So now I’ve written a novelisation of Hamlet. Two questions arise: why? And when? The truth is that the questions are almost inseparable. But here goes.
Picture if you will another Will - Will Shakespeare - stepping into the green room of the Globe Theatre with a manuscript clutched in his quill-stained fingers and saying to his partners, Ernie Wise style, ‘I’d like you to look at this play what I wrote.’
And what would they have seen? A revenge tragedy. ‘Ah yes, the old Senecan stuff. Gorboduc had a good go at that - must have been forty years ago. And The Spanish Tragedy was a big-hitter, if a bit sensational and over the top. Kept the groundlings happy but not the critics. What’s so different about this ‘ere ‘amlet?’
What indeed? And one answer is that the revenger not only doesn’t take his revenge but seems innately unable to do so until, at the end of the longest play Shakespeare ever wrote, he does so almost as a reflex action, and because he’s nothing left to lose. In this sense it’s the most famous example of inaction in all of world drama.
And yet on the other hand, it’s full of it – action. There’s adultery, incest, fratricide, regicide: nine fatalities in all, five by poison, applied in three different ways; death by duelling, execution, stabbing and drowning. There’s murder and suicide and pirates, there’s a sea-fight, a fight in a grave a stand-up comic’s skull, and a ghost that keeps popping up. On top of that there’s a travelling circus, a play within a play, raging speeches, breakdowns, tears behind the smiles, gags galore, an Oedipus Complex, an Orestes Complex, and some ‘cuntrie matters’, if you’ll excuse Hamlet’s French. And that’s just for starters, what with a war going on, and twenty thousand men going to their graves like beds, and fighting over a patch of land so small it won’t even be big enough to bury the casualties. And why? Because honour’s at the stake. It’s a play about principle. That suit you then?
You betcha. James Bond doesn’t even have a look-in. It suited the Globe guys down to the ground – and groundlings – and in or around the year 1600 Hamlet turned out to be a palpable hit and has been hitting the stage ever since, not to mention the big silver screen.
And yet and yet again – it’s been said by more than one writer that ever since it was written, Hamlet seems as if it’s trying to be a novel. And that’s one answer to the question of why I decided to do what the Bard would undoubtedly have done had he been writing today and not four and a half centuries ago, based on the principle that the choice and master spirits of any age are always attracted by the prevailing genre of their age, today being the age of the novel. Sadly I am not the Bard. But at least he gave me one hell of a start.
This takes us to the ‘when’ question – and what brought me to penning my own novel version of Hamlet: ‘novel’, I hope, in both senses of the word.
The impulse goes back to 1959, late in the year, when I had just turned 15, and had also just failed all of my end-of-term school exams, and was feeling pretty glum, mainly because I knew I had let my mother down. Her people were all fishermen in the east coast fishing village of St Monans, where I was born and bred, and she’d met my father when he was in the navy, so there was a strong chance I might follow in the family footsteps and go to sea.
My mother had other ideas. She wanted me to excel academically, and she was so delighted when I passed the Eleven-Plus exam, enabling me to follow an academic course at secondary school. But after three years and more it was obvious I was not making the grade. Why? I wasn’t applying myself, there were problems at home, to do with my father, and I think ultimately I was demoralised and just gave up.
That, as I say, was at the end of 1959, when I entered my sixteenth year. Five years earlier in 1954 a twelve-inch black-and-white Bush television set had been wheeled in all its majesty into our living-room.
It was switched on that night in 1959, and I happened to be sitting glumly in front of it, not watching it, but contemplating a life at sea, starting the next day, when suddenly a voice-over came on, announcing, ‘This is the tragedy - of a man- who could not make up his mind.’ It was the 1948 Laurence Olivier film of Hamlet. And I watched it. And I was riveted. Transfixed. I don’t think I’d even heard of Hamlet. I was pretty ignorant. We’d done a couple of Shakespeare plays at school – Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I didn’t understand much and didn’t find remotely interesting. Yet here was perhaps the most complex and deeply-thought provoking play of all time. And it hit me like a double ton of bricks. I was smashed sideways. My life changed in those ninety minutes.
Why? Maybe the time had come. There is a tide in the affairs of men/Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune./Omitted, all the voyage of their life/Is bound in shallows and in miseries. The time was right. Or I was right for it. My hour had come. Whatever. But all I know is that I suddenly grew up. On the spot.
