Mojo, The Bard, & Me

These good fellows will bring thee where I

am. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hold

their course for England: Of them I have

much to tell thee.

 

-Horatio (reading a letter written by Hamlet)

 

Hamlet                 Act IV, scene vi   Line 27

What Hamlet has to tell Horatio of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is that they are as good as dead. Yes friends, we’re back to Hamlet, where just about everyone ends up dying. Well, not Horatio. He’s one of the lucky few.

So it’s been a while since I’ve seen or read Hamlet and I’d completely forgotten about Hamlet’s little adventure on the high seas. Now we don’t actually have any scenes in this play taking place at sea like we do in The Tempest and Pericles,  so we don’t get that line about ‘assisting the storm’ (see 10/26 post). In Hamlet we just hear about what happened on the ship via this letter to Horatio. And what happened was that Claudius sent Hamlet to England with these two characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as his guardians. Claudius also sent a note with R&G asking the folks in England to kill Hamlet. Neither R&G nor Hamlet knew the contents of the note initially. But there’s a whole kerfuffle with pirates, and somehow Hamlet gets his hands on the note. Well he changes the note so that it asking the English to kill R&G (this very much unbeknownst to R&G), and he gets away from the pirates and R&G and heads back to Denmark. So now R&G are headed to England without Hamlet and with a note telling the Brits to kill them. So that should be amusing for the Brits. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will be handing a note to them from Claudius saying ‘Please kill these guys handing you the note.’ And who says Will didn’t have a sense of humor?

This is a pic of me and my sister and my cousin when we were kids acting out the scene from Hamlet where Hamlet goes to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Jimmy and Jean (left and center) are R&G, but I can’t remember which one was which, and I’m not sure what the thought process was behind the costumes. The sandbox behind us is the boat, and that’s me playing Hamlet on the right. You can see I’m holding the letter in my hand, and I’m going for that part-confused, part-mad-as-hell look. You know, sort of half way between Olivier and Branagh. I think I really nailed it. What do you think?