The Invisible Man: a short story by G K Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English critic, poet and novelist who was well known as one of the most colourful and provocative writers of his day. He was seen by many as a latter-day Samuel Johnson, not only for his common sense and incisive wit, but also for his physically large appearance.

“The Invisible Man” was the fifth story written by G K Chesterton about his priest/detective Father Brown. It appeared in his original collection of Father Brown stories, entitled “The Innocence of Father Brown”, in 1911.

The Story

The setting of the story is Camden Town, a district of north London. A young man, John Turnbull Angus, walks into a café and proposes marriage to the waitress, Laura Hope, who appears to be the only member of staff on the premises. One assumes that the two are not complete strangers to each other, but this is not made clear. She turns him down but, because he refuses to take no for an answer, she tells him the story of her complicated love-life.

She had been living at her father’s pub, The Red Fish, which was somewhere out of town, when she had been the subject of marriage proposals from two suitors, neither of whom she found attractive. One was a very short man, almost a dwarf, named Isidore Smythe. The other, tall and thin but with a terrible squint, was James Welkin. Laura did not want to marry either of them, but neither did she want to hurt their feelings, so she came up with the plan of announcing that she could not marry anyone who had not made his way in the world. The two men promptly set off to seek their fortunes as if, in Laura’s words, “they were in some silly fairy-tale”.

A year has passed, and Laura is now running the café but in real fear that she has been tracked down by James Welkin, the suitor with the squint. She keeps hearing his voice when there is no-one to be seen. She has received letters from Isidore Smythe, who is a now successful businessman, but as she reads the letters she can hear Welkin’s distinctive laugh.

Angus hears a noise in the street and walks through into the confectioner’s shop that adjoins the café to find a man who can only be Isidore Smythe. He points out that a strip of paper has been pasted on the shop window bearing the message “If you marry Smythe he will die”. Smythe also mentions that he has had threatening letters left at his flat, but nobody has seen anyone who could have brought them. Angus offers to help Smythe, and Laura, by putting the matter into the hands of a private detective that he knows and who lives nearby. He is Flambeau, a reformed former French master criminal who is a character that appears in many of the Father Brown stories.

Angus escorts Smythe back to his flat, which is on the top floor of Himalaya Mansions. On the way he notices billboard advertisements for the product that has made Smythe his fortune, namely large clockwork dolls that perform household duties under the general name of “Smythe’s Silent Service”.

When they reach Smythe’s flat, Angus notices that the place is full of these machines that perform their functions at the touch of button. He also sees a scrap of paper on the floor with a message that reads: “If you have been to see her today, I shall kill you”.

Angus heads off to fetch Flambeau, but before he leaves he instructs four people, a cleaner, a commissionaire, a policeman and a chestnut seller, to keep a close eye on the premises and report back to him if anyone enters the building while he is away.

Angus finds Flambeau, who is being visited by Father Brown. As the three of them walk back to Himalaya Mansions it starts to snow. On arrival, Angus hears from all four “guards” that nobody has entered the building in his absence, but Father Brown is not so sure, because he can see footprints in the snow that tell a different story.

When  they reach Smythe’s flat they find a bloodstain on the floor but no Smythe. Back on ground level, Father Brown asks the policeman to investigate something on his behalf, and when he returns he says that Smythe’s body has been found in the nearby canal. Father Brown then regrets that he forgot to ask if a light brown sack has also been found.

The solution of the mystery revolves around the fact that, according to Chesterton and Father Brown, people tend to observe only what they expect to regard as being out of the ordinary. Nobody saw anyone enter Himalaya Mansions, although they would all have seen the postman do so but dismissed this occurrence because it was unremarkable. A postman does not count as a person in such a context.

As a postman, James Welkin was able to deliver all the letters and messages to Laura and Isidore Smythe, and to take away the latter’s small body in his postman’s sack. Laura could hear Welkin’s voice but not see Welkin himself, because the voice was remarkable but a postman doing his rounds was not. The murderer was invisible because he was all too visible, being as much a part of the background scenery as the trees and the houses. Even the sight of a postman leaving the building with a sack that was fuller than when he entered was apparently not sufficiently out of the ordinary to attract attention.

Does it work?

It’s a reasonable thought on which to hang a story, but does it really stand up to scrutiny? One thing to bear in mind is that this story was written in Edwardian England when the class system held sway and everyone with any money employed servants to perform menial tasks for them. Chesterton hints at this very strongly with his description of Smythe’s mechanical servants who line the walls until called into service to perform a specific task. There is a telling line here in that they are described as “only automatic machines and nobody would have looked at them twice”. This would have been how many middle-class people regarded their human servants.

