She is gathering her skirts, pulling her shawl about her, getting ready to turn her back on her husband and his company, when her attention is drawn by a boy walking on to the stage. A boy, she thinks, unknotting and reknotting her shawl. Then, no, a man. Then, no, a lad – halfway between man and boy.
It is as if a whip has been snapped hard upon the skin. He has yellow hair which stands up at the brow, a tripping, buoyant tread, an impatient toss to his head. Agnes lets her hands fall. The shawl slips from her shoulders but she doesn’t stoop to pick it up. She fixes her gaze upon this boy; she stares and stares as if she may never look away from him. She feels the breath empty from her chest, feels the blood curdle in her veins. The disc of sky above her seems at once to press down on her head, on all of them, like the lid of a cauldron. She is freezing; she is stiflingly hot; she must leave; she will stand here for ever, on this spot.
When the King addresses him as ‘Hamlet, my son,’ the words carry no surprise for her. Of course this is who he is. Of course. Who else would it be? She has looked for her son everywhere, ceaselessly, these past four years, and here he is.
It is him. It is not him. It is him. It is not him. The thought swings like a hammer through her. Her son, her Hamnet or Hamlet, is dead, buried in the churchyard. He died while he was still a child. He is now only white, stripped bones in a grave. Yet this is him, grown into a near-man, as he would be now, had he lived, on the stage, walking with her son’s gait, talking in her son’s voice, speaking words written for him by her son’s father.
She presses a hand to either side of her head. It is too much: she isn’t sure how to bear it, how to explain this to herself. It is too much. For a moment, she thinks she may fall, disappear beneath this sea of heads and bodies, to lie on the compacted earth, to be trampled under a hundred feet.
But then the ghost returns and the boy Hamlet is speaking with it: he is terrified, he is furious, he is distraught, and Agnes is filled by an old, familiar urge, like water gushing into a dry streambed. She wants to lay hands on that boy; she wants to fold him in her arms, comfort and console him – she has to, if it is the last thing she does.
The young Hamlet on stage is listening as old Hamlet, the ghost, is telling a story about how he died, a poison coursing through his body, ‘like quicksilver’， and how like her Hamnet he listens. The very same lean and tilt of the head, the gesture of pressing a knuckle to the mouth when hearing something he doesn’t immediately comprehend. How can it be? She doesn’t understand it, she doesn’t understand any of it. How can this player, this young man, know how to be her Hamnet when he never saw or met the boy?
The knowledge settles on her like a fine covering of rain, as she moves towards the players, threading her way through the packed crowds: her husband has pulled off a manner of alchemy. He has found this boy, instructed him, shown him, how to speak, how to stand, how to lift his chin, like this, like that. He has rehearsed and primed and prepared him. He has written words for him to speak and to hear. She tries to imagine these rehearsals, how her husband could have schooled him so exactly, so precisely, and how it might have felt when the boy got it right, when he first got the walk, that heartbreaking turn of the head. Did her husband have to say, Make sure your doublet is undone, with the ties hanging down, and your boots should be scuffed, and now wet your hair so it stands up, just so?
Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. ‘O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!’ murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.
She will say all this to her husband, later, after the play has ended, after the final silence has fallen, after the dead have sprung up to take their places in the line of players at the edge of the stage. After her husband and the boy, their hands joined, bow and bow, facing into the storm of applause. After the stage is left deserted, no longer a battlement, no longer a graveyard, no longer a castle. After he has come to find her, forcing his way through the crowds, his face still streaked with traces of paste. After he has taken her by the hand and held her against the buckles and leather of his armour. After they have stood together in the open circle of the playhouse, until it was as empty as the sky above it.