A play set within the world of Shakespeare's Hamlet; first performed in 1966.
by Tom Stoppard
Synopsis
Two minor characters-Rosencrantz and Guildestern-wander through and around Shakespeare's Hamlet, pondering the meaning of their existence and the rofes they play in both theater and lite.
Events in History at the Time the Play Was Written
The Play in Focus
Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place
Sir Tom Stoppard, born Tomas Straussler on July 3, 1937, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, believed that he became "a playwright by historical accident," since plays were the dominant mode of literary expression in late 1950s and 1960s England (Gussow, p. 3). A former journalist and novelist, Stoppard experienced his first real success with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which premiered in 1966 (as part of the Edinburgh fringe festival). Despite not being born English himself, or perhaps because of it, many of Stoppard's plays have focused on the canon of classic British and Irish literature: The Real Inspector Hound (1968) satirizes mystery writer Agatha Christie; Travesties (1974) features novelist James Joyce as a character; Arcadia (1993) focuses on the comings and goings of the poet Lord Byron; and The Invention of Love (1997) is about the poet A. E. Housman, with playwright Oscar Wilde in a prominent role. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Stoppard rewrites "Elizabethans Shakespeare's masterpiece Hamlet from the point of view of its most minor characters, and in doing so, makes the play newly relevant to 1960s British society.
For More Information
Brustein, Robert. The Third Theater. Jonathan Cape: 1970.
Delaney, Paul, ed. Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Elsom, John. Post-war British Theater Criticism. London: Routledge, 1981.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Introduction in The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
Gussow, Mel. Conversations with Stoppard. New York: Grove Press, 1996.
Jenkins, Anthony. The Theater of Tom Stoppard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Kelly, Katherine E., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
McCrum, Robert, et al. The Story of English. New York, Viking Press, 1986.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford. Boston: Bedford Books, 1994.
Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Literature and Its Times © 1997 Joyce Moss and George Wilson © 2007 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
