«It is true, but it doesn't matter. A sophisticated reader takes such things in his stride. You are a sophisticated reader in ovo.»
«In what?»
«Of course Hamlet is Shakespeare.»
«Whereas Lear and Macbeth and Othello are-«Aren't.»
«Bradley, was Shakespeare homosexual?»
«Of course.»
«Oh I see. So Hamlet's really in love with Horatio-«Be quiet, girl. In mediocre works the hero is the author.»
«My father is the hero of all his novels.»
«It is this that induces the reader to identify. Now if the greatest of all geniuses permits himself to be the hero of one of his plays, has this happened by accident?»
«No.»
«Is he unconscious of it?»
«No.»
«Correct. So this must be what the play is about.»
«Oh. What?»
«About Shakespeare's own identity. About his urge to externalize himself as the most romantic of all romantic heroes. When is Shakespeare at his most cryptic?»
«How do you mean?»
«What is the most mysterious and endlessly debated part of his ceuvre?»
«The sonnets?»
«Correct.»
«Bradley, I read such an extraordinary theory about the sonnets-«Be silent. So Shakespeare is at his most cryptic when he is talking about himself. How is it that Hamlet is the most famous and accessible of his plays?»
«But people argue about that too.»
«Yes, but nevertheless it is the best known work of literature in the world. Indian peasants, Australian lumberjacks, Argentine ranchers, Norwegian sailors, members of the Red Army, Americans, all the most remote and brutish specimens of mankind have heard of Hamlet.»
«Don't you mean Canadian lumberjacks? I thought Australia-«How can this be?»
«I don't know, Bradley, you tell me.»
«Because Shakespeare, by the sheer intensity of his own meditation upon the problem of his identity has produced a new language, a special rhetoric of consciousness-«I'm not with you.»
