The Murder of Gonzago

Pynchon’s Courier’s Tragedy is a Jacobean machine whose editions disagree. The Murder of Gonzago is the machine before there were editions: one night, one audience, one man who cannot sit through the poisoning.

Hamlet is not interested in whether Gonzago is any good. He is interested in whether it is true in the only sense that matters at Elsinore — whether a murderer will recognise himself in a fiction and spoil the evening. The Players are professionals. The court is not. That is the joke, and the method, of every later book in this library that is used as a test rather than as a pleasure.

We get the dumb-show, the interpolated speech, the flinch. We do not get the rest of Gonzago, because the rest of Gonzago was never the point. A complete text would have been a rival to Hamlet. Shakespeare was not in the business of rivals.

On the readability rating. The trap is given. The play, as a play, is not. Hamlet told us the name. That was enough to catch a king, and enough to file.