However, even if the reader is willing to accept that a middle-class person could regard a postman as an invisible public servant, does this really work in the scenario of the story? The people who are asked to keep a lookout are not middle-class but working-class, and of the same social status as a postman. Would a cleaner or chestnut seller really allow a postman to be invisible in the same way that a much wealthier householder would? The commissionaire actual states that he would ask any man, “duke or dustman”, what his business was on entering the building, but would he really have made a distinction between a dustman and a postman in this regard, even to the extent that the latter  was “invisible” to him?

It is on this point of class distinction that the story rests in terms of its acceptability to the reader. It is probably true to say that it would have been read differently by its original readers in class-ridden England than by members of today’s much more classless society.

© John Welford

A Tradition of 1804: a short story by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy is known as the author of a series of lengthy novels, which are not always an easy read. However, he also wrote a considerable number of short stories which modern readers might find more approachable. Here is an account of a particularly brief short story.

A very short story

“A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four” was one of the stories published by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) under the title “Wessex Tales”. Although most of the stories had appeared in a collection dated 1888, the final set of seven tales was published in 1912. Of these, “A Tradition of
Eighteen Hundred and Four”, at seven pages long, is easily the shortest. Hardy wrote the date “Christmas 1882” at the end of the story, which was when it first appeared in print (under a slightly different title, with “Legend” for “Tradition”) in an American Christmas annual. 

A summary of the story

The narrator of the story, following an introductory couple of paragraphs in the author’s voice, is “old Solomon Selby”, who retells an experience from when he was a child. After the story has been told, Hardy tells the reader that Solomon has been dead for ten years, so the time gap of about 70 years from then back to the events of the story makes perfect sense.

Solomon says that his father had been a shepherd all his life and lived “out by the Cove”. This can be understood to be Lulworth Cove, on the Dorset coast about midway between Weymouth and Swanage. It is a small, almost circular cove with a narrow entrance that is today a noted feature of the “Jurassic Coast”. As a child, Solomon had lived in a remote shepherd’s cottage, and the years he remembers best were 1803-5, because he was then of an age “when a child’s eyes and ears take in and note down everything about him” and also because those years were at the heart of the Napoleonic Wars between Great Britain and France.

People in England, and especially along the south coast, were particularly worried about the threat of invasion from France. They knew that Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered most of the continent of Western Europe, was intent on defeating Britain. Solomon relates that his father, when droving a flock of ewes to Sussex, had been able to see the French coast and caught sight of the sun glinting on the accoutrements of the vast army that Napoleon had assembled on the beaches and which he was preparing for the invasion. It was believed that some 160,000 men and 15,000 horses would make the crossing on a fleet of 2,000 flat-bottomed boats, which were being built as part of the preparations.

Solomon introduces his uncle Job, a sergeant at foot, who reckoned that the invasion would take place on a calm night, using oars rather than sails. Napoleon’s problem was where he should land his troops, and, according to uncle Job, there was a lot of speculation about where this was likely to be. Most people agreed that the shortest crossing, towards Dover, was the least likely, given that that part of the coast would be the most heavily guarded, but there were plenty of other possibilities. Napoleon’s knowledge of potential landing places and troop concentrations was known to be slight, so people were wary about French spies coming ashore to “case the joint”.

The story then focuses on a night early in the year when the sheep flock needed to be tended right round the clock because the ewes were lambing. Young Solomon was called upon to help his father at such times, standing in for him when the latter needed to rest. On the night in question uncle Job had paid a visit to the house and, when it was Solomon’s turn to go out to the sheep-fold on the hill above the Cove, offered to accompany him. They settled down to rest in some straw with uncle Job telling the boy stories about his past adventures until Solomon fell asleep.

When he woke up, uncle Job had himself fallen asleep and Solomon became aware that there were two men, in military uniform, standing about twenty yards away. He watched by the light of the Moon as they looked at a roll of paper, pointed at various features, and spoke in a language which Solomon could not understand. 

He woke uncle Job and pointed the men out to him, having suspected that they were two French generals come to spy out the lie of the land. However, when uncle Job saw them he soon realised that one of the men was Napoleon Bonaparte himself, which was soon obvious to Solomon when the light from the Frenchmens’ lantern fell on the famous face that the boy had seen so often in pictures.