Of course still you look into the thing for reasons. There’s the famous scene, for example, in which Hamlet speaks the 4th soliloquy. ‘To be or not to be’, and in that 1948 film Olivier’s brooding face is seen contemplating what Shakespeare calls ‘a sea of troubles.’
It’s a metaphor, of course, for all life’s worries, but it resonated with me because we lived so close to the sea – it literally splashed our doorsteps – and because of the family troubles to do with my father. I used to go out on my own a lot as a child and walk along the lonely sea-shore projecting my own troubles onto the sea, or seeing them in the sea’s troubled face. It’s an illusion, of course, what scholars call ‘the pathetic fallacy’, where nature apparently reflects human feelings and situations. It doesn't. The sea isn’t troubled because the sea isn’t sentient, even if it often appears to be angry or calm or whatever. It’s you who are troubled, and if you have troubles you project them onto the sea. As I did. And so that night I was hooked. I was Hamlet. Or I knew, or felt I knew, what it felt like to be Hamlet.
Just as the film finished my mother came in from her night’s work. And I said, ‘Mum, I don’t want to go to sea. I want to repeat my 4th Form, make up for my failure, and stay on at school and take my Certificate Exams.’ She was hesitant, for obvious reasons. My track record was against me. Apart from which at that point in our lives she was a single mum, a single earner, my father having been banished back down to Middlesbrough, his home-town. And we didn’t have much cash to spare. But I assured her that her boy could do better. And would do better. And wouldn’t let her down again. And the boy did do better, at school university, as a schoolmaster, and as a writer.
And that’s one answer, I suppose, as to why 65 years later, I wrote my own version of the Hamlet story.
Anything else? Any more immediate trigger? There was one – not so much a trigger as a blank shot. Three years ago a book came out called Hamnet, by an author called Maggie O’ Farrell. The names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable in Shakespeare’s day, and the Bard had sadly lost his eleven-year-old son Hamnet, the twin brother of Judith. I pounced eagerly on the book, as I always do on any new Shakespearean publication. I was hoping to learn more about the playwright and about his son, the circumstances of whose death we know nothing about. I even wrote enthusiastically to the author. She never replied. Her agent said she was too busy with her next book. I wondered what it must be like to have an agent.
In the end however, in spite of the hype and ballyhoo surrounding the book, I felt let down. I had learned nothing new. What I did learn about was how mystically wonderfully wise women are. But I knew that already. I was married to one who died tragically young. And I am married to another. Women are wonderful. And should rule the world – if not their husbands! But what about poor old Shakespeare? And Hamnet/Hamlet? It was just a few years after his son’s death that the play bearing his name was first put on at the Globe. The drama is a kind of counter-reality to the death that had clearly affected him so much, and which I’d already written about in my novel Will.
And there was one other thing. When Shakespeare was sixteen, a young girl called Katherine Hamlet was drowned in the Avon, whose treacherous currents took lives every year. Accident? Suicide? Was she pregnant? Let down by a lover? An inquest was held. The verdict was merciful – otherwise she’d have been buried in unconsecrated ground. She’d slipped and fallen in, they said. But the doubt had been there. And that doubt – and the girl’s name, like the dead son’s, found its way into the play, and into Ophelia’s watery willowy death. Shakespeare was fascinated by drowning, and by the sea’s imagined magical power to give up its dead and restore them to life, to bring twins together again, reunite brother and sister, such as Viola and the supposedly drowned Sebastian, of Twelfth night, written soon after Hamlet.
Things were on Shakespeare’s mind. And on mine. Disappointment can lead to action. I couldn’t bring Hamnet back from the dead, as his father had done in his plays, and the latest book had done its best, but I could resurrect Ophelia - so I mused – give her the voice she never had in the play, where she is silenced, and sexually subjugated. It was time to unlock her from that grim, flinty farthingale, and those cruel corsets, and let her say what she had wanted to do with Hamlet, to tear their pleasures with rough strife – through the iron gates of life. She couldn’t, not in the play. The prince was on another planet.
And so things came together. I’d published my first book forty years ago. I’d waited long enough. And Ophelia had waited four hundred years. And more. I took up my pen and wrote Letters From Elsinore.
Christopher Rush