Shelli Brown, Lauren Ketron, and Wilson Sims

Creative Group Project

October 18, 2010

Folly in Death

Two clowns enter and begin digging a new grave. Each dressed in the garb of the underclass, they carelessly shift dirt and bone. Two yards below them, under earth and time, what remains of the jester of Hamlet’s youth, creaks with spirit and thought:

Yoric (called Rick by all he knew):               

O please great God, is this the moment of my liberation? Will darkness finally cease? Dirt and worms for three and twenty! For three and twenty my whit’s gone without audience. Three and twenty those bugs once under my bell-toed shoes have had their feast. Three and twenty I’ve desired to see the fruition of the arrogant survivors…ahh, but surely I’ve decayed to feminine hysteria. Not all of the after-life is awful monotony. I’m neither funny nor un-funny, rich nor poor, sexy nor fat, but simply neither.

Rick, in his spirit-mind of course, gives a sort of sigh. Though there is none to see nor listen, his tools of expression are still imagined. The clowns are halfway through their labor, tossing skeletons of mortally great and poor. 

And perhaps, even still, there is relief in repose…peace to be found in the lack of evaluation and degradation…It’s also three and twenty since being forced to lug about that arrogant blob, that indecisive nose picking, cock-blocking Hamlet. Was it 1,000 times which I was required to leave the company of young virgin’s? Wenches driven to passion by my antics and innuendo? 1,000 times which I had my ears pulled and nose bonked by his pudgy, hoof-like hands? Of all people, I, the one who sees through facades of manner and construct! I who read thoroughly the text of laughter—those who laughed too long at my clever remarks of infidelity, those who laughed too loud following a joke about a certain organ’s under-endowment, and those who could laugh not at all as I mockingly usurped the thrown—trading Old Hamlet’s crown with my absurd stalking, and snuggling up with Gertrude.

Rick begins to experience his forgotten senses: blended wafts of grass, manure, and humanity begin to float through the thinned terra.

Shit. The first sensual experience, the first of life to greet my resurrection; the first of all is the shit which has fed my prison. How appropriate that not sunshine, nor daisies, nor laughter would reside at the gate of this world; but the foul waste of our blundering. I have longed for the moment, which seems to be approaching, but now that it is at hand—I wonder if my desire for sense and thought, for approval and fame, I wonder if these are natural or taught. I wonder at the triviality, and I wonder at the expanse. Is it worth it? While sensation in itself, the feeling of feeling, may itself warrant life—must our response to knowledge, our familiarity with pain, equally warrant not only death, but even the wish to have never lived? But despite this musing, and despite the literary disadvantage of lacking an abdomen in which to house a referential soul, a greater amount of whatever I am wants to be, than not to be…prays even, that this wretched smelly cave-man will unearth my spirited skull and grant me my brief leave blindness…Certainly it is far less difficult to long for life when dead, that to long for life while living.  

The diggers begin to speak loudly, covering Rick’s musings with their banter until Rick’s words fade into his personal thoughts.         

***

After much hollering and joking, the diggers finally reach what is left of Rick’s skull and haphazardly uproot it from its hiding place. The earth releases its hold on Rick, and light breaks upon his consciousness.

Ah! Sweet sunlight!  Sweet rays!  I have long forgotten what it feels like for you to play upon my cheek!  But what cheek remains now… how different this feels—sun upon bone and not flesh. The earth has truly transformed me in the last three and twenty.  Her dirt, her worms, they have truly done their worst.

Dirt rains down upon Rick’s skull, dusting him with loose, moist earth.

Who does this man think he is?  A bit heavy with the spade there, mate.  And singing while he does it.  Ah… that I can understand.  One is driven to it after being around these soul-draining, self-serving royal slugs for long. 

The clown ceases his shoveling momentarily to converse with the prince, who has just arrived by the grave.

Ah, speak of the devil… here’s the biggest slug of them all.  My, how’s he’s grown… and not at all in height might I add.  Serves him right, the loafing brat.

Rick pauses his musings long enough to catch the digger’s words. 

“… It was that very day that young Hamlet was born—he that is mad, and sent into England.”

What’s this?  Hamlet, mad?  No, the poor clown is mad if he cannot recognize the face of Denmark’s dismal future when it’s right in front of him.  Though it wouldn’t surprise me if Hamlet were mad… he drove me mad sure enough.  Hey… easy there!

The clown nudges Rick’s skull with his foot. 

“Here’s a skull now hath lien you i’ th’ earth three and twenty years… A whoreson mad fellow’s it was.  A pestilence on him for a mad rogue!  ‘A poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once…”

Ah… yes.  I thought he seemed familiar.

“…This same skull, sir, was, sir, Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester.”

The King’s jester… why not just Yorick?  Or better yet just Rick?  Even in death I am deemed property of someone else. 

            Or am I? 

“Was” is not “is,” is it not?  For “this same skull was Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester” is surely not the same as “this same skull is Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester.”  Therefore, there must be some element of freedom that these worms have given me.  In their gnawing, they have torn away the chains of bondage, of class, of duty, of money, for these fetters that were “is” are now “was,” and I that “was” am no longer the King’s.

Rick becomes aware that he is no longer on the ground, the coolness of the earth traded for the sweaty heat of a palm. 

“Alas, poor Yorick!  I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”

Poor Yorick?  Poor me?  Nay, do not pity me, sloth, for I am a free man.  Pitied still by the living, but set free in death.  Pitied by the one who caused me my life, no less.  And not that he was even quick-witted enough to catch all of my jests and fancy, mind you.