Uncle Job cursed that he did not have his flintlock pistol with him, and so Napoleon and his companion were able to slip back to their boat and escape, watched by Solomon and his uncle, to a larger boat waiting outside the Cove. Solomon ends his story by simply stating that, having reported the incident, uncle Job heard no more about it, and also saying that the expected invasion never took place. However, he remained convinced that Lulworth Cove was where the French army would have landed had it ever done so.

Could it have happened?

Hardy concludes with a paragraph that states, as mentioned earlier, that Solomon has been dead for ten years, and that his account was not generally believed “due to the incredulity of the age”. 

In his preface to the 1919 edition of “Wessex Tales” Hardy added a note to the effect that this story was purely fictional and that he had always thought it highly improbable, but that he had since been told that the tradition was a real one and that some people believed that Napoleon had actually visited the English coast on a spying mission. It is possible that this legend was not well known in Dorset, where it is hard to imagine that Hardy would not have been aware of it, because Hardy had originally set his story in Sussex and only moved it to Dorset between the different editions of the “Tales”. On the face of it, Sussex, with its long stretches of deserted low-lying coast, seems a more likely location for such an event, and the idea of Napoleon Bonaparte considering the prospect of sending 2,000 boats into Lulworth Cove, which is relatively small, seems little short of bizarre!

As a story, “A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four” is not particularly memorable. It contains only one surprise, no characterisation worth mentioning, and little in the way of plot. It is simply a “what if” kind of story that poses a question that is interesting as far as it goes, and it is well written in that it keeps the reader’s interest, but that is probably the most that can be said about it.

© John Welford

The Road to Wigan Pier, by George Orwell

George Orwell (real name Eric Blair, 1903-50) is best known for two classic works, namely Animal Farm and 1984. However, he wrote a great deal more than those two books, producing both fiction and social commentary. His 1937 book “The Road to Wigan Pier” falls into the latter category.

The book is in two parts. Part 1 describes the appalling social conditions he found on his three-month journey in 1936 in the industrial north of England (he visited Sheffield and Barnsley as well as Wigan), where mass unemployment was rife at the time. 

Part 2 is a discussion that outlines Orwell’s views on Socialism. Orwell took the line that the conditions he had seen could be alleviated by Socialism, so that was a very good reason why the country should become Socialist.

The existence of Part 2 became a real problem for Orwell in that his publisher, Victor Gollancz, who had commissioned the project, was initially reluctant to publish anything other than Part 1, because he believed that the advocacy of Socialism would prove to be too controversial. However, he later changed his mind and published both parts, providing his own critical introduction that commented on what followed.

The Road to Wigan Pier has been criticized on several fronts, one being that Orwell concentrated on the conditions of working men and ignored the plight of women in the industrial towns. Another problem was that he took no account of the attempts at self-improvement that many working-class men were making.

The title might present a puzzle to some people, in that piers are features of seaside towns and Wigan – not far from Manchester – is well inland. The original “Wigan Pier” was a wooden platform from which barges were loaded with coal on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. It had actually been demolished a few years before Orwell visited the town, but the name had stuck for the area of warehouses and wharfs and is still in use today. A replacement “pier” has been built, although the district is now devoted to culture and entertainment rather than industry.

© John Welford

The launch of Penguin Books

According to the founder of Penguin Books, Allen Lane, he was inspired to start publishing cheap paperbacks when he had time to kill on Exeter station (he was returning to London after paying a visit to Agatha Christie) and was hard-pressed to find anything suitable in the station bookstall. All that was on offer were reprinted classics and pulp novels.

There was clearly a gap in the market for contemporary writing aimed at a mass audience. What was needed were books that were easy to read, convenient to take around with one, readily available and very reasonably priced. The Penguin imprint, which began in July 1935, would concentrate on popular fiction, particularly crime, and biography.

Allen Lane’s genius was to make his Penguin books easily recognizable, which he did by sticking to a consistent cover design that was colour-coded to show the type of content – dark blue for biography, orange for general fiction, green for crime fiction, etc. 

The first ten titles, all published at the same time, were reprints of books that Allen Lane thought would sell well, and he was correct with some of his guesses, but not all. They included crime novels by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, fiction by Ernest Hemingway, Compton Mackenzie and Eric Linklater, and a biography of Shelley. 

However, some of his first batch of authors are little known today. That is a risk that publishers always take – but by printing in volume and getting good marketing deals from outlets such as Woolworths, the gains easily outweighed the losses and Penguin Books sold a million volumes in its first ten months, each one priced at sixpence.

