Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Read online

  Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Novel

  A.J. Hartley

  David Hewson

  Copyright © 2014 by A.J. Hartley and David Hewson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN: 978-1-62647-709-4

  Created with Vellum

  What Readers Think

  This book first appeared as an audio drama on Audible, narrated by Richard Armitage.

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  What the Critics Say

  “It’s a fresh, contemporary take on Shakespeare’s tragedy, one not afraid to create new characters or cut long soliloquies. We get a noirish Hamlet, who, when asked by Laertes if he's ready to fence, blurts out: ‘I’ve been ready all my life.’” (Associated Press)

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  “English literature teachers worried about getting pupils entranced by Shakespeare should plug them in to this imaginative gloss on Hamlet before starting on the real thing. Hobbit-fanciers will rejoice to find that Richard ‘Thorin Oakenshield’ Armitage is an outstandingly versatile narrator. This is the one of the most powerful listening experiences that I’ve had.” (The Times London)

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  Some reactions from Audible customers

  ‘Brilliance itself… the drama, the passion, the complexity of characters.’ Michael, Sydney, Australia.

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  ‘I love this take on the old story. There's depth of emotion here, and the characters and actions make sense in a new way. As a wonderful bonus for those of us who have longed for deeper and better-realized female characters in Shakespeare's plays … Hartley and Hewson endow the women of Elsinore with brains and sensible motives and actions.’ C. Telfair, Shephardstown, WV.

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  ‘I have become a huge fan of A.J. Hartley and David Hewson. Having studied Shakespeare as a student I am familiar with the stories, but this is not just another rehashed version. They take the story line and while remaining faithful to the basics, add life and depth to it in a way that is never boring.’ T. Higgins, Detroit MI.

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  ‘The authors have done a wonderfully creative job of approaching the tale from a fresh, very lateral perspective. Lesser events and characters in the play are brought to the fore, and a wonderful layer of Machiavellian political intrigue suffuses the story. The same is true of the play's original paranormal elements. The authors have developed it into a lush political and psychological thriller.’ Madeleine, London.

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  ‘I'm not unique in finding new depth to the characters - Ophelia, Hamlet himself, and (for me) especially Claudius. Is Hamlet mad or acting? Is Claudius evil or caught in the one act he committed (perhaps) through the evil manipulations of another? By adding back stories to the major and secondary characters, the story moves beyond the dramatic (and melodramatic) familiarity of Shakespeare's speeches into a tragedy of real people's lives.’ Janice, Sugar Land, TX.

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  ‘You’d think that Hamlet would be done to death by now, but these writers managed to bring something fresh and very engaging to the table. Hamlet, although definitely still a brooding character, feels a lot less like a navel-gazer and a lot more like a caged lion, brooding only because he has not yet figured out how to sink his teeth into his prey. By the time the final scene occurred, bathed in blood as usual, I was twisted up inside with all of the individual characters’ desperations and I could see the whole thing happening not as some giant farcical tragedy but as a set of unavoidable forces all crashing into each other, each person hurting inside and out.’ R. L. Cobleigh, Ashland, MA.

  1

  Something Rotten in the State of Denmark

  Drunk, full of a righteous fury, the king lay on a couch in the court garden, listening to the laughter in the castle behind. It was November in the year sixteen hundred, a cold still night beneath a clear moon. Gaiety inside. Dancing.

  Hamlet, monarch of Denmark, a burly, ill-tempered man of fifty, had left the entertainment clutching his flagon of hard spirit, found space in the courtyard, ordered servants to bring braziers to keep him warm then drank, drank hard, spitting curses into the darkness as he listened to the hubbub inside.

  This new century had brought with it a changed world, one he was coming to hate. He was an old Dane, blood going back to the pagan days of the Vikings. Made by a world where a man ruled by strength and cunning alone, left his enemies in pieces on the battlefield, seized by force any neighbouring lands he coveted.

  Now the air was rank with fresh ideas from the soft lands of the south. Art and notions of freedom. The idea that life was no more than perpetual combat seemed unfashionable in the chattering circles of plumed dandies and so-called intellectuals that comprised a modern court. Men whose grandfathers had spent their lives mucking out pig farms now went to school and came back with the languages and skill with words and numbers that stuffed the kingdom with lawyers and secretaries and businessmen who could turn their hands to any manner of dealing which turned a profit. Where once there had been peasants and kings and precious little in between, there was now an army of scholars and merchants clawing their way past the venerable old aristocracy in the name of freedom.

  And with that freedom – or the illusion of it – came dangers. Treasons made all the more painful since they began so close to home.

  He finished the flask of aquavit, bellowed for another, told the lad who brought it to leave him alone.

  Alone.

  As if that were possible. Try as he might he couldn’t still their voices in his head. Gertrude, his queen, prancing ‘round in her finery, a confident hostess making up for her boor of a husband. Claudius, his own brother, a silken-voiced courtier who’d worked at Hamlet’s side since he first took the crown.

