GUIL: My dear fellow!

ROS: How are you?

GUIL: Afflicted!

ROS: Really? In what way?

GUIL: Transformed.

ROS: Inside or out?

GUIL: Both.

ROS: I see. (Pause.) Not much new there.

GUIL: Go into details. Delve. Probe the background, establish the situation.

ROS: So-so your uncle is the king of Denmark?!

GUIL: And my father before him.

ROS: His father before him?

GUIL: No, my father before him.

ROS: But surely-

GUIL: You might well ask.

ROS: Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king.

GUIL: Yes.

ROS: Unorthodox.

GUIL: Undid me.

ROS: Undeniable. Where were you?

GUIL: In Germany.

ROS: Usurpation, then.

GUIL: He slipped in.

ROS: Which reminds me.

GUIL: Well, it would.

ROS: I don't want to be personal.

GUIL: It's common knowledge.

ROS: Your mother's marriage.

GUIL: He slipped in.

Beat.

ROS (lugubriously) : His body was still warm.

GUIL: So was hers.

ROS: Extraordinary.

GUIL: Indecent.

ROS: Hasty.

GUIL: Suspicious.

ROS: It makes you think.

GUIL: Don't think I haven't thought of it.

ROS: And with her husband's brother.

GUIL: They were close.

ROS: She went to him

GUIL: Too close-

ROS: for comfort.

GUIL: It looks bad.

ROS: It adds up.

GUIL: Incest to adultery.

ROS: Would you go so far?

GUIL: Never.

ROS: To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popped onto his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner?

GUIL: I can't imagine! (Pause.) But all that is well known, common property. Yet he sent for us. And we did come.

ROS: (alert, ear cocked) : I say! I heard music

GUIL: We're here.

ROS: Like a band-I thought I heard a band.

GUIL: Rosencrantz…

ROS: (absently, still listening) : What? Pause, short.

GUIL: (gently wry) : Guildenstern.

ROS (irritated by the repetition) : What?

GUIL: Don't you discriminate at all?

ROS (turning dumbly) : Wha'?

Pause.

GUIL: Go and see if he's there.

ROS: Who?

GUIL: There.

ROS goes to an upstage wing, looks, returns, formally making his report.

ROS: Yes.

GUIL: What is he doing?

ROS repeats movement.

ROS: Talking.

GUIL: To himself? ROS Starts to move. GUIL Cuts in impatiently. Is he alone?

ROS: No.

GUIL: Then he's not talking to himself, is he?

ROS: Not by himself… Coming this way, I think. (Shiftily.) Should we go?

GUIL: Why? We're marked now.

HAMLET enters, backwards, talking, followed by POLONIUS , upstage. ROS and GUIL occupy the two corners do looking upstage.

HAMLET: for you yourself, sir, should be as old as I am if like a crab you could go backward.

POLONIUS (aside) : Though this be madness, yet there is method in it. Will you walk out of the air, my lord?

HAMLET: Into my grave.

POLONIUS: Indeed, that's out of the air. HAMLET Crosses to upstage exit, POLONIUS asiding unintelligibly until my lord, I will take my leave of you.

HAMLET: You cannot take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal-except my life, except my life, except my life…

POLONIUS (crossing downstage) : Fare you well, my lord. (To ROS :) You go to seek Lord Hamlet? There he is.

ROS (to POLONIUS) : God save you sir.

POLONIUS goes.

GUIL (Calls upstage to HAMLET) : My honoured lord!

ROS: My most dear lord!

HAMLET centred upstage, turns to them.

HAMLET: My excellent good friends! How dost thou Guildenstern? (Coming downstage with an arm raised to ROS , GUIL meanwhile bowing to no greeting. HAMLET corrects himself. Still to ROS :) Ah Rosencrantz!

They laugh good-naturedly at the mistake. They all meet misstate, turn upstage to walk, HAMLET in the middle, arm over each shoulder.

HAMLET: Good lads how do you both?

BLACKOUT

ACT TWO

HAMLET , ROS and GUILtalking, the continuation of the previous scene.

Their conversation, on the move, is indecipherable at first.

The first intelligible line is HAMLET 'S, coming at the end of a short speech-see Shakespeare Act 11, scene ii.

HAMLET: S'blood, there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.

A flourish from the TRAGEDIANS ' band.

GUIL: There are the players.

HAMLET: Gentlemen, you am welcome to Elsinore. Your hands, come then. (He takes their hands.) The appurtenance of welcome is fashion and ceremony. Let me comply with you in this garb, lest my extent to the players (which I tell you must show fairly outwards) should more appear like entertainment than yours. You am welcome. (About to leave.) But my uncle-father and aunt-mother am deceived.

GUIL: In what, my dear lord?

HAMLET: I am but mad north north-west; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.

POLONIUS enters as GUIL turns away.

POLONIUS: Well be with you gentlemen.

HAMLET (to ROS) : Mark you, Guildenstern. (uncertainly to GUIL) and you too; at each ear a hearer. That great baby you see there is not yet out of his swaddling clouts… (He takes ROS upstage with him, talking together.)

POLONIUS: My Lord! I have news to tell you.

HAMLET (releasing ROS and mimicking) : My lord, I have news to tell you… When Roscius was an actor in Rome…

ROS comes downstage to rejoin GUIL .

POLONIUS (as he follows HAMLET out) : The actors are come hither my lord.

HAMLET: Buzz, buzz.

Exeunt HAMLET and POLONIUS . ROS and GUIL ponder. Each reluctant to speak first.

GUIL: Hm?

ROS: Yes?

GUIL: What?

ROS: I thought you..

GUIL: No.

ROS: Ah.

Pause.

GUIL: I think we can say we made some headway.

ROS: You think so?

GUIL: I think we can say that.

ROS: I think we can say he made us look ridiculous.

GUIL: We played it close to the chest of course.

ROS (derisively) : "Question and answer. Old ways are the best ways"! He was scoring off us all down the line.

GUIL: He caught us on the wrong foot once or twice, perhaps, but I thought we gained some ground.

ROS (simply) : He murdered us.

GUIL: He might have had the edge.

ROS (roused) : Twenty-seven-three, and you think he might have had the edge?! He murdered us.

GUIL: What about our evasions?

ROS: Oh, our evasions were lovely. "Were you sent for?" he says. "My lord, we were sent for…" I didn't know when to put myself.

GUIL: He had six rhetoricals

ROS: It was question and answer, all right. Twenty-seven questions he got out in ten minutes, and answered three. I was waiting for you to delve. "When is he going to start delving?" I asked myself.

GUIL: And two repetitions.

ROS: Hardly a leading question between us.

GUIL: We got his symptoms, didn't we?

ROS: Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn't mean anything at all.

GUIL: Thwarted ambition-a sense of grievance, that's my diagnosis.

ROS: Six rhetorical and two repetition, leaving nineteen, of which we answered fifteen. And what did we get in return? He's depressed!… Denmark's a prison and he'd rather live in a nutshell; some shadow-play about the nature of ambition, which never got down to cases, and finally one direct question which might have led somewhere, and led in fact to his illuminating, claim to tell a hawk from a handsaw.