Something Rotten Adrian Tchaikovsky This is not what I told Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, when he arrived with his little band of followers; the desperate adventurer who had heard the Danish royal family was failing and had come to stake his claim.
Well, he has it all now: Norway, Denmark, all of it. And perhaps he sleeps easy, believing what I told him. But he never entered Elsinore. He never saw what I saw, what nobody should have to see. It’s better that way. Let him sleep easy right up until the restless history of that castle returns from that undiscovered country.
You’ve heard the story, of course, the one I told to Fortinbras. I made it lurid and bloody enough that nobody would think to go behind it and find the far more lurid and bloody truth.
But let me introduce myself: I am Horatio. I had the privilege of being the Prince of Denmark’s only confidant. And even now I cannot tell you what was true, what he did not confide in me, whether or not he was mad. I would far rather Hamlet had been mad.
And yet I fear – and it keeps me awake at nights – that there was method in it.
I knew Hamlet at Wittenberg. We were students together. He had an insatiable thirst for learning; he said that, back where he came from, they did not care for the new sciences. He was a child of his mother, though, and she had sent him away from Elsinore at a young age to be educated. He very seldom returned home. Often, when he threatened it, she came to see him instead. His father he described as “distant, almost faceless.” But then, Old Hamlet was the King. Small wonder he had no time to be a loving parent as well.
. . .
