Shakespeare’s Ghosts
Stephanie Chatfield
The ghosts begin in the wood, where all lost things are first mislaid.
A crown, a letter, a bloody handkerchief. A girl’s song folded under moss. A father’s voice caught in the mouth of an owl. The wood keeps them all, not kindly, but carefully, as women once kept lavender in linen, to sweeten what would otherwise decay.
There is a boy who enters at dusk with a candle and a borrowed name. He has been told that stories are made of ink, but this is not true. Stories are made of hunger. They are made of wanting the dead to answer. They are made of doors that open only after midnight.
Give me your question, says the ghost at the root of the oak, and I will give you a kingdom.
The boy has no kingdom. He has only a grief he cannot carry. He gives it.
At once the leaves turn black with ravens. A king steps out of the bark, crowned in frost. A queen follows, wringing river-water from her hair. Then a bride with flowers in her sleeves. Then a soldier with mud in his mouth. Then a fool, bells silent, smiling as if he knows the one joke God forgot to finish.
These are Shakespeare’s ghosts.
They do not haunt houses. They haunt choices.
The dagger before the hand. The word before the wound. The kiss before the poison. The little pause in which mercy might have entered and did not.
The boy asks why they have come.
Because you called us, says the queen.
Because you read, says the fool.
Because no one buries a story deep enough, says the drowned girl, and from her lips fall violets, rue, rosemary, a sprig of something nameless that smells like rain on a grave.
By morning the boy returns without his candle. In its place he carries a small dark flame that will not go out. He has learned what all readers learn eventually: the dead in Shakespeare are not dead.
They are waiting for us to speak.
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