Free The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross by Peter Roman

dressed in black met me at the stage and pulled me into the wing.
    “You’re sure you know all the lines?” the man asked as the woman pulled a tunic over my head.
    “Oh sure, I’ve seen this play thousands of times,” I said.
    He paused in buckling a belt around my waist. “Seen it or acted in it?” he asked.
    “Both,” I said. Which was probably true. When you’ve been alive as long as I have, who can remember every moment?
    The woman dusted my face with some makeup. “We don’t have time to walk you through all the staging,” she said, “so just try to follow the other actors’ cues as best as you can.”
    “I don’t see as I have any other choice,” I said.
    She frowned and shook her head, no doubt at the insanity of the situation. But that’s theatre for you. Then the lights went down and actors pushed past me to get on the stage and it was show business like usual. I stood off to the side and tried to remember the lines of the play, but all I could think about was Morgana sitting out there in the audience, watching me. I adjusted my costume again to make sure I looked my best as the other actors went on with the play. I ran my hand through my hair one way and then another. I tried to remember when I’d last brushed my teeth. I cursed Morgana’s name to all the hells, and then I checked my clothes again.
    And then one of the stagehands was pushing me forward and it was my turn onstage. I walked out with Claudius and Gertrude and Laertes and all the others. I tried to hide in the crowd, which was difficult given that everyone in the audience was staring at me. No doubt waiting to see how badly I was going to mangle the part. I thought even the spotlights were shifting to me. I started to sweat.
    And then I realized there was a pause in the conversation and all the other actors were glancing at me. It was time for my first line. I delivered it from memory, without even having to think about it.
    “A little more than kin, and less than kind,” I said in an aside to the audience, and they applauded my ability to speak.
    And so we were off.
    What can I tell you about that performance? The rest of the play was adequate. The other actors were true professionals, no doubt trained in the best schools in all of England. It was
Hamlet
at the National Theatre, after all, even if it was a matinee. They did what they could with an amateur in the lead role and carried on. And I did what I could, mainly by lifting bits from other Hamlets I’d seen. I spoke the lines with the confident rhythm of Burbage. I carried myself with the weariness of Betterton. I delivered my soliloquies with the quiet brooding of Olivier. It wasn’t pretty but it was passable. And I think the audience was too bewildered by my schizophrenic performance to really judge me, which is just as well. Or maybe they’d been enchanted by Morgana to clap whenever I spoke. Either way.
    It all went well enough until my first scene with Ophelia.
    It was in the third act, during my soliloquy on the nature of existence and other such trivialities.
    I walked out from stage right and delivered the lines to the audience. “To be, or not to be; that is the question.” I tried to say the lines much in the same way Keats had said them to me when we were in that villa in Rome, dying together. It turned out we had both sides of the question covered.
    Anyway, I came out saying my lines and then stopped when I saw Ophelia waiting for me on the other side of the stage. It was Amelia, of course. She had enough makeup on to almost make her look alive. Almost.
    The rest of the lines went out of my head, so she jumped in.
    “Good my lord,” she said, “how does your honour for this many a day?”
    “Well,” I said. “Well, well.”
    There were a number of lines I missed in there, about dreaming and dying and sleeping the everlasting sleep, but no one seemed to notice their absence. Or if they did, maybe they passed them off to artistic license.
    Amelia