  “My own blood,” the king muttered in a slurred and drunken tone. “My own…”

  There was a storm coming. A bloody one. Vengeance made real. In the morning it would begin.

  He drank and drank. Until finally the voices receded and the lights went out in the neighbouring hall.

  Still, one was missing.

  “The boy,” the king whispered, close to sleep.

  His son was back where he longed to be. In Wittenberg, Germany, reading books. The perpetual student.

  Filling his head with all those Italian ideas about art and culture, statecraft and freedom. Playing with new-fangled firearms when he should have been learning how to hew an enemy’s head from his shoulders with a sweep of his broadsword.

  These were no lessons for monarchs. Denmark was doomed unless Hamlet acted with a fierce and merciless strength. Unless by force again he brought it back within his iron fist. And the boy… no use at all. A weak, fey creature, so meek in bearing it was hard to believe Hamlet had sired him, let alone given the sullen brat his name.

  “Tomorrow,” mumbled the man slumped on the damp cold couch, beneath the sputtering torches. “Tomorrow all changes. And…”

  The drink closed his eyes. Exhaustion. Nothing else. Not guilt. He’d known none in the cruel past. Would feel nothing but satisfaction when the coming work was done.

  He laughed at that thought. Rolled back his head. And in that moment the strangest thing happened. Something liquid, cold and sticky, slipped into his ear.

  A roar rose in his throat and stuck there. His eyes opened but as they did a cold thrill of pain raced through his head as a swift nausea rose in his gut.

  Hamlet, King of Denmark, looked around him, realised he couldn’t even move. There
was a shape, timorous in the shadows. Something in its hand.

  Treason…

  A small word for a vile act that might change the world.

  Trea…

  He tried to say it. Tried to shout, to scream, to cry for help. But nothing came except the foamy bile, pouring through his nostrils, spewing from his throat.

  His finger stretched out in front of him. A shape emerged from the gloom.

  “You…” the king stuttered in his dying agony. “I will see you in…”

  The very word choked, stuck in his craw.

  “Hell?” asked a cold, mocking voice in front of him. “Not yet, Hamlet. Not yet…”

  Then the night came around the dying man, enfolding him like a black shroud. And with it one final terror.

  Almost three months on flurries of snow and slabs of rain fell on the castle’s grey stones. Hard icy gusts rolled in from the ocean, drifting onto the walls, bringing spray and the smell of salt into every corner. From the woodland by the shore came the nocturnal dirges of hungry owls and the screeches of foxes in heat.

  Marcellus listened. In his year as a soldier on the night watch he’d come to hate these things. Had become a man used to snatching a few hours of sleep during the day then waste the endless night waiting on dawn.

  Time spent in boredom and stupid routine, usually. Elsinore was the greatest castle in Denmark. Too tall for siege ladders to reach its ramparts. Too well stocked inside its vast interior, with chicken coops, a pig pen, a vegetable garden for the royals. What went on outside the walls didn’t much matter.

  It was different for the peasants in the hovels by the harbour. They would be left to the mercy of any hostile foreigners who crossed the narrow Øresund channel looking for loot.

  But no one worried about them so much at that moment. The castle had a new king. It was still waking from the uneasy hangover of his coronation and an equally unexpected wedding.

  There should have been nothing for a sentinel like him to do. Then, three days before, he saw something and after that Marcellus scarcely slept at all.

  It started as a garbled tale from an idiot stable boy, one of the usual night time terrors the guards shared around the fire when they had nothing better to do. Then the watch leader, Barnardo, a man with as much imagination as the stone from which Elsinore was built, said he’d seen an intruder beside the chapel tower: a tall figure in full armour, walking the battlements.

  The place was searched from top to bottom. There’d been snow that evening but there were no footprints on the ramparts. If it had been anyone but Barnardo the episode would have been regarded as no more than an uneasy joke, one more castle myth, told by a fool. Yet, even with the sun up the next morning, a doleful sense of unease hung over all the sentries who would watch the following night.

  They told no one in authority. Enemy spies didn’t scale the walls in plate armour. The King’s councillors had enough to think about looking out to the flat, low shoreline beyond Elsinore’s walls without worrying about what might already be inside, somehow unseen. Yet fear and trepidation proved infectious. By nightfall an air of muted panic hung over the watch like smoke.

  Three hours after midnight and still nothing, though every man was awake and watchful, jumping at the slightest sound, the flutter of a bat, the squeak of a mouse, the howls of distant dogs.

  Marcellus had worked his way to the eastern wall and was gazing out into the freezing night wondering how much time had passed since the last bell. It couldn’t be long now. Still, the watch had been quiet. By the time the guards had made their second circuit of the walls with nothing to report even Barnardo had been shame-faced, muttering about cloud shadows and the dreams that came from boredom.

  Snow fell on a light breeze beneath a moon that was almost full, its silver light reflecting on the narrow stretch of water that separated Denmark from its neighbour. Marcellus was feeling a little easier. Soon dawn would come. The cock would crow from the coop. Elsinore would wake to another day ruled over by Claudius and Gertrude: new king, the same queen they had before.

