…I was a strange dreaming child, 
I was born for the theatre, 
I was to become a famous man here...

 
The magic of the theatre and the stage fascinated Hans Christian Andersen from his first years. He recounts that the greatest joy for him as a boy was when he and his father on Sundays cut out and sewed doll's clothes for his theatre and performed shows in his childhood garden.

His father introduced him to Holberg's comedies, and as a child he read Shakespeare's dramas with a ravenous appetite, and afterwards he rewrote them for his own doll's theatre. Furthermore he often recited his own poems and dramatic pieces for the most distinguished families in Odense - or whoever would listen, and was therefore nick-named "Der kleine Declamator".

In his early years he read Odense Theatre's posters which held substantial summaries of the plot below the list of characters. He imagined numerous dramatic actions which he later in his life characterized as: "my earliest unconscious writing".