We Haven’t Got There Yet
- by Harry Turtledove
- Short Story
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- “We Haven’t Got There Yet” by Harry Turtledove, Tor.com Original Fiction, 19 March 2009 [webzine].
Some 360 years before Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead debuted in Edinburgh, Will Shakespeare himself attends a performance.
—Michael Main
His mind races faster than a horse galloping downhill. Try as he will, he can’t mistake her meaning. If Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is dead itself—a century dead!—then Hamlet must be older yet. But his head had only a little more hair, and that only a little less gray, when he wrote it. An impossibility—an impossibility he has just seen staged.
translate
Okay, William Shakespeare, what the hell d’you want with us? Why’d you barge in here, anyway, and how much did you pay the hired muscle outside?
Tags
(9)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 1600 to 1699: AD 1606
- Timeline Models
- Time Travel Methods
- Themes
- Ex Nihilo Knowledge: An actress recites lines to Shakespeare from a play he has yet to write: Will he write those lines because Gertrude—no, Jessica—gave him them? Would he have written them had he never set eyes on her? Will he not write them now because she gave them, and in the giving somehow spoiled them?
- Stuck in Time
- Real-World Tags
- Fictional Tags
Variants
(1)
- “We Haven’t Got There Yet” by Harry Turtledove, Tor.com Original Fiction, 19 March 2009 [webzine].