DENMARK BABIES: All your favorite characters in the nursery! If you loved Muppet Babies and Looney Toon Babies and The Flintstone Kids, you’ll love Denmark Babies!
See Baby Hamlet toddle around the nursery with Baby Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The Baby Crown Prince likes to color and sometimes he’ll eat the crayons if you don’t watch him closely. Baby Rosencrantz and Baby Guildenstern are inseparable and follow one another everywhere. At the sandtable, if Baby Rosencrantz starts throwing sand at Baby Hamlet, Baby Guildenstern will have joined in within seconds.
At circle time, Baby Rosencrantz and Baby Guildenstern sit hand in hand. Baby Hamlet must be coaxed to come out of his spot under the table to join the group.
Baby Hamlet likes to finger paint.
Babies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern like to put paint on each other.
Baby Hamlet likes to play with the little drum.
Babies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern like to throw the drum. All the babies in the Danish Royal nursery are educated quickly. They will read and write within a few years and no common babies toddle around this Nursery School.
There’s a great deal of prestige at Denmark Babies but also intrigue. Thirty some years later, Baby Hamlet and Babies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the only ones left. The others have all outmaneuvered one another into the grave.
Author: erainbowd
What it should be More than his father’s death, that thus hath put him So much from th’understanding of himself I cannot dream of.
Claudius wakes up gasping, the sheet around him drenched, his heart racing. Gertrude hasn’t stirred, she is sleeping soundly, as if a sleeping spell had been cast on her.
As his heart slows and his breathing returns to normal, as his eyes take in the drapes of the Royal bedchamber, he begins to come back to himself, begins to piece together what his mind had just left.
In his dream, his brother had risen from his tomb, his armor. There was, in the space where his crown should have been, blood oozing out, in a perfect ring. His helmet in his arms, ready to be replaced on his head.
This tomb-risen brother stood on the marble patio of his sepulcher and Claudius stood nearby, hoping to remain hidden. He remembers the tang of fear in this moment. He remembers a tree that he rested his hands on, hoping to become invisible.
And then somehow his brother was right before him and he looked him right in the eye and he pointed at Claudius’ chest – as if he were attempting to bore a hole in his heart.
He doesn’t remember the journey but suddenly he is standing on the ramparts of the castle – now at a distance from his ghostly brother. Then young Hamlet is there, too wearing that ghostly black cloak he chose to wear to the ceremony, that little brat.
Claudius watches young Hamlet fall to his knees, watches his brother explain his own murder, watches young Hamlet rise with determination. Once again, the ghost of his brother looks right at him and even though he hasn’t heard a word, he knows that young Hamlet is after him.
The ghost stalks away and Claudius suddenly hears Hamlet cursing him. He sees him pick up his sword and raise it. And then he wakes up.
Something have you heard Of Hamlet’s transformation – so call it, Sith not th’exterior nor the inward man Resembles that it was.
From man to centaur
From centaur to dragon –
Did true transformation literally suggest
A dramatic change in the outward form,
Like a shift in species?
Claudius feels compelled to justify his use of “transformation” –
as if it were not common to describe a change in character this way.
Possibly. He is, on one hand, attempting to be delicate to not say Hamlet’s gone NUTS, CRAZY, MAD but on the other hand, he is indicating something even more dramatic than strange behavior – a change so extreme he has become a mollusk or a camel.
And how is Hamlet’s exterior transformed? Ophelia indicated some change in wardrobe but are a few clothes in disarray enough to suggest a total shift in his exterior? Perhaps. We do respond to signals as simple as this. I always think of this exhibit I saw at the Exploratorium in San Francisco years ago.
It was on memory and the exhibit took images of famous people and replaced their hair with either Elvis or Marilyn Monroe hairstyles. It was nearly impossible to recognize them. Which was, of course, the point, that our memories latch on to hair in a very significant way. Perhaps Hamlet’s transformation is just an extreme haircut?
Moreover that we much did long to see you, The need we have to use you did provoke Our hasty sending.
