

   

   

   Two things were certain: I was going to play Hamlet and I was going to die young. The second
   of these eventualities I would leave to chance, but the first required preparation. In the
   summer of 1952, at various times of the day and night, I studied with a thoroughness that
   still astonishes me. I learned every line of Hamlet by heart.

   People have done madder things, I assured myself as I committed the words of Reynaldo, the
   Sailor, the Players and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to memory. Learning Hamlet was no more
   idiotic than climbing a mountain or swimming the English Channel. The play was there, after
   all, as huge and challenging, in its way, as any Everest. The difference was that I would be
   conquering it in an upstairs room, in a terraced house in Battersea, in secret.

   I spent weeks and weeks in and out of Elsinore, a self invited guest at the Danish court. ‘I’m
   not going to tell you again that your supper’s on the table,’ announced my mother, banging on
   the door. ‘I don’t know what the street must think,’ she remarked when I emerged, book in
   hand. ‘All that spouting every evening.’

   ‘Let them think what they want,’ I answered. ‘They’re welcome to their thoughts.’

   ‘You’re making us a laughing stock with your eternal bloody Shakespeare.’

   To Emily, who lived on the ground floor with her husband and two daughters, Shakespeare was
   Shakespoke. ‘Your boy lives for his Shakespoke,’ she said to my mother. ‘Yes, and I wish he
   didn’t,’ was the response.

   ‘There goes Bleeding Macbeth,’ Emily would say whenever I began to spout. Why she chose
   Macbeth, and why she had him bleeding, I never discovered. ‘Oh, my God, it’s Bleeding Macbeth
   having one of his turns,’ I heard her call up the stairs once. ‘Give the poor sod a dagger and
   tell him where to stick it.’

   I was indifferent to such taunts, as I was to those of the neighbourhood children. ‘Romeo,
   Romeo, wherefore are you, Romeo,’ they shouted after me. I walked on, muttering lines that
   weren’t Romeo’s. ‘What’ve you gone and done with Juliet? Put a bun in her oven, have you, you
   dirty tosser?’

   With Gertrude in mind, I asked my mother if she ever considered marrying another man. ‘Don’t
   be so wicked,’ she snapped.

   ‘What’s wicked about it?’

   It was wicked because it insulted my father’s memory. ‘I won’t find his like twice in a
   lifetime,’ she said. ‘However hard I look – which I shan’t be doing, while there’s breath in
   my body.’

   

   

   I think it was Michael’s idea to write a play with Hamlet’s sister as the principal character.
   Michael was one of my close friends. My mother approved of him because he had once
   congratulated her on the way she made tea, which was more than her son ever had. We enjoyed
   acting together: he was Queen Anne to my Duchess of Marlborough, and Mrs Elton in what the
   adaptor had left of Emma.

   We called our verse drama Hamela. We wrote three or four scenes before the effort of finding
   rhymes caused us to admit defeat. Our Hamela was a lively, commonsensical girl, who regarded
   Hamlet as an absolute drip. It was her opinion that their father’s death was really nothing to
   brood over. On the battlements at dawn, she admonished him thus:

   

   Now that the cock’s up,

   Just pull your socks up...

   

   Our plans for Hamela included a passionate affair with Ophelia, whose madness was thereby
   averted. The girls were not to meet, though, and Hamela was never to knock her brother
   unconscious with a dildo – that dazzling coup de théâtre with which Hamela was supposed to
   end.

   

   

   Some snatches of Hamlet have stayed with me – the soliloquies, Polonius’s advice to Laertes,
   the gravedigger’s talk of Yorick, among others. When I finally appeared in the tragedy I had
   spent a mad summer learning, I was given nothing to say. I was cast as a humble courtier,
   required only to bow and scrape, to move the furniture, and to listen.

   

   

   (from An Immaculate Mistake. Scenes from childhood and beyond. Bloomsbury, London 1990, pp
   94-97)