Proof & Crown

There is nothing beautiful about a death by poison. Fortinbras allows him to wash the prince’s body; it is the best consolation he can offer him, perhaps a recompense for some remembered courtesy at the death of old Fortinbras. But the weather had been cold, then, and the circumstances not so disorientingly dire.

He doubts any of the women of Elsinore would touch the corpse if they could help it, even to dress it for its final rites; they hate and fear their prince even in death, but not half as much as they fear poison. Queen Gertrude had dressed old King Hamlet’s body for the grave; had she felt revulsion at the state they found him in, any horror at how he looked in death all scabbed and bloated, the once-noble body corrupted – disgust at herself – at what she had suffered to be done? The other corpses have been carried from the great hall where they were displayed to the satisfaction of the court, and he supposes they are tended to elsewhere – by their own kin, if any yet live.

Fortinbras’ men carry him in on a stretcher like a soldier merely wounded, and it hurts Horatio’s heart to see. They lay him on the bed, leaving Horatio with a basin of water and a heap of clean cloths. He has been openly weeping in jags since the trumpets sounded last, hoarse unstoical sobs that escape him like the cries of a wounded animal. In the company of other men he can speak with authority, give orders, talk of this and that and what will happen next, but when he’s alone it overtakes him and he’s useless, useless.

He thinks of Augustine before his conversion: a wretched thing, eking out life, having lost his better self in the person of a dear friend. Having lost half of himself as surely as if he were torn in two. He cannot justify feeling this way, but still he’s torn, and bleeds.

He undoes the buttons on his prince’s coat, slips it away from his body. In life he’d seemed impossibly graceful, whether slinking into chairs bonelessly or darting across the duelling ground with steel flashing; now the pliability is slowly leaving his dead flesh and his limbs are no longer slack. It had been an unimaginable horror, to feel the life as it left him, feel taut vibrant pain-stiffened flesh cramp and succumb, and now this. What else is this – this heaping-up of flesh, but this vessel of clay, that lies here inert and will never again speak, move, act? No more than an empty house, a garment with no one wearing it. It would be one thing if he looked peaceful in death, but his prince looks every bit as pain-wracked and careworn as in his last moments, something’s settled into the twisted set of his mouth and the purple hollows of his eyes that no one can wash away.

The fault’s all his, he had been overfond and foolish, he’d loved him too well. When he’s held him it should have been with full knowledge of what he was: a mere man as vulnerable as any other. A freshman’s syllogism: Socrates is a man, all men are mortal… This was all before, before death had entered in and changed everything it touched – when he’d thought of Hamlet’s death only as a hated risk rather than a certainty.

What he is now, Horatio will be too. He prays it will be soon.

He wipes the blackened blood from superficial cuts, and sponges away dirt and saliva and filth; he combs out his hair, stiff with sweat and damp along the hairline from the washing of his face. He washes his hands, too, scrapes the gore and grime out from under his fingernails. The signet of old King Hamlet is still on his son’s finger – a small thing, yet a fatal one, that had taken the life from luckless Rosencrantz and hapless Guildenstern. (In his weakness he can’t bring himself to hate them.) He’d been keeping it stored with his coin, had only put it on before the duel – for luck, Horatio supposed, for strength, to borrow some of his father’s might in arms. Now it’s Fortinbras who will carry the royal seals of Denmark.

Horatio wants to cast this ring into the sea. He wants to thrust it into a furnace and melt it into nothing. He wants to keep it and wear it next to his skin for ever, a sign as good as any when he tells the tale that this all was true, that real men and women died.

He knows what he’s going to do instead. It’s something foolish.

Hamlet’s jaws are reluctant to open, even subjected to force; they come apart with substantial effort only, and an ugly cracking sound that chills Horatio to his marrow. The prince will never say another word in his own defense; he needs Horatio to speak on his behalf. Horatio kisses the ring and drops it in between Hamlet’s bloodless lips. A strip of torn sheet binds up his jaw and he goes to lay out the cloth to cover him in.

Will they lay him in state as Fortinbras has promised them, high on the bier like the king he nearly was, or will they hurry him into the ground like fair Ophelia before the others are even fitted for their grave-clothes? Will they sing him a soldier’s requiem? He wonders how long ago the queen had set her shuttle to work weaving her only son’s shroud. Or if she had intended it for herself, what it is she’ll be buried in, who will prepare her for the grave. Seeing him wrapped in a winding-sheet is worse than seeing him buried; he expects to hear an objection any moment now to the absurdity that any man should be outfitted thus when not a day before he had life and breath in him. Hamlet would have had something to say, something blindingly witty and wise. Horatio can’t think of anything at all.