English Oral

[knights_say_nih]

YES! MWAHAHAHA! This is my Oral Assessment (sounds half dirty) for English this term. A monologue from the perspective of the Player from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. It still needs some polishing, but here it is so far, hot off the press.

Warning. Deeply, deeply morbid. And long.


The Opposite of People.
Come in, come in. What is it that you want.
No, I do not owe you any money, thank you very much. You have the wrong address, I assure you.
Yes, I am certain, thank you very much. You may go.

Of course, if you might care for a drink, I wouldn’t mind some company. An audience.
Well then, it seems we’ve gathered quite a crowd. Students coming out of the woodworks, it appears. Ah well, Necessity is the mistress of Productivity, and it rather seems the great occasion of my very real necessity has produced you.

*coughing fit*

I’ll tell you the occasion in a few moments, but first allow me to introduce myself to you.
I am Hamlet. I am Claudius. I am Rosencrantz, I am Guildenstern. Lear, Macbeth, MacDuff and Gloucester. I am Edmund the Bastard, and Romeo the lover. When I was younger and my voice had yet to crack I was Juliet too. Imagine that, me in a dress.

*ominous pause*

Don’t laugh, I was smaller then. A life on the stage is a frugal one and this was before I’d quite such a heavy load around my midriff. But the years catch up to you and life is full of fine wine and rich food and one indulges more than one should. I made a perfectly lovely Juliet. Melted hearts and brought tears to my audience’s eyes in all the theatres- or taverns- we played in.

No matter. I was Juliet and in an incestuous twist I was Romeo too. I have been kings and I have been beggars. I had a name once.
Will I share it with you?
Will you believe me if I tell you I forgot what it was to begin with?

*a long, desperate look at the audience, because he hopes they will because he HAD*

No?
Well, call me William, then. It’s a proud name and shared by many a thespian, including the most noble of them all. The God who steered the life of many a man with pen and ink, who brought characters as beautiful and strange as the Danish prince who natters to himself to life, and as simple and guileless as gentle Rosencrantz and noble Guildenstern who were penned in only cursory lines.

I’ll be William. Who will you be? Go on, around your circle, introduce yourself to me. Rebecca, oh, I’ve a play for you, about a young wife living under the shadow of another. Amelie, you could be a French film actress. Clare, lovely, a simple name. Downright Commedia dell Arte, would you play my Pierrot? Emma. Well, you’ve been in your own play of course, but not as yourself. Elizabeth, you could be a queen of England, if you ever chose to make your life on the stage. We’d have to powder your face of course, and pluck an inch here, dress you up in a corset and put you in a wig, but that’d be small suffering in comparison to the beauty you could create, yes?
Yes?
No.

Well, the life of the stage isn’t for everyone. I made it my home, for I had no other. When you consign yourself to becoming a player you wander out and about, without house, home, or name for yourself. There is nothing more indistinct than another actor. You don’t talk about William, who held a skull in his hand and wept tears of sorrow. You talk about Hamlet, the play that made you cry. The actor is merely a glove that the character puts on in order to appear in front of the world yet again.

I’ll give you a performance, in a few moments, but forgive me. When I’m not acting I’m rather old, when I’m not onstage I have something of a limp, and years of sleeping in a nearly bare wagon with naught but the heat of bodies next to me for warmth has left my lungs, well, not quite what they used to be.

So, to make my rather long story short, I’ll go on to why I’ve gathered you, my final, lovely audience.

You see, I’m dying.

It’s not the fanfare of a hundred trumpets, it’s not the screaming echoes of a madman’s last moments, it’s not a woman hurling herself from a fiery building or a lover driving a dagger into his breast to end the thousand woes of life.

I am more than ninety years old when I’m not onstage and ten, twenty, thirty. I am old and I am dying.

I must say, it’s been quite the experience. I’ve never played the scene quite to the hilt before, I think, no matter how beautifully the most expensive of stage daggers collapse. This time, I won’t stand again at intermission. This time, I won’t lie on the stage and complain in my own mind that my back is aching.

I’m not afraid of death. I’ve died a hundred thousand deaths before. But this one is different.

It’s closing night, and perhaps you’ll call me vain, but I did want someone to be there to applaud when the curtain draws to its own inevitable close.

Do you think me morbid? I’m afraid you must. You know, I did have someone my-hand-to-God die on stage once before. You’ve probably heard that story before, about the sheep thief? Yes? Good. It is, in some small way, comforting to know that even some part of me will not be forgotten, even if it is that little, cruel, ridiculous whim of mine. It went miserably anyways, I honestly can’t recommend it.

That is not the experience I’m hoping to counterfeit today. What I intend to show you is something utterly different.

My plot hinges on two very simple concepts- the first. Appropriateness.

We’re willing to cry when we see Juliet impale, poison, stab, hang, or whatever it is she did to herself, the memory eludes. However how many of you shed a tear for the man who tripped on Polonius’s corpse and tumbled head over heals down the stairs and broke his neck. His name was William too, and he was a squire. He had a wife and she was heavy with child when she heard news of his death. The upset ruined her and the child was lost. Go on, weep for him. Now.
No, you won’t. None of you will be able to because it simply isn’t appropriate. The same thing went for my man. He was young and uncelebrated and had a dreadful tendency to mumble.

