Logs burn in my fireplace and I have a book on my lap: I have a kingdom: a crown: crackling of wood becomes voices, stuff of dreams, friends, stages, plays, quarrels, hopes, changes, beginnings, endings, the pen scratching paper, pigeons chuckling, laughter, death, Hamnet’s face, father’s, the cloak, the whisper, the plague, the rain, fog, losses, waves against rocks: a log totters and the upended section spurts into a pennant...shake-scene!
I have no picture—no drawing—to help me remember Hamnet. Inago Jones could have done one. I should tear apart pieces of paper and fold them until they become his face, or, with scissors, cut out his silhouette. Damn the weak mind that makes such simple wishes impossible!
There was no artist in Stratford. Stratford had no skills to offer except death’s skill...death for all of us along with that triumvirate, love, marriage, children; with fornication for pallbearer, adultery for sexton, rape for choirmaster...
How weary and stale and flat are the uses of this world. Bring hebenon for O...
Youth’s falcon on his glove, Hamnet stands with his friends around him, most of them young, their well-groomed horses held by pages.
On the distant shore of a lake, a castle breaks through a grove of beech.
Hamnet is laughing at his unhooded bird.
“Have you unseeled him?” someone asks.