We Haven't Got There Yet

“How will you live whilst here?” Shakespeare comes out with another natural question.

“We’re actors.” Yes, that is the man who played the spokesman. And yes, that is a line from the play. But, Shakespeare realizes, it is also an answer. The man continues, “We’ve got stuff we can do. We won’t starve—any more than actors always starve, I mean.”

“Ah, sadness! woe! that it should be so in your strange London, even as it is here,” Shakespeare says.

“Listen, man, if there are actors in heaven—fat chance, yeah, but like I say, if—they’re starving there, too. Bet your sweet ass they are.” The player who was Guildenstern speaks with complete assurance.

Still so many things to wonder at! Shakespeare scarce knows—knows not—where to begin. The best he can do is, “What is it like in, in your London?”

Yet again, the players look at one another. This time, Shakespeare understands their glances at a glance. Let them tell him, and tell him true, and he will grasp even less than they do of his city.

But then the woman who was Gertrude speaks for the first time. And she too beyond doubt is a woman, not so young and fresh as the company’s Ophelia, but no crone, either. She has teeth marvelously clean and white. Everyone in the company seems to.

“It is full of noises,” she says softly.

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,

That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again.

“Holy crap, Jessica! What a showoff!” the spokesman says.

“Teacher’s pet!” the player who was Guildenstern puts in.

Shakespeare takes no notice of them, but bows to her. He has more of an answer than he thought he would get. And . . . “Those are not the worst of verses. Whose, if I may make bold to ask?”

Coming up to him, she takes his hands in hers. “Why, they are yours, Master Shakespeare.”

With regret, he shakes his head. “Never sprang they from my pen.”

She leans forward to kiss him gently on the cheek. They are very much of a height. Her breath is sweet—how not, with those perfect teeth? “Never yet,” she whispers, and slips away.

And that, at last, is altogether too much for Shakespeare’s ravished senses. He flees the tiring room, stumbling in his haste to get away. “Cast you forth, did they?” Ned says, rough sympathy in his voice. Shakespeare gives back not a word. Will he write those lines because Gertrude—no, Jessica—gave him them? Would he have written them had he never set eyes on her? Will he not write them now because she gave them, and in the giving somehow spoiled them?

Questions. Always questions. Answers? How do I know? We haven’t got there yet. Christ, how he pities Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!

* * *

Can he stay away from the Rose? That question he answers on the morrow: he cannot, and scarcely tries. The lure of the lost company from that other London is too great. Can nails resist a lodestone? Not even if their ship falls to pieces because they fly from it.

When he comes up, the signboard says they are giving something new. He nods to himself. Any company will offer a variety of its wares.

He sets a penny in the moneytaker’s palm and goes in with the groundlings. A fresh curiosity kindles. Who is this Godot, and why is someone waiting for him?

Copyright © 2009 Harry Turtledove