Angus. Another night such as this, and all our heads will have turned white.
[Exeunt all save the Nuns, who begin singing the Miserere while conveying the corpses towards the bed. The church bells cease sounding. Nightingales are heard warbling without. A cock jumps on the window-sill, and crows.
When we begin to read this piece we are startled, and ask: ‘Why is all this so familiar to me? Of what does it remind me?’ After a few pages it all at once becomes clear: the whole thing is a kind of cento from Shakespeare! Every character, every scene, every speech in any way essential to the piece! King Hjalmar is put together out of King Lear and Macbeth; Lear in his madness and manner of expressing himself, Macbeth in his share in the murder of the Princess Maleine. Queen Anne is patched up out of Lady Macbeth and Queen Gertrude; Prince Hjalmar is unmistakably Hamlet, with his obscure speeches, his profound allusions and his inner struggles between filial duty and morality; the nurse is from Romeo and Juliet; Angus is Horatio; Vanox and Stephano are Rosenkranz and Guildenstern, with an admixture of Marcellus and Bernardo, and all the subordinate characters, the fool, the doctor, the courtiers, etc., bear the physiognomy of Shakespeare’s characters.
The piece begins in the following manner:
The Gardens of the Castle.
Enter Stephano and Vanox.
Vanox. What o’clock is it?
Stephano. Judging from the moon, it should be midnight.
Vanox. I think ‘tis going to rain.
Let us compare this with the first scene in Hamlet: