Before her husband affirmed the paucity of lords as opposed to fish, an actor sprang out from the curtain at the back of the stage and blew a trumpet, signaling the beginning of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
Joan’s Hamlet paced across the stage, looking like a melancholy warrior, ready to draw his rapier and stab someone in the heart. The crowd didn’t seem too impressed, but they liked the Ghost and squealed every time he boomed his famous line, Remember me.
Thaddeus watched Mr. Wooty, positioned directly across from him on a prompter’s stool, glance repeatedly at the crowd. It didn’t take theatrical experience to realize that the crowd wasn’t following Hamlet’s convoluted speeches and didn’t understand much of what was going on.
The biggest cheering came for the juggler who followed the first two scenes. Thaddeus watched him for a moment before he nodded to the Meadowsweets, rose, and walked off the back of the stage to the area where the actors were entering and exiting.
Mr. Wooty was coaching Otis in his lines, while a laughing Madeline dusted some rouge on his cheeks.
Joan was practicing yanking her sword from its hilt. She jerked her head up as he walked over and to his enormous pleasure, her eyes lit up. “Thaddeus!”
He bowed. “Hamlet.”
He turned to Mr. Wooty. “It’s not working,” he said bluntly.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” Mr. Wooty admitted. “I wouldn’t have, but we had to rehearse for Lindow, and I didn’t want to lose a day rehearsing a different play.”
“Do it as a comedy,” Thaddeus said bluntly.
“What?”
Thaddeus turned to Joan and Otis. “Do it the way you played for the children. Make it funny. The audience will love it.”
“But the other actors—” Joan protested.
“They’d just as soon not be plastered with tomatoes,” Mr. Wooty said. “But I’ve never heard of a funny Hamlet. Now this particular Ophelia . . . certainly. Last night I laughed myself into stitches, watching her pull flowers off her hat and offer them to the queen.”
Joan was shaking her head, so Thaddeus took a step closer. “You’re funny, Joan. The funniest person I know. Everyone laughs around you.”
“It’s Hamlet,” she whispered. “A classic of English—”
“A boring play about a fretful prince,” he interrupted her. “All these people paid for a night’s entertainment, and you can give them that, Joan. Just play the Hamlet who gazed at the alligator head.”
“I don’t think I can,” she said, winding her hands together.
“I know you can.”
“I agree,” Otis said. “Look, I’m about to go in there and have my big scene where I give you back my love letters, right?”
“First, your father tells you to give back the letters,” Joan told him.
“I knew that!” Otis said, making a quick recovery. “Anyway, as soon as I walk out, they’ll begin laughing. Just play along.”
“I know that you wanted to play a serious part,” Thaddeus told her. “I’m sorry, Joan. I’ll arrange for you to play Hamlet in London, if you wish.”
“God, no!” she cried. Her face expressed utter conviction.
Thaddeus had to stop himself from kissing her.
“More lip color,” Otis said to Madeline. “More rouge too. And can you throw a few more flowers onto my hat?”
Up on the stage, the juggler caught his balls, blew a kiss to the crowd, and jumped off the back. Thaddeus made his way to his stool, where Mrs. Meadowsweet leaned toward him. “We’ve been discussing you,” she announced. “Did you write this play?”
“No, I did not,” he answered.
She looked relieved. “Mr. Meadowsweet feels it’s right rubbish and not worth the money.”
Her husband muttered something that sounded like, “A trout stream is free.”
“The play will get better,” Thaddeus promised.
“Was that ghost the king who’s dead?” Mrs. Meadowsweet asked.
Thaddeus nodded. “Thus he’s a ghost.”
“Twisty,” she said. “I expect the queen’s new husband killed him. He looks a fair rotter, like my second, as died last year. Not that Mr. Meadowsweet killed him, of course.”
Mr. Meadowsweet put on a stern look. “I certainly did not.”
Luckily, the trumpet sounded before Thaddeus had to comment on the homicidal propensities of Mrs. Meadowsweet’s third husband.
Otis was a huge success. The audience began laughing immediately, not bothering to pretend that Ophelia was actually a woman, but recognizing one of their favorite pantomime characters: Cinderella, or Patient Griselda, or any other character, played by a man.
Ophelia complained to her father that Hamlet seemed to have gone mad, and acted out the madness herself. The audience roared with laughter.
It was even better when Hamlet and Ophelia were on the stage together. The tense, agonizing scene in which Ophelia gives Hamlet back his love letters turned into a raucous conversation, and when Hamlet told Ophelia she should enter a nunnery, the audience screamed with laughter.
This Ophelia? In a nunnery?
Not the way she was strutting around the stage, swishing her hips and poking Hamlet in the stomach when she got cross.
“He’s better off without her,” the woman to the front of the stage told her husband in a loud voice. “She’s no better than she should be. A nunnery indeed!”
Thaddeus couldn’t stop himself from laughing, watching Joan play the audience like a virtuoso. When she acted Hamlet the night before, she had pretended the audience wasn’t there and performed as if they were recreating history. But tonight?
She held them in the palm of her hand.
To be or not to be was hilariously received, and Otis’s mad scene, when he gave away all his flowers and then began plucking them from his hat and throwing them into the audience, was cheered so loudly they must have heard it in the center of town.
He was slightly concerned how Joan would handle the dueling, but he shouldn’t have worried. From the moment she had trouble pulling her rapier from its hilt, to the point at which she collapsed on the stage, employing every technique her brothers had taught her about long, dramatic deaths, the audience adored her.
Cheering brought the company back on stage three times to take bows.
Thaddeus watched his neighbor clapping and then leaned in. “So you enjoyed it?”
“The best was that lady with the jaw like a frying pan.”
“A man,” Thaddeus confirmed, tucking away the “jaw like a frying pan” to amuse Otis.
“She climbed in the prince’s bedroom window,” Mrs. Meadowsweet said. “No better than she should be.” She leaned in closer. “Don’t believe that she drowned herself, though. That sort would have paddled off downstream, and the family buried an empty casket to keep themselves from being mortified.” She narrowed her eyes with a vigorous nod. “Aye, that’s how it went.”
In London, the audience clustered around the stage door, wanting to meet their favorite actors. Here, they poured into the street and left for the public house. The Lindow coach was waiting, so Thaddeus instructed the coachman to go around to the back and pick up Joan and Otis.