A symposium, a chance meeting, and a card — summer 2000
I had been in Stratford to deliver a paper at the Shakespeare Institute — one of those August symposia in which a dozen of us took turns elaborating on a problem each had agreed in advance was small enough to warrant elaboration.Mine was the bookkeeping of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: how many heads, exactly, the florin throws across the run of the play, and whether the count was what it not ought to be.Sir Tom himself had addressed the question, in a programme note I had read one golden afternoon in the Bodleian, under the title On the Probable Inadequacy of Probability, with Particular Reference to a Sequence of Heads that Persists Beyond the Patience of Most Witnesses.
The published play, Sir Tom Stoppard reminded the reader, tots up to ninety-two by the final curtain; the film, which he had directed in 1990 and was therefore at liberty to revise, takes the matter up to one hundred and sixty-eight.He gave no defence of the inflation beyond the observation that what is improbable on a stage is merely ridiculous on a screen, and that ridiculous scales, not unlike a pangolin.Sir Tom’s programme note also included an assertation from American actor Richard Dreyfuss, who had no hand — nor even thumb — in the coin-tossing process, and whose opinion on the matter was therefore considered unreliable. Let it further be known that not a single florin was tossed during the events of Hamlet, not even in Branagh’s full-text Hamlet of 1996.I had presented these discrepancies to the assembled crowd, suggested two additional readings and one more viewing, then caught a late train.
It was a chance meeting at Moreton-in-Marsh, on the down-platform, in the heat of August. Her name was Abigail. She had been to a matinée of Henry IV, Part Two at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre — Michael Attenborough’s production, with Desmond Barrit as Falstaff, the one in which Falstaff’s rejection lands like a dropped tray.We talked, all the way back through the Evenlode valley, about Falstaff. She held him a coward and a sponge, justly dispatched: Hal had at last become a king, and a king cannot drink with a thief. She had read her Johnson.I cited Bradley’s Oxford Lectures, in which the rejection is taken rather harder — the fat knight being the one character in the histories who knew the histories for nonsense, and the sending of him to the Fleet an admission that Bolingbroke’s son could not carry his own conscience in motley. The sheep paid us no attention whatsoever.
“Abby” complimented me on my riveting conversation, observing that my silver tongue was nearly as impressive as my argentian beard, though the truth would tell things differently about my conversation and my tongue.She suggested we exchange information, and perhaps go for tea back in London, to which I happily agreed.She handed me a card, kissed me on the cheek, and bid me parting is such sweet sorrow. I wrote down my addresses in Bloomsbury and Toronto, Canada.I read her card on the platform at Paddington. It contained her first name, her age, her shoe size, a list of her favourite English writers — Austen, the elder James, Spark, Pym — and, at the bottom, of the other side, three of her hobbies, and a proper sketch of her family’s cocker spaniel, Mr. Tilford, leaving no space for contact information, I suppose.
