Hamlet lies dead on the stage, having pithily predicted that ‘the rest is silence’. Fortinbras and the English Ambassadors come on to see the sprawled corpses of the Danish Court with only Horatio there to, as Hamlet puts it, ‘report me and my cause aright’. The Ambassadors set the tone – they have turned up too late to announce the death of two minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. One asks, bleakly, ‘Where should we have our thanks?’ Horatio deputises for the director, demanding that the dead be held up for view, ‘high on a stage’, and then wraps up the night with his account of what we have all apparently seen:
So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause,
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on the inventors’ heads...
Horatio’s glib summary reveals why we need plays and what plays are. To reduce the rich, ambivalent events of the previous three hours to this paltry, moralised list; to draw general meanings from highly individualised actions; to hear no differentiation between Hamlet’s acts and Claudius’s, with all the dead muddled in the same bill of fare – this is almost as comically inept as something Polonius might have said. The action of Hamlet, like the action of any play that escapes from its author into independent life, defies a fifty-word précis.
Hamlet’s account would have been quite different, as would Ophelia’s, Laertes’s, Gertrude’s and so on – yet such is the exquisitely fashioned nature of the play that what transpires cannot be reduced to any one account, nor be described as any one thing. If there’s any truth in Horatio’s synopsis, it perhaps lies in the way it reflects on the writing of a play. ‘Accidental judgements’ is an oxymoron, but it might stand as an account of the way in which the playwright’s decisions generate something that transcends conscious intent. ‘...purposes mistook / Fall’n on the inventors’ heads’ suggests, too negatively perhaps, how plays often exceed their makers’ intentions – think of Ibsen stoutly demurring from the view that A Doll’s House was a rallying call for the emancipation of women, or Brecht rewriting his plays to curb their emotional impact.
To conclude a book about playwriting by stating that the craft eludes definition, just as life itself defies summary, might seem perverse. But this discussion was always going to fall short of its subject matter, in the way that Horatio, who after all has been on the periphery of the story he describes, falls short. So for every observation about a particular play in this book, dozens of others lie in wait to contradict it; for every generalisation, a myriad of disobliging instances remain.
No one has ever got to the bottom of Hamlet. And because that is the case, the play and the character continue to live in their multifaceted, irregular, indefinable form. Likewise, having offered this account of the secret life of plays, for this writer at least, the mystery of playwriting has only deepened. Perhaps that mystery is the only thing that can finally be asserted with any confidence about how plays live.