I, on the other hand, am myself. I am an actor. Gaudy, bawdy and ridiculously talented. I am Hamlet. I am Claudius. I am Rosencrantz, I am Guildenstern. Lear, Macbeth, MacDuff and Gloucester.

I have lived my life by the theatre, shouldn’t I be able to die by it? I have made my living and lived my life by tripping from stage to stage. I am only ever truly alive when I am on the stage. Does that not mean that I should be allowed to die artistically?
When you devote your life to something, shouldn’t you be allowed to die for it?

That is, Ladies and Gentlemen, why I have called you here to this impromptu funeral. My cough, you have heard it, yes? It will soon get the better of me.

Get the better of me. What a strange expression. If I die with dignity then is it getting the better of me or am I getting the better of death? True death has no dignity. True death your body slowly collapses, piece by piece, until it can no longer hold together. Death is a slow rot that seeps through your being from the inside out and touches your organs with its blackened fingers. Death is the lines on your face or the blood spilling down your chest after a fight.

It knows neither dignity nor mercy, and yet… why should I not conquer it?

My life has been illusion. Illusion with so little substance to it that needs it be performed within the constraints of reality? I’ve never paid any attention to reality before; I don’t see why I should now. It’s merely one of those things that apply to other people, not me.

Perhaps I am a little more trepidations than I care to admit. But how can I help myself. It is theatre, and it is death. Where would the moment be without the suspense?

There is an art to the building of suspense. For example, I might have destroyed rather a lot of it by letting you know that death is my fate. What is the point of going to see a play when you know the characters shall die from the very beginning? Are you going to form any sort of attachment with me at all, now that I have introduced my mortality to you?

If you weren’t humans, I would suggest you didn’t, however we are all, at one point or another, going to shuffle off this mortal coil. I have no doubt I will go first, as I am, as I have said, rather old when I am not acting.

But for all you know Miriam could stand now, trip over her own feet, and land on her head. People do land on their heads almost as often as they do on their tales--- or so the law of probability tells us, and if she lands just so on her head she might die first. That would be utterly without suspense and would leave us in need of an ambulance.

I propose, then, that we take my early revealing not as a deflation of suspense, but as a building block of it. We know that I, like all of you, and every other man and woman, am building to the inevitable punctuation of existence. A colossal black period, in the temporal and the grammatical sense both.

You know what is coming. Your only hope now is that I will somehow escape it. That by some twist of fate the ambulance we called for Miriam will arrive and I will be resuscitated just in time, or that even though I am human and my death is prewritten in the script of every day life, I will make some marvelous discovery or choice.

It is, if you pardon my frankness, ridiculous. All theatre is. What do you expect? You know it’s a tragedy, you know it’s Shakespeare- the play isn’t a success unless the entire cast is lying headless or bloodied on the stage. Have you never read Titus Andronicus? Enters Lavinia, hands and tongue gone, covered in blood, screaming and pursued by a bear for Heavens sake.

Yet every time the audience sees Hamlet they practically have their hearts in their throats. That is, I suppose, the actor’s ultimate victory. Where they can reach the point where not only they themselves forget that they’ve been doing the show once a night for a month now, but the point where the audience forgets it’s been playing for several hundred years time, too. So, you’re willing to gasp for them, their barely masked death romps, so you might as well weep for me now. Is it really any different?

I’m being self pitying, aren’t I? You’ll have to forgive me. Sometimes it’s difficult, when a man isn’t accorded the same respect as a character. Look at me. I stand before you, as real as you are, and yet you can barely afford me your attention while some Danish prince who never existed has years of study devoted to him.

What makes his story more important than mine, may I ask you? The resemblance between Hamlet and the player is superficial, but noticeable goes the stage direction. Oh, do forgive me, I’m wandering in and out of reality, but as I said. I’m an actor. It’s my prerogative.

A secret? I occasionally loathe that man. That pompous, swaggering prince who prances about the stage. Who speaks on and on, safe in the assumption that he has an audience around him, whether or not the people in his world can hear him. That man who not only kept his name, but had it slapped like some sort of advertisement for woe over the cover page of this wretched mammoth of a play.

He was not real. He was not real and he has more of an identity than I do. Damn him. Damn him to hell and back again.

Unfortunately, my life, and death, seems to be lacking in the timing that blesses my art. I have said my piece, and more than I meant to, but the man in the proverbial lighting booth has yet to lower the lamps behind my eyes and let me slip into blackness. Would that it were more convenient.

In the mean time I have, for your appraisal, a poem. By the Lady Emily Dickinson. Perhaps you could play her one day, I don’t know.

But with no further ado-

Drama's Vitallest Expression is the Common Day
That arise and set about Us—
Other Tragedy

Perish in the Recitation—
This—the best enact
When the Audience is scattered
And the Boxes shut—

"Hamlet" to Himself were Hamlet—
Had not Shakespeare wrote—
Though the "Romeo" left no Record
Of his Juliet,

It were infinite enacted
In the Human Heart—
Only Theatre recorded

Oh, damn, I won't be able to finish it.

[and exuent]
[a voice from outside]
Owner cannot shut—