No Prozac For Hamlet

NO PROZAC FOR HAMLET

(originally published in Deep South )

MODERATOR

We have a really unusual case, today, of madness and murder and accusations in royal places. Our guests today are: Prince Hamlet of Denmark and his friend Horatio [slumped in comfortable chairs, miked and ready, Horatio tensely distracted, Hamlet poised ], a friend who's supported his Princeliness, we understand, through some weeks of ... would you call it rehabilitation? And over here we have the Queen and the latest King of Denmark, Gertrude and Claudius. Now, Prince, if you would begin . . .?

CLAUDIUS

Why not let us begin? We are on the defensive, here, you know. It is our morality that is being attacked; no one has to attack him, he indicts himself.

HAMLET [not impolitely]

Go ahead, please.

GERTRUDE

Maybe I ought to begin. I might begin with a mother's admission: I willingly endure a mother's blame for what has happened to my son. He betrays some of my faults but in another way.

MODERATOR

Now hold on. I think, well...[snickering] we needn't consider mothers too terribly responsible for the inactions or actions or misdeeds of their children these days? Or should we?

CLAUDIUS

He slew an old man, drove a girl mad -- upset everybody -- made accusa--

MODERATOR

And we have the specialists waiting to tell us what their examinations and tests have told them about Hamlet's malady, his motives in the killing of Polonius--who may, I am told, join us through the folks with the Necromantic Hot Line who have agreed to give us a feed today. Now, let's see Prince. [looking at notes] I see you have been charged with but, [glancing at someone off-stage] never tried for this murder?

HAMLET

A question about my sanity came up.

CLAUDIUS

It was of course the quick marriage that first set him off, he did not like that rapid move to replace his father.

HAMLET

Would anyone with a sense of propriety?

CLAUDIUS

I think he still wants to sleep with his mommy because he feels sick [mockingly, in babytalk] and he hopes she will make him feel all better. I am sleeping with his mommy, the Queen, and he wants to replace me.

MODERATOR

You must've been talking to the doctors backstage, King Claudius. You don't strike me as the sort of man who'd read up on Oedipal connections.

GERTRUDE

He's a good man, but he --

HAMLET

He killed my father, this I know, 'cause the father told me so. So you must die, too, but I couldn't say when.

GERTRUDE [aside, grim]

See? Here he goes! Slides right off into it. Threatening the king outright....

MODERATOR

I think we'll bring out some experts on this problem now. Doctor Jones, is it?

JONES [ambling on stage]

Ernest Jones.

MODERATOR

And you have I think written a popular essay on this subject, called--

JONES

Hamlet and Oedipus.

MODERATOR

Right, in which you said:

JONES

Don't get out of context. I always said this would happen.

MODERATOR

Doctor Jones, I believe you once wrote this famous, uh, construction [reads]:

"The association of the idea of sexuality with his mother, buried since infancy, can no longer be concealed from his consciousness...the long 'repressed' desire to take his father's place in his mother's affections is stimulated to unconscious activity--"

HAMLET [groaning]

Oh, please-

MODERATOR

"--by the sight of someone usurping this place exactly as he himself had once longed to do so...more...the actual usurpation further resembled the imaginary one in being incestuous."

CLAUDIUS

How? It says in the Bible, I could almost quote you the verse, that a woman is supposed, is bound to marry the brother of her deceased husband. It's in the Book!

MODERATOR

This is a probably a subject for another show, one I am sure we'll do, but for now let's stick to his accusations and his reasons for killing Polonius.

HAMLET

I told everybody, didn't I Horatio? Thought he was a rat. Sorry!

MODERATOR

But good Prince, as much as we'd like to admire you for your firm belief in what a ghost told you, this old man was nothing more than a meddling father watching over his daughter. Did he deserve the treatment you gave him?

Hamlet: But you have to understand my metanoia. And remember how crazy she was, God help her! I don't call it paranoia, for that word has really crazy meanings wound about it; I mean a sort of being above my mind, watching it (and everybody else's) from a somewhat detached position not exactly sub specie aeternitus, but close.