Penguin Books soon expanded into other fields, such as the Pelican imprint for non-fiction titles and the Puffin children’s book imprint.

The success of Penguin Books showed that it was possible to get people reading good books if the product was attractive and properly marketed. Literary writing was now a mass-market commodity.

© John Welford

Poets of the 1930s: what inspired them?

The 1930s saw an explosion of poetic activity in Great Britain, with poets such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day Lewis coming to the fore. There were several factors that linked the “Thirties Poets”, and most of them were known to each other and other literary and artistic figures of the time, even if they were less well known to the public at large.

They were, for example, almost all attracted to the Left in politics despite coming from privileged backgrounds. They were the generation that had been of school age during the First World War and had therefore come to know of its horrors second-hand, for example through the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and others. They were therefore protest poets of a different kind from the previous generation.

So what were the influences that inspired these poets to write? What was it about the 1930s that would not allow this small coterie of talented writers to stay silent?

We can define the Thirties as the period between the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the outbreak of World War Two in 1939. The first event produced economic shockwaves that had huge consequences across the world, and the second was, in some ways, the ultimate consequence, although many other factors contributed to the second major cataclysm of the 20^th century.

The 1930s saw the rise of Fascism in Europe, clashing head-on with Communism in a number of arenas, most notably Spain, where civil war broke out in 1936 and attracted a number of British intellectuals to fight on the Communist side. Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, posing serious questions to the democracies of Europe as to how they should react. In Italy, where Fascism as such was born, another totalitarian dictator, Benito Mussolini, took his country to war in 1935 by invading Abyssinia.

A number of the Thirties poets had direct experience of the rise of the Nazis in Germany. W. H. Auden went to live in Germany on leaving Oxford University in 1928 and was joined there by Christopher Isherwood (a prose writer whose works inspired the musical “Cabaret”) in 1929. Stephen Spender, William Plomer and Edward Upward also had first-hand experience of 1930s Germany, and their anti-fascism and consequent pro-communism were the result of that experience.

On the home front, the interplay of the forces of right and left was also being played out in the 1930s. It was widely agreed that Liberalism was failing. It had not produced a “land fit for heroes” after the end of World War One, and Britain was governed for a time by a coalition of parties that seemed unable to take the country forward in any particular direction. For a young person who wanted answers and a sense of purpose, the choice had to be towards one extreme or the other.

Oswald Mosley had been a Labour MP, but he formed his “New Party” in 1931 that, as soon became clear, was a British Nazi party. At first, some intellectuals were attracted by Mosley’s no-nonsense approach. These included W. H. Auden, but he and others were soon repelled by the thuggery that Mosley’s “Blackshirts” demonstrated on the streets of London, especially towards Jews and immigrants.

The alternative was the politics of the Left. The Labour Party, under Ramsay Macdonald, was discredited because it had thrown in its lot with the Liberals and Conservatives in the National Government, so other parties of the left that presented a more openly Marxist front were far more attractive. The story of the connections between British poets and intellectuals and the various factions of the far left is a complex one, not least because Marxist cliques and parties, then as now, rarely present a united front and the scene is forever a shifting one. However, none of the poets of the Thirties was right-wing in attitude, and none of them was apolitical.

Another factor that pushed the poets towards Communism was their general admiration for the young Soviet Union, led by Stalin. Here was a state, built on a political philosophy that they admired, that was succeeding while the West was failing. It has to be remembered that, although several of them had direct experience of Berlin under Hitler, they did not have the same familiarity with life under Stalin’s regime. Indeed, the full story of how Soviet Communism actually worked, with its show trials and mass starvations, was unknown to all but a very select few until many years later.

What the poets and intellectuals did know about was conditions in their own country. Economic depression inevitably leads to unemployment, which hits the poorest hardest. During the Thirties, this led to a massive North-South divide, because the industries that suffered most from changes in world conditions were predominantly based in the North. In 1934 the town of Jarrow in north-east England (from which the “Jarrow Crusade” was to march to London in 1936) had unemployment of 67.8%. At the same time, unemployment in High Wycombe (in the leafy Home Counties near London) was only 3.3%. The south could even be said to be prosperous not only in relative but in absolute terms, with new light industries springing up and large numbers of substantial semi-detached houses marching out along the high roads in “ribbon development”.

With very few exceptions, the poets and writers of the Thirties had no direct experience of economic deprivation. George Orwell (who described himself as “lower upper middle class”) had no need to make himself poor so that he could write “Down and Out in Paris and London” (1933). The poets were mainly split between public school (i.e. fee-paying) and Oxford and public school and Cambridge. That did not, however, prevent them from having social consciences.

