Disclaimer: I don't own Ros and Guil, or Hamlet and all the other characters in the play of that name. I'm just messing around with them.
Words, words, they're all we have to go on.
Yes, words were all that kept us there, stuck in a court which moved around us as though we didn't exist, except when we were needed. Lying words, words that promised much but meant so little, words that confused and battered us into believing that our destinies were fixed and that we had nothing to fear. And like fools, we believed everything they told us, even played around with words to pass the time – statement, one-love, rhetoric. Words were our undoing – a letter, words changed, and we went to our deaths, words spilling from our mouths like so much blood.
Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?
I freeze, when you ask that. You always do this, find the one thing I don't want to talk about, and probe it and worry it, until I have to think about it. You never know you're doing it. And I could kill you for it, sometimes. Like just now. I don't want to think about death, I want to put it to the back of my mind, to forget that it will ever happen, but you're blabbering on, making it all a joke. But you can't imagine how it would feel. I can. And it scares me so much.
I'm talking about death – and you've never experienced that. And you cannot act it.
And yet, as the Player finally lies still, there's a twinge at the back of his mind, something whispering that it was all too easy. And then the Player stands up. Fear and incredulous anger jostle for position in his overheated brain – how did he...how dare he? How dare he stand there in his ridiculous clothes and his stupid hat, defying the order of things, revelling in their confusion? How dare he? But stand there he does, and the world seems merely painted paper and plaster and they are but two clowns whose parts are over. And the curtain falls.