Christopher Rush has used the life and work of William Shakespeare in his previous works both fiction and non-fiction and returns to this subject matter in his latest novel, Letters of Elsinore, which delves deeper into the relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet. We hope you enjoy the extract below.

Letters from Elsinore
By Christopher Rush
Published by Sparsile Books

Ophelia’s Muddy Melodious Death

There was a woodland stream on the landward side of Elsinore, just beyond old King Hamlet’s orchard. It flowed very quietly among the trees, still waters, not deep. But deep enough. That’s where she was found, half-floating but drowned, close to a willow-tree, the whitish undersides of its leaves mirrored in the glassy stillness of the water. There was a sad symbolism there, the willow being considered an emblem of regret and wretchedness, particularly pertaining to the sorrows of forsaken love, and from that sad tree those who have lost their loves sometimes make mourning garlands, which they wear, or hang up like mournful trophies.

She’d gathered garlands of flowers for herself before coming there: crow-flowers, daisies, and even nettles, noxious generators of pain and poison, to the delicate, slender and tender-handed, as she was. And those long phallic purples–orchids with the roots resembling testicles, which lent them a coarser name on the rough tongues of peasants. In their vulgar parlance they were known as pricks, crimson cocks, knobs with balls, and so on, whereas our chaste maids and unplumbed virgins, untouched by country grossness, chose not to go there, referring to them instead as dead men’s fingers–macabre but modest, sexuality succumbing to death. That’s where Ophelia chose to end it all, if choose she did. Could it have been a cry for help? Or did a branch giveway? Or maybe she tumbled, hung with her trophies, her armfuls of wild-flowers, and fell in the weeping water. But it was her failure to struggle against her fate which later led to the verdict of ‘doubtful’, determining her death.

A shepherd’s boy, it seems, was the only eyewitness, so they said, too terrified to intervene, or afterwards to say too much about the lewd lyrics she sang concerning cock-robins and cock-a-doodle-doos, and how she stroked the long purples and moaned of country matters and sweet nothings–the details had to be coaxed out of him –before the waters gathered round to cover her and put her to her bed. She was now the property of the gravedigger.

‘It’s to be a Christian burial, so let’s get her plot dug straightaway, and let’s dig it straight, not one of them skew-whiff pits.’

‘Hang on, not so fast there! If she drowned herself in her own defence -’

‘She did. It’s been decided on. But now you’re the one’s got it wrong. How in God’s name could she kill herself in self-defence? You mean self-offence. She committed an offence.’

‘What offence was that?

‘Heaven help us, se offendendo–don’t you know any Latin? After all them funerals? It was an offence against her own body. And the body’s a temple. And that’s a crime, don’t you know that neither?’

‘I know this much, if she hadn’t been a nob, she’d have been slung into the ground outside these here walls–unconstituted ground.’

‘Unconsecrated. You’ve got no more brains than that spade.’

It was never a love affair, it was a conspiracy of sorts, a well-woven lie. He was never going to rescue me, to sweep me up with him onto his white charger and carry me off and out of Denmark and change my life. And so my life stayed as it was, and what it was, a needlework of mediocrities that he wasn’t going to unpick. It was a stich-up of shortcomings: the motherless child, the dutiful daughter, the innocent little sister, the wrong choice, the forbidden choice, the decoy, the bribe, the bait, the cow loosed to the bull, the whore in the convent, the nun in the brothel. Let’s face it, I was a mistake, the courtly love that was all court and no love, the prince’s intellectual indiscretion, to be corrected, cancelled, regretted –oh yes, greatly regretted, all too late. But all the same he whored me in his mind, he took me without penetration, and in the end he was unkind, he was cold, he was a bloodless butcher. And he killed my heart, he killed my soul. He was Elsinore’sexecutioner. He was just like his uncle. He was a murderer. And he had enough anger for all of Elsinore.

Anything else? Left undone perchance? Oh yes. Last stage of all: get buried –easiest of exits, not my problem, not my job, to be laid in earth, the only bed I was ever laid in, cold clay, and put me back, back on my back, where you could have had me, any night you cared, had you cared enough. Too late now, death’s my lover now, the Grim Rapist, and worms will welcome the woman, and try that long-preserved virginity. See, here they come now, quietly up the thighs, to the portals of the hymen, and there you have me –ravished at last. I’m undone. And nothing’s left to do –unless to do it all again, eternally, and haunt them from my grave?

Too late for that, my friends. They’re in their graves already, all of them, even you, Horatio, even you. And you, with a headful of ghosts, were the only one among them that least deserved a haunting. But I’ll say it again –I could have loved you. Love was all I wanted. And love denied where it was so desperately needed, it was a kind of haunting too, and more than mere pathos. I think you said it once –it was tragedy. The rest were just deaths. Death’s all right. Nothing better. Nothing tragic about death, not if you deserve it, or if you want it, if it’s what you live for, if life’s lost its meaning for you and the urge to exist has gone. But who am I in the end? The nonentity of Elsinore –what does she know? Not much. I never pretended to know much. I wasn’t given the chance. I do know one thing, though, and I know it now for sure, surer than before. That gravedigger –he got it right in his own muddy way. At least he wasn’t far from the truth when he said it: she killed herself in self-defence.

Letters from Elsinore by Christopher Rush is published by Sparsile Books, priced £20.99.