On top of the political and economic conditions of the time, poetic inspiration also came from social changes that became apparent during the decade. Class distinctions were still well defined, but the poets came to regard the middle class as “doomed”, in that its moral certainties were open to question. These in turn had been based on strict applications of religious precepts, which the poets had been subjected to during their schooldays, so a rebellion against humbug, rigidity and sexual Puritanism was hardly to be wondered at.

Other developments included a revolution in terms of popular entertainment. Talking pictures made the cinema a highly popular destination, even for those with little money to spare on leisure activities. Given that most films were American in origin, the influence of American culture began to be felt in Britain.

Dancing was also extremely popular among the lower middle class. Together with the cinema, the “palais de danse” encouraged the habit of “going out”, especially among young adults. For those who preferred to stay at home, such as older people, the loudspeaker radio brought entertainment and world news into the home.

The keyword of the decade must therefore be “awareness”. People of all classes were becoming more aware of life beyond the narrow confines of their work and family. They could see and hear for themselves what was going on, be that in terms of political developments or the cultures of other nations.

For the poets, there was much against which to protest, although the audience for their writings was always a limited one. Poetry had little to do with the mass media, and the works of Auden, MacNeice and Co, warning of disaster ahead, would only have had readers in their hundreds. It was only in the forties that a reasonably large poetry-reading public emerged, by which time the disasters had already occurred. 

© John Welford

There Was An Old Woman Who Lived In a Shoe: what does it mean?

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,

She had so many children she didn’t know what to do;

So she gave them some broth without any bread,

And she whipped them all soundly and sent them to bed.

This may just sound like a nonsense rhyme but it does have a real meaning behind it. Like many so-called nursery rhymes it was political in origin, dating from the reign of King George II of Great Britain (reigned 1727-60).

George was the second king of the Hanoverian dynasty (from which the current royal family are descended), coming to the throne in 1727, but he was not very popular with the British public. He had been born abroad and found the English language difficult. He also found the business of governing not to his liking and tended to leave the major decisions to his much more able wife, Queen Caroline. He therefore acquired the nickname of “the old woman”.

He also found that the leading minister of the day, Sir Robert Walpole, was able to control Parliament and that he had very little influence over what the members of parliament did. They were therefore the unruly children of the rhyme.

Many people in the country had been ruined by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1721, and King George was keen to involve Britain in foreign wars, notably the series of struggles that became known as the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-8). This meant that there was very little money in the public purse (“broth without any bread”). 

The king demanded that Parliament should remain in constant session and that its members should attend every day to vote the way he wanted them to, although, as mentioned above, it was Walpole who really controlled matters. A demand that MPs vote in a certain way is referred to as a “whip”, which derives from the “whipper-in” on the hunting field who kept the hounds in line. 

The “children” were therefore soundly whipped and sent to “bed”, namely the House of Commons.

The shoe in the rhyme could also be a reference to marital fertility, as symbolised by the throwing of shoes as the bride and groom left for their honeymoon. George and Caroline were certainly fertile, having eight surviving children.

The “old woman” rhyme was therefore a way of poking fun at the inadequacies of an unpopular king, with its meanings hidden in such a way that anyone reciting it could not be accused of directly insulting King George.

© John Welford

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: a play by Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard took the title of his 1966 play from a line towards the end of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. All the main characters are dead, which leaves the concluding lines to be spoken by Hamlet’s friend Horatio and the Norwegian general Fortinbras. An ambassador from England announces that he has come too late to tell the Danish king that his orders have been obeyed and that “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead”. 

These two minor characters appear much earlier in the play as spies sent by King Claudius to try to work out what is in Hamlet’s mind that could explain his bizarre behaviour. They are old friends of Hamlet and are greeted warmly at first but then less so as Hamlet is clever enough to work out their true purpose and taunts them about their duplicity. 

Later on, Claudius sends Hamlet on a ship to England, accompanied by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are bearing a letter from Claudius that requests that Hamlet be killed on arrival, but Hamlet is able to switch the letter for one that condemns his two former friends to death. Hamlet is able to escape from the ship when it is attacked by pirates and return to Denmark, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not so lucky.

Tom Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 but has lived in Britain since 1946. His widowed mother married a British army major, which therefore gave Tom and his brother Peter British citizenship. He began writing plays in the 1950s and in 1964 wrote a one act play entitled “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear”, which evolved into the three act play in which King Lear plays no part.