  A strange contracted sequence of events within a mere three months. A monarch’s funeral. A royal wedding. A coronation. And something strange stirring on Elsinore’s heights.

  When this odd interlude was over Marcellus would drag Barnardo down the tavern, make him buy a round of wheaten beer, and enjoy reminding his friend how badly he’d spooked them.

  He was laughing to himself at that thought when there was the briefest, softest sound, like metal scraping faintly on stone. A sudden chill breeze froze his blood. Sensing something behind he wheeled around, dropping his shouldered halberd so its spiked tip pointed down the battlements to the round tower.

  Someone – or something – was standing in the doorway along the wall, a deeper blackness in the shadows.

  “Who’s there?” he demanded, staring down the shaft of the halberd, his knuckles white.

  “It’s me,” said a familiar voice. “Barnardo. Put that thing away before you kill someone.”

  Marcellus shook his head with relief and lowered his weapon as the watch leader joined him.

  Barnardo was a farmer’s son from Jutland, frank, tough, unshakable mostly. He rested his long snaphaunce gun against the parapet then peered over the walls down to the port. The channel looked still in the moonlight. Perhaps it would freeze soon and make Elsinore briefly open to invasion from its twin town across the water in Sweden, Helsingborg.

  “You look frozen,” the new man said. “Francisco can take over here. Go home to a warm bed and dream of a warm woman.”

  “Dreaming’s all I do,” Marcellus grumbled.

  “That’s because you’re an ugly sod. Speak of the devil,” Barnardo said, deadpan. Two men were emerging from the chapel tower, one armed like them, the other with a cloak drawn tightly about him, his breath like mist in the freezing air.

  Francisco, another guard. The second a younger, slimmer figure. Horatio. Friend to the king’s son.

  An educated man, Barnardo thought, not kindly.

  “I haven’t seen a bloody thing,” Francisco muttered as they came close. “You?”

  “Now there’s a surprise,” said Horatio, with a wry grin at Francisco. “No ghouls or apparitions then?”

  He was a smart-faced youngster from one of the aristocratic families, slim, clean-shaven, fine, delicate hands, unscarred by hard labour. A student through and through. Marcellus hawked and spat over the battlements.

  “Seen a whey-faced toff who don’t belong here. Wonder what he thinks he’s up to.”

  Horatio laughed.

  “Just seeking answers. Francisco’s got it in his head that if this thing appears again someone like me might be able to speak to it.”

  “Someone like you?” Marcellus echoed, an edge to his voice. “A clever bugger, you mean?”

  “Not really. I just…”

  “He’s here because I invited him,” Francisco cut in. “Just a thought. I mean… we didn’t know what to do last time, did we?”

  Marcellus frowned, but Barnardo slapped them both on the shoulders so hard it hurt.

  “No arguing boys. Too cold up here for a fight.”

  “If it does show up…” Marcellus brandished his halberd, “We’d be a sight better equipped to deal with it than a sodding bookworm.”

  “I don’t doubt that, sir,” Horatio said cheerfully. “But it’s all a bit moot, isn’t it? I mean…”

  “Shut it!” yelled Barnardo, pointing back to the round tower. “There!”

  All four men span round on their heels, looking along the wall.

  Just visible in the silver night a hulking shape stalked towards them. It appeared to be a giant of a man, armoured from head to toe, a vast two-handed sword dragging behind him. The visor of his helmet was up. The bearded face beneath it seemed to glow with a soft, pearly light like moonshine on deep water.

  But the eyes had the colour of fire, of burning coals, and they stared with menace directly at the sentr
ies with each step the creature took.

  Marcellus was the first to come to his senses, once more levelling his halberd and bellowing at the thing to halt. His hands trembled and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. The others followed suit, Barnardo snatching up his gun and snapping back the hammer. Even Horatio plucked a dagger from his belt though he shrank against the crenelated parapet as if ready to flee.

  The apparition didn’t break stride. It was closing on them, hoary locks stirring about its face as if in a stiff breeze no one else could feel, still glaring, still noiseless as the grave from which it must have come.

  Francisco cringed as it closed on them, but Barnardo stepped forward, shouting “Stop, in the name of the King!” barring its path with a sweep of his axe.

  Still it came on, stepping through the weapon as if it was no more than air, then through Barnardo himself so that he cried out in horror and loosed his weapon. There was a flash of flame and a terrible report. For a moment the battlements were wreathed in acrid bluish smoke. Then the armoured spectre emerged through the bitter cloud, unhurt, unmoved. The others were falling back, shouts of alarm and fragments of prayers on their lips. Francisco stumbled to the cold stones, one arm over his face. Horatio dropped to his knees and in that instant a sound broke out over the castle, the distant crowing of a cockerel.

  With the first sound of morning the apparition vanished, quick as mist caught in a sudden storm. The four stood in frightened silence. None keen to speak as if words would make it all real.

  Marcellus was the first.

  “That face!” Marcellus stammered. “Did you see the face?”