JONES

He is rationalizing his illness. You must admit to feelings of self-loathing, to revulsion for food and joy-

HAMLET

Yes, well, maybe, Doctor, but only to the proper point. I don't know. How is one supposed to grieve; for how long the father, for a wife or mother? Is there some set time period?

JONES

You are in denial, sir! [to the audience] It is dangerous!

HAMLET

How can there be manuals for the regulation of grief? I still grieve for my father; he doesn't manifest his ghostly self nearly as much lately.

JONES

He enjoys being manic-depressive, is what it is, good sirs and madams. He has begun to enjoy his disease. This is the beginning of the worst disease, and it does happen. Psychosis eventually will create the sort of psychotic episode he's probably going to tell you.

MODERATOR

Right. We would get to that sooner or later. You saw the ghost of your father, Ham, is that right?

HAMLET (to HORATIO)

Speak up, Horatio.

MODERATOR

Twice.

HAMLET

Once armored, once in nightclothes. I know how it must sound to you all.

GERTRUDE

Very odd. He talked to it and said it talked to him, but I saw nothing.

HORATIO [abrupt but calm]

I saw it. Him.

MODERATOR [introductorily]

Hamlet's young defender. You are a student, it says here...

HORATIO

I saw it that night as did the guards on duty. I would not have believed it until I saw it.

GERTRUDE [to herself]

Why couldn't I see him? It was not to me that his unquiet spirit came with this story. How can I believe in my boy's crazed imagination? Horatio looks somewhat dazed by all this; he'd say anything.

CLAUDIUS

That boy's lying. Look at him. Obviously frightened or dazed or frozen up by something.

HORATIO

This changed my life, sir.

MODERATOR

Interesting. How so?

HORATIO

I began to be interested in alchemy and necromancy and such things. I have a bunch of book here ... Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy ... Paracelsus ... [reading, oblivious].

MODERATOR

Okay... Now what exactly, HAMLET, did your father's ghost instruct you to do? Did he say, Go kill my brother? Was it a voice, whispering in your ear...?

HAMLET [looking askance]

I am not normally a bloodthirsty man. I am on most occasions slow to action, stolid, plodding along almost in what I must admit is truly a tergiversational mode. I could have killed you, Claudius, did you know? When you knelt before God? After the play? Then, Polonius would not have been mistaken for a rat....

MODERATOR

You don't sound very contrite. We were under the impression that you wanted to make a case for yourself, yet you speak of your victim as a rodent and I think you also referred to his "guts"?

HAMLET [continuing, unaffected]

...and Ophie might still be alive, and Laertes would not have tried to get into St. Elizabeth's Hospice to kill me and gotten himself all messed up...but no, you see, this was my problem, that I did not want to be an avenger-son! That caused it all.

MODERATOR

Despite what your ghostly father told you.

HAMLET

Despite him, yes. Forgive me, father!

MODERATOR [excitedly]

Do you see him there now? [off-stage] Is the feed here?

HAMLET [peering about with the others]

No, I think not.

CLAUDIUS

You interrogate an insane man, you-- [splutteringly]

JONES

If I may intersperse a word here? There is a certain psychological schema that is set up in cases of extreme self-loathing. You think of people afflicted with this as, well, perfectly harmless to everyone besides themselves, right? Yes? But! There may come that time when this de-struk-tive in-ward-ness turns Out-ward [gesturing broadly] because it is frustrated by the strictures against self-destruction which lie quite deep in thehuman psyche. Cyclothymics have very irregular, very unpredictable swings and fluxes of affect. Sometimes he is deeply manic--often when around large groups of people; other times he is inconsolable, lonely, solitary, one you must leave alone. It could then happen that --

HAMLET

Please, please let me interrupt here. I must be allowed to defend my inactions.

MODERATOR

Go ahead.