“He hath borne me on his back a thousand times…”

You remember that, do you?  Pray you; do you remember the last time you made this request—this demand, more like it?  The summer after your vacation in England, after your sudden spurt in size?  Even after I warned you of my fragile spine and your growing poundage, you still demanded to have a go, once more.  Well, that thousandth time did it.  Do you remember?  Remember my broken back, remember the idiot doctor whose help sent me sooner to my grave than back to the court?  Of course you don’t.  Psychopath.

“Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick to this favor she must come.  Make her laugh at that.”

Oh, now that is one bidding that I would gladly still do.  Gertrude, lady of my heart, that I had not met such a horrible, premature end.  My jests, my wit, were just starting to win your notice.  Alas, your oaf of a son took care of that.  For an idiot, he does effectively ruin your affairs, my dear. 

“But soft, but soft awhile!  Here comes the King… the queen, the courtiers.”

What’s this?  It’s as if the very mention of her name has drawn the lady to my presence. 

Another voice, unrecognizable to Rick, begins talk about a doubtful death, charitable prayers, shards, flints, and pebbles. 

I wish that he would cease his droning—let the fair Queen speak!  Let me once again hear her voice!

“Sweets to the sweet!” Rick feels the brush of a soft petal against his bone, the caressing melody of the Queen’s words. 

Ah—my lady!  You do remember me!  And you brought me flowers!  My hope is renewed.

One of the bystanders suddenly leaps into the grave, knocking Rick down with him.

“Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead til of this flat a mountain you have made…” the man cries out, kicking the dirt.

Speak for yourself!  To only just be reunited with my sweet, only to be cast aside again by fate!  If I didn’t know any better, I would think Hamlet was involved in this…

A second man jumps into the grave, almost crushing Rick’s skull.  “What is he whose grief bears such an emphasis, whose phase of sorrow conjures the wandr’ing stars, and makes them stand like wonder-wounded hearers?  This is I, Hamlet the Dane.”

Of course.  The ape couldn’t let someone else steal the show.  Typical.

The two men scuffle, hammering Rick into the corner of the grave, where earth tumbles onto his skull, covering his senses in darkness yet again.

Gertrude—wait!  Where has she gone?  Ah fate, you are cruel!  You and your damned tool named Hamlet.  Just wait…. Just wait.

All goes black.

***

The sound of slow, trudging footsteps breach Rick’s awareness.

These diggers reappear to torment me in my hour of rest. Another grave must have been opened.

Two clowns bring a covered body, followed by Horatio. Horatio is crying, saying, “Let four captains bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage; speak loudly for him. Take up the bodies.”

What is this? My once master Hamlet, so young still to be dropped into the darkness of death. I wonder how he came to this fate? Short pause. Loneliness must overcome, and nostalgia, for in the days in which we walked the earth I never felt so inclined to speak of my “master” Hamlet as though we were friends. He is... was, after all an inconceivably boorish fool in life; I am certain in death he could be no less.

He speaks.

Hamlet speaks to himself, he cannot see or hear Yorick.

“What a piece of work is man? How noble in reason? How infinite... But what is infinite? The time which we have on this earth... no. No infinity there. Yet, in these brief hours that I have passed from life, I have discovered no new insight. Is there in knowledge in the afterlife? Is there glory in this death?”

Still dramatic I see.

“My mother, a whore. My father, abandoned. My uncle, a murderer, and still no revenge has been sought. Now in this new life, this shadow of life, we will continue in our past minds, without our bodies?”

Ay, there’s the rub. Why, after my own death I harbored the same questions, the same wonders. The mysteries of time have not been revealed to me. I pause to say that we end the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that the flesh is heir to. Insomuch as I have experienced this sleep, I have not yet discovered its secrets. Are we indeed continuing the lives we lead above? I must say no. This state, though I cannot explain it, is unlike the life we are each born to live.

“My nostrils (if I yet still have nostrils) are filled with the damp and unsatisfying scent of earth. Oh to be rotted and finished, to be part of the worms and the earth for good. Him Rick who passed to this death before me... If only he were here. To answer my questions, to sooth my soul...

Hamlet considers for a moment, and then continues.

... or even to simply fetch me a glass of water. As long as we are both in our current states, he might as well do some work.”

Just when we were starting to relate. At least I to you, Hamlet. You have not changed a bit, and you have much to learn about the afterlife. We are no longer in Denmark, where you are king and I a lonely jester. In death equality is more than a goal; it is fact, unlike anything experienced above the ground. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service – two dishes, but to one table. Hamlet’s kingdom will not save him from the worms that do feast on us all selfsame. Gertrude confided in me during our nights together; she said that your royal family feigned happiness and attempted to cover their misery with their riches. Beyond that life there is no hiding. In these three-and-twenty years I have learned that. Ay... in this new life, this new structure, I might even hold to an affair with Gertrude, the forbidden fruit of my past life.

Rustling above, more bodies are being buried.

Another burial? Or a few more to hear it. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, seen by these sudden deaths. But as we all must live, we all must die. This certainly holds true, with the least of man and the most.

The royal family always did love a scandal, though... I only hope someone immortalizes it in some way. This family certainly deserves the attention, though my role would be better left out.

I only hope the queen is well whilst in these misfortunes. To lose a son, even one as... difficult… as her Denmark prince, is unbearable. His worth is in her life, and her legacy possibly in his death. Though you were a snot-nosed brat, turned a snobby spineless prince, you were beloved by the queen. Once I was also. But I digress.

Rick develops here a softer tone, a gentler spirit towards the prince that he blamed for his misfortune (though Hamlet did deserve the blame). He releases his anger towards the prince as he imagines the life of the prince, the parts he experienced, and the parts he has yet to discover... and a hint of compassion sweeps gently over Rick’s being.

To sleep, perchance to dream, Hamlet. I am sure you will live on. Someone will tell, with th’ occurents, more and less, which have solicited. – the rest is silence.