Will You Play Upon This Pipe?

“Will you play upon this pipe?”

“My lord, I cannot.”

I did love you once

Sometimes, you do a word-search in Hamlet and you find something you never noticed before. 

This line appears all through Don’t Touch: “I did love you once.“ 

Hamlet says that to Ophelia.

And later Rosenkrantz says to Hamlet: "My Lord, you once did love me.”

Oh, Hamlet, so fickle. Were I in high school, I’d write a paper about it.

Do you remember how you first met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?

We are but longtime childhood friends - how this happened I have absolutely no idea. I suppose it was because I would spent copious hours in the graveyard and my worried Queen mother, the ever brilliant thinker she is, plucked the two dullest creatures from the pavement and set them loose on me like rabid curs. They are opposite of my likeness - brash, immature, entirely witless, yet optimistic and hopeful, brave and good-natured. Qualities that if perhaps I possessed I would be valued by my family. I think that Claudius has painted me villain and turned these noblemen against me, but some nights I wonder if I have done that myself.

This all to say that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been with me all my life, the shining observers to this mad melodrama. To lose them is to lose hope for the world.

“Has it ever happened to you that all of a sudden and for no reason at all you haven’t the faintest idea how to spell the word — “wife” — or “house” — because when you write it down you just can’t remember ever having seen those letters in that order before…?”

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

“Dying is not romantic an death is not a game that will soon be over”

— Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead

Sam Alexander and David Tennant in Hamlet (2009)