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.

Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer?
Is that what’s happening here?
A fatal mistake, really –
Back at school, the student might forget the wrongs done him.
He might allow the sting of the loss of his position to diminish.
He might wrap himself up in philosophy
In language
In science
In words
In books
And trouble himself a lot less about the world back home
Where his country putrefies from the top down.
But place him next to you
Beside the throne that ought to have been his
Smelling the wine you drink and the scent
Of his mother on you –
Place him where the world can easily compare you
And hope to elevate him back to his rightful place.
Place him where he can ferret out your actions; You create your own end there, Claudius.
You calculate yourself into your grave.

Is this the MOST formal declaration of love in history?
Count the words between “love” and “you.”
Even in declaiming his affection for his family,
He distances the word “love” from both himself and
His alleged beloved son/nephew.
To “impart toward” a person, too – is not the most
HEARTFELT way to express affection.
Perhaps this is all politics is.
Just taking the ends of love and pulling it, like taffy
End from end
Until it is a thin strand that one can tie into knots
Wrapping over and over itself
So that no part of it can be distinguished from another.
Just words
Like sticky
Inedible
Candy.

Woe, thrown to the earth
Will burrow itself into the ground and nestle itself
among the roots of the other plants.
It will reach its feathery roots
Around it, pulling on the vines that are its neighbors.
It will poke its head through the topsoil,
A new face of woe:
Despair, transfigured
Rising, inch by inch
Into a tiny green shoot aspiring to the sky. Woe will push its way through the ends of leaves
Until it balloons out into a plump pod of loneliness
Which unfolds and drips
Pink, white and red
Raining pollen of pain and dispersing it
Out into the wind.