HAMLET

I was telling you before. I'm not a warrior-type. I could never measure up to that, to what my father the warrior had done. Sorry! No can do. And I tried to say I did not care. And--but-- His death did suppress any minor joys I may have gleaned from my books at Wittenburg. I was already studying mortality. He simply became the latest example.

GERTRUDE

And that's what made you see the ghost.

HAMLET

And that's why you couldn't see the ghost. You haven't a grain of memento mori in you, Mother--I suppose I should learn to appreciate that quality-- Yet even if the visitations were all created in my mind alone (which they were not!) does that invalidate the imperative he gave me, the gory details of his tortured existence? The mind makes a lot of things, Doctor Jones. Living in my skin, undergoing life through this consciousness, could you make such a keen reductive gnostication about me?

JONES

That is not the way of science.

HAMLET [under his breath, through his moustache-hairs]

Nescience.

CLAUDIUS

What?

JONES

Wha?

MODERATOR

So what we have here is the case of a prince who may or may not be semi-sane, who, he says, only accidentally murdered an eavesdropping old councilor to the King.

CLAUDIUS

And he says I killed his father: I loved my brother, I grieved for him, I could never have killed him.

GERTRUDE [tentatively]

Never.

CLAUDIUS

I'm sorry your son is a cyclothymic. Perhaps it is treatable with unguents, philters of some modern sort? [looking at Jones]

GERTRUDE

I was a terrible mother. I was a terrible wife. Now I'm a terrible second wife.

HAMLET

Mother, you always do this.

GERTRUDE

What?

HAMLET

You excuse yourself by reminding us all of your weaknesses.

GERTRUDE [to Jones, who nods assent]

Is that right?

MODERATOR

We did a show on this not long ago.

HAMLET

Who will your believe, mother?

GERTRUDE

My son or my husband.

HAMLET

If you'll --

[alarum]

MODERATOR

I certainly hope that's the sound of our Necromantic Hot Line feed coming in, folks. We have one of the deceased on the line. Just a minute...are we ready, Claire? Okay...

[HAMLET leaps up from his chair, runs off-stage behind some technical equipment, cowering down, listening to a hand-shaking hum]

GHOST

Hamlet Son, are you there?

[Ghost-voice, heard only by Hamlet in the midst of earsplitting white noise]

HAMLET

Yes, father, I'm here.

GHOST

You forgot, son.

HAMLET

No, father, I'll never forget. This thing of a King will someday be punished, I know it, father. Secret retributions scoot around through the world all the time.

GHOST

Hamlet?

HAMLET

Yes?

GHOST

Who are all these other people? I can only communicate, you know, with you. The others are hearing static noises. Son, something must soon be done. Purgatory is a lonesome, difficult place.

HAMLET [sadly]

I'm sure it is, father. I think of you.

GHOST

There's nothing to do...it seems like eternity but we are aware that it's not.

HAMLET

Those others include your murderer King Claudius, a doctor, and Gertrude.

GHOST

Talk to your mother.

HAMLET

I've tried, I really have.

GHOST

She hasn't learned to fully express her grief, HAMLET, that's all it is. Sometimes grief makes a woman horny --

HAMLET [quite shocked]

Father!

GHOST

Well, that's just another little sin that'll have to be purged away. It's nothing compared to some of my other sins. I was too bloodthirsty, son. Learn from me.

HAMLET

You do confuse me, old man.

GHOST

Talk to her.

HAMLET [mechanically]

I will.

[GHOST is gone]

Farewell.

HAMLET

Farewell. So now what do I do? If my mother would stand with me to accuse him? But she cannot. She's too weak. Ophelia, where are you tonight? I could use some female strength to prop up my sagging volition. Soon they will take me back to my fine room at St. Elizabeth's Hospice, with this new example of craziness to study--" he says he had a conversation but all the rest of us heard was static"----and the studiers and gleaners will come by from time to time to interview me anew, to try to stare into my eyes and figure me out. They'll leave and write monographs. Prozac intermingled with "cognitive therapy" (as they say) for several months, perhaps a year or two: they'll eventually let me out, and by then the newsmongers will have tired of this royal story.

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