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.

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.

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?

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.”

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.

If I repeat this line –
I’m suddenly singing
A line
From a song
From the first show I ever did
As a professional actor.
The play that ran parallel to this one –
But rehearsed first.
Twelfth Night will always be linked to Hamlet for me.
Feste linked to Gertrude –
Though they have very little to do with one another
Aside from the death of, or by, maidens-
Be it in song
Or in mysteriously descriptive speeches.
“Come away.” Claudius says to Gertrude – or Hamlet –
or the court – or the lot of them and they are
all gone, all but Hamlet.
“Come away. Come away death.” Sings Feste
already slain but longing for the end.
The brain makes these connections
Neurons building bridges to other neurons
“Come away” connected to “Come away.”
Hamlet to Twelfth Night
A clown to a queen
Forever twinned
Entwined by fate.

Small graceful acknowledgement leads to daily gesture
Which leads to the shaking of the earth
Through heaven and divine right.
 Small small huge!
It’s a sentence that begins with the key in the ignition –
Before we know it
We’re roaring down the highway.
This car’s pick up is extraordinary.
It doesn’t necessarily seem to know where it’s going
But it gets there with speed and boisterous shaking.

Under their royal bedcoverings
(in a bed we’ll hear much more about in subsequent scenes)
I bet this is a familiar command
From King to Queen.
What her response might be to this instruction is dependent on
What brought these two together.
If the crackle between them
Was audible, if you could almost see his touch on her arm
Rocket through her like an earthquake,
If royal dinners had previously been torture for them
Back before they were partnered
With their knees accidentally brushing under tables and
Curious fingers seeking
Under the safety of surfaces – –
Then the sounds that followed this instruction
Would be heard nowhere in this play,
Only in the rooms safe from their subjects.

If this king persuaded this queen
With politics and rational words,
If he posited it all as good for the nation
Or threatened her with consequences
The sound might be similar but
it would be hollow and manufactured.

Or maybe he just wants her to follow him.

This must be in the textbook on irony.
A man takes another man’s job
Then tells him to be as he would be
If he’d had the job that is rightfully his.
To the world: “Treat him
As if he were me – the king –
Which is who he should rightfully be in the first place.”
It twists the knife, doesn’t it?
I take your home, move in, claim all your stuff
Then invite you over and say
“Make yourself at home!”
But be sure
If you did
If you put your feet up on the coffee table or
Fixed yourself a cup of tea with your old kettle,
You’d be back on the street in a minute.
Have no doubt, this is my home now. . .
This is how I can welcome you to it.

Isn’t that just what we all need?
Someone to label and critique our answers,
Someone to translate and codify
What we say to our loved ones.
“Thanks very much for picking me up at the station, Mother.”
“What a nice thing for a boy to say to his mother! Nice work!”
As if familial relations were moderated by
Siskel and Ebert (or whomever the new guy is) or
Beavis and Butthead.
Now
He’s all thumbs up
All smiles
All praise
But one can feel how mercurial this smiling may be
How temporary this compliment.
Who is this man to judge
A son’s love of his mother?
Who is he to pat the boy on the head and pinch
His cheeks and say
How sweet he is
How loving
How fair.