Did Claudius have a relationship with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern before this? People longing to see each other usually KNOW each other. They’re usually friends or collaborators, or maybe celebrities. I long to see my friends who live far away. I long to see my boyfriend when it’s been too much time. And I have, I confess, once longed to meet a rockstar, too.
It’s highly probable and possible that Claudius is being hyperbolic and political here in his longing to see his stepson’s friends, as if they had value in and of themselves, apart from their access to Hamlet – but it’s a fun thought experiment to connect up Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with Claudius before this moment. What if he were Uncle Claudius to them? What if, when they came to visit little Hamlet, Uncle Claudius would bring them in to his study and give them candy and secret lessons – maybe play pretend games – like “Secret Spy” and “Detective.”
Welcome, dear Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Indeed. Welcome! It is a pleasure to bring
New characters into this little exercise here.
It means, on the website, I will have to add two more categories and tags.
It means the universe of the play is expanding, new blood coming in.
But even more exciting: the introduction of new patterns of speech. New sentence styles. New people to get to know bit by bit. It’s like being introduced to someone at a party. We don’t know them well yet – but we’ve heard of them.
Come.
I named my dog Ophelia.
I thought it would make her obedient.
I thought, perhaps, when I clapped my hands and said, “Come,” she would come.
I thought she would sit when I said sit
And would fetch things when I threw them.
Turns out, though, that you have to be taught
To do those things. The environment and the teacher and the world
Must come together to make a person, or a dog, heel.
This must be known, which, being kept close, might move More grief to hide than hate to utter love.
Huh? Is he saying that if the secret stayed in secret
It would create more grief, more trouble?
It would move it? From where to where is this grief?
And what is this hate to utter love business?
On this side of the equation: moving grief, necessary for hiding
On the other: hate speaking love.
I fail to see the comparison. Isn’t hate speaking love
Already a small number?
Even without revealing the secret –
I would think that grief would sit
In the spot where the alligator opens his mouth
Indicating the greater than sign.
While the love spoken by hate sits small
At the lesser than the end of the alligator.
Come, go we to the King.
That was nice, that apology.
Nice that you took some responsibility
For your daughter’s tears.
Nice that you realized you overstepped your bounds.
But then you return to this going to the king business
It seems a little bit like
The Chief of Staff at the White House
Going to consult with the President
Over a problem with his kid –
And not the president’s kid, either –
His own. As if his own authority
Were not enough to handle the situation.
I picture a father leading his kid by his elbow
To go confess before the big cheese –
A confession that may not reflect well on the confessor
Or the subject of the confession.
It’s a circle of embarrassment.
By heaven, it is a proper to our age To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions As it is common for the younger sort To lack discretion.
Our class is dominated by older ladies
Who are awash with opinions and do not hesitate
To share them at every turn.
They cast the net of their opinions so far and so wide that they cast a spell of silence among the rest of us. Its power was strongest in the beginning because the young new arrivals are less hesitant to speak but those of us younger students were struck dumb by it.
In other contexts, I am a most vocal student but here, in three years, I have never said a word. We, the younger sort in this class, are not quite young enough to lack discretion. In this case, the proper aged ones do cast beyond themselves in opinion and are also lacking discretion.
I work with many of the younger sort, who do, decidedly lack discretion. Part of teaching very young people is, sometimes, the task of teaching discretion. Sometimes, I long to bring these older ladies in our class to my class and there perhaps give them an opportunity to re-learn discretion.
But beshrew my jealousy.
Used to be, it was the girls who got the boys – the ones with boyfriends, lots of them, or a really cute one they held on to. Then it was the girls who looked put together no matter what they did – the ones with the culturally desirable genetic structure, the ones who could buy any old thing off the rack and look amazing in it.
Then, those with money. Those with husbands. Those with kids. Those with a house or livable apartments.
But always, the ones with success, the ones on TV, on film, on Broadway, written about in American Theatre magazine or reviewed in the New York Times, the ones who worked with the people I wanted to work with the ones with good press photos the ones who worked and worked.
The Hamlet Project 