Margaret Atwood - The Tent

Absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story …

These were Hamlet’s last words to me. Well, almost the last. I didn’t know at the time that this wasn’t a request but a command—in effect, a clever and twisted curse. I would be doomed to stay alive until I did tell the story. Which is why you are reading my own words, in this very newspaper, today.

Yes, this is Horatio speaking: friend, confidant, ear-for-loan, eternal bystander at the festivities and debacles of the great and bloodthirsty. I have to say that I did my best as second banana during the Elsinore affair. I listened to Hamlet’s outpourings, which at times bordered on lunacy; I sympathized; I offered what I hoped was sage advice. And then I got stuck with cleaning up the not inconsiderable mess.

Or not so much cleaning it up: wrapping it up. I was supposed to set down the events truthfully, as they had occurred, though showing Hamlet in a more or less favourable light, the light that shines on every protagonist. I hoped to wring some poetry out of these events, darkish poetry it would have to be. Perhaps I could add some philosophical musings about the human condition. I also hoped to come up with a plausible resolution to the story.

But what was the story? It was a tale of revenge, that much was clear. A wrong had been done, or it appeared to have been done. Hamlet said, as I recall, “O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right,” or something like that. But through morose dithering combined with sudden rash actions, he ended up killing quite a few more people than ought to have been killed, even according to the rather loose guidelines of honour as then constituted.

This often happens, as I’ve observed during the course of my now entirely too-long life. The Hatfields and the McCoys go at it, turn and turn about, until no one’s left standing. Countries are similar. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” I have often said while standing deliberately in the line of fire during these small, medium, and large payback events, but few have ever listened to me. An eye for an eye is their idea. A head for a head, a bomb for a bomb, a city for a city. Human beings—I’ve observed—are hot-wired for scorekeeping, and since they like to win, they’re always going one better than the other fellow.

Excuse me. Not one better. One more.

I started out well enough at the outset. I found a fresh piece of parchment, I ground some ink. Once upon a time there was a well-meaning but knotted-up prince called Hamlet, I wrote. But that didn’t sound quite right. Then I thought I might do it as a sort of play. Elsinore. A Platform before the Castle, I wrote. Then I dried up.

Trouble is, I started thinking about the story behind the story, which was not that Claudius had murdered Hamlet the Elder, but that Hamlet the Elder had murdered another king called Fortinbras. Well, not murdered exactly: slain in single combat, thus getting hold of a wad of Fortinbras territory. But the upshot of all of Hamlet Junior’s machinations was that he himself ended up dead and Fortinbras the Second got hold of everything—not only his father’s lost lands, but all of Hamlet’s lands as well.

So if it was a revenge story it was a strange revenge. The only person to benefit from it was someone who hadn’t been directly involved. That often happens too, I’ve noticed. Maybe instead of being a revenger’s tragedy the Hamlet saga was a story about subconscious guilt—Hamlet realizes the Hamlet family has done dirt to the Fortinbras clan, and obliterates his own kinfolk and scuppers his inheritance in a spectacular act of self-sabotage.

While I was chewing on my quill, dozens of years went by. Then some jumped-up English playwright chose to dramatize this whole fracas. I was annoyed—he hadn’t even been alive at the time, and he put in a bunch of stuff he couldn’t possibly have known anything about. If he’d come to me I might have set him straight; but he didn’t, and he published first. He filched my material and appropriated my voice and exploited a human tragedy that was really none of his business.

Anyway his play was too long.

My own writer’s block got worse than ever. Hamlet’s well-known procrastination had rubbed off on me. I began asking difficult questions. Why me? Why should I have to write Hamlet’s_ story? Why not my own?_ But there’s nothing much to mine, really. Come to think of it, is there anything much to Hamlet’s? By this time we were well into the seventeenth century, and Oliver Cromwell had gone on the rampage, and Charles the First had had his head cut off, and thousands of soldiers and civilians had died cruel and ghastly deaths, with their intestines wound out of their bodies and their heads stuck up on stakes. I’d seen a lot of that up close, so a few slashed and drowned and poisoned bodies littering the Danish court were no longer very horrifying to me by comparison.

Somehow I no longer wanted to tell Hamlet’s story. I wanted to tell something a little more—what’s the term? Human, inhuman? Something bigger. But statistics pall after a time. We’re not programmed to register more than a hundred corpses. In heaps they simply become a landscape feature.