Stoppard was interested in the many unanswered questions arising from “Hamlet”. Clearly, the characters were used by Shakespeare for a specific purpose, and they always appear as a pair with little to distinguish one from the other. They are also overshadowed by the much stronger character of Hamlet. However, what if they were put in the limelight and the other Shakespeare characters played bit parts? Also, what if their actions were seen in a comic light as opposed to being elements of a tragedy? These were the possibilities that inspired Tom Stoppard to write his play.

Stoppard turns everything on its head by concentrating on the times when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are off-stage as far as Shakespeare’s play is concerned. One can imagine that the main action of Hamlet is happening on another stage in parallel to what one is seeing here. At times the two plays interact and a scene from “Hamlet” appears in Stoppard’s version.

One of the main themes of “Hamlet” is the main character’s musings on the nature of existence and the purpose of life, as exemplified by the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy. For Stoppard, the same questions apply to his main characters, and much of the comedy of the play comes from their introspections and conclusions on these matters.

Act One

The play opens with the two courtiers flipping a coin and betting on heads or tails, which immediately poses questions about fate, chance, and the nature of reality. The coin always comes down heads, 92 times in a row, thus prompting the characters to reckon that they are subject to unnatural forces. The scene is therefore set for happenings that are beyond their control and which they will struggle to understand.

When the pair are summoned by Claudius and Gertrude to undertake their mission to spy on Hamlet, great play is made of Shakespeare’s apparent inability to tell them apart. This even extends to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves. Hamlet’s central question of “Who am I?” is thus presented with a comic twist.

The travelling players from “Hamlet” also make an appearance in this act. Just like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern they spend a lot of time off-stage, so Tom Stoppard imagines that all these bit players might get together at such times. However, the play that they put on for the courtiers is a lot more bloodthirsty than the wordy and courtly performance they enact in “Hamlet”. During their “time off” they clearly have other preferences.

Act Two

In Act Two there are many interactions between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the chief player, the king and queen, and Hamlet. Questions of reality and unreality crop up with confusing frequency, aided by the contrast between what the players do on stage and off (they produce a dress rehearsal of “The Murder of Gonzago” which they perform in “Hamlet”), and always against the background of whether Hamlet’s madness is feigned or real.

Issues of life and death arise when the players foretell the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the couple are asked to find the corpse of Polonius after Hamlet has killed him in error, thinking that his victim was Claudius.

Act Three

Act Three takes place on the ship to England as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern escort Hamlet to England, sent there by Claudius in a bid to have Hamlet killed. Questions of existence arise at the outset because the pair have no idea how they got there and need proof that they are actually alive. They open Claudius’s letter and thus discover the king’s true purpose. However, Hamlet switches the letter while they are asleep.

Also on board are the players, who have decided to escape the expected wrath of Claudius. They have stowed away in barrels on deck, which also prove to be good hiding places for all the characters when the pirates attack. After the pirates have gone, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discover that Hamlet has gone too.

When they look again at the letter they learn the truth about Hamlet’s treachery and have to face the fact that their fates are sealed. However, they cannot understand why they deserve to die. The chief player offers Guildenstern an intended consolation along the lines that everyone must die, but this enrages the courtier who takes the player’s dagger and stabs him with it. The player falls but then rises again, because his dagger is a theatrical one with a retractable blade. This provides another approach to the question of the reality of life and death.

In the final scene the two main characters muse on the existential issues that have pervaded the play but still fail to come to any satisfactory conclusions. Could things have been different? Could they have changed the course of events in either their own drama or the parallel one that keeps impinging on theirs? The lights go out on each of them in turn and the line “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and dead” sounds as the final moment of the play.

Although this is a comedy, it has a number of messages and poses many questions. Just as there are no easy answers in “Hamlet”, so there are none here. An audience member will come away with the uneasy feeling that, as well as being the main character in his or her own life story, they are also a bit player in that of every other person they know, to a greater or lesser extent. 

Would a patron of this play who did not know “Hamlet” reasonably well get as much out of it as someone who did? The answer to that is probably No, because there are so many subtle references to Shakespeare’s play in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”. Also, it would be difficult for someone who was completely ignorant of “Hamlet” to be aware of the points of contact between the two plays, or even of the significance of the title. That said, the play is entertaining and enjoyable in its own right, and might be an interesting point of entry (if somewhat confusing!) to “Hamlet” for someone who had not seen it.

© John Welford