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This really worked for me, probably because it felt very much like the other books and movies that were fundamental to what I think is funny. I need to go back and watch Lion King 1 1/2.
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Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
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Hamlet told from the worm's-eye view of two minor characters, bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Echoes of Waiting for Godot resound, reality and illusion mix, and where fate leads heroes to a tragic but inevitable end.
126 pages, Paperback
First published May 1,1967
This edition
- Format
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126 pages, Paperback
- Published
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January 1, 1977 by Grove Press
- ISBN
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9780802140784
- ASIN
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0802140785
- Language
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English
Characters More characters
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Horatio
Horatio is a character in William Shakespeares tragedy Hamlet.He was present on the field when King Hamlet (the father of the main character, Prince Hamlet) defeated Fortinbras (the king of Norway), and he has travelled to court from the University ...
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Polonius
Polonius is a character in William Shakespeares play Hamlet. He is chief counsellor of the plays ultimate villain, Claudius, and the father of Laertes and Ophelia. Generally regarded as wrong in every judgment he makes over the course of the p...
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Laertes
Laertes is a character in William Shakespeares play Hamlet. Laertes is the son of Polonius and the brother of Ophelia. In the final scene, he mortally stabs Hamlet with a poison-tipped sword to avenge the deaths of his father and sister, for which h...
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Gertrude
In William Shakespeares play Hamlet, Gertrude is Hamlets mother and Queen of Denmark. Her relationship with Hamlet is somewhat turbulent, since he resents her marrying her husbands brother Claudius after he murdered the king (young Hamle...
About the author
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Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.
He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.
He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.
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Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 99 votes)
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99 reviews All reviews
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I never feel fully qualified to review books of this caliber with any hope to encompass everything they stand for. But Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is approachable and easy and terribly difficult to spell, as far as a book can be classified as approachable. And I feel like saying a few words on it won't result in a lynch mob.
When we are taught to look at a known scene with fresh eyes / from a fresh perspective in Creative Writing classes, it's commonplace to immediately leap to inanimate objects and personify abstract concepts. This out of the box approach to creativity has become so thoroughly canvassed that it fits into the box quite nicely now. But maybe, just maybe, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the end result one actually seeks in those exercises - a novel approach to a known plot, and one which brings quite a bit of new to the old. Part of this novelty that it brings obviously has to do with it having been written in 1966. The influences in this book are decidedly modern, and the writing doesn't bother to hide it. But the other part of the novelty might just lie in the reimagining - in bringing secondary characters to the forefront and having their ruminations and their (very good) jokes narrate the entire story.
Having said all this, I did feel at times that the book trod a dangerous line between being reminiscent of Waiting for Godot and of being Waiting for Godot.
When we are taught to look at a known scene with fresh eyes / from a fresh perspective in Creative Writing classes, it's commonplace to immediately leap to inanimate objects and personify abstract concepts. This out of the box approach to creativity has become so thoroughly canvassed that it fits into the box quite nicely now. But maybe, just maybe, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the end result one actually seeks in those exercises - a novel approach to a known plot, and one which brings quite a bit of new to the old. Part of this novelty that it brings obviously has to do with it having been written in 1966. The influences in this book are decidedly modern, and the writing doesn't bother to hide it. But the other part of the novelty might just lie in the reimagining - in bringing secondary characters to the forefront and having their ruminations and their (very good) jokes narrate the entire story.
Having said all this, I did feel at times that the book trod a dangerous line between being reminiscent of Waiting for Godot and of being Waiting for Godot.
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Absolutely my favourite play I think. Tom Stoppard's witty alternative version of Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the main characters, they aren't aware they are in a play but are trying to make sense of the continuous scene changes and unexpected turns of events. As they start to understand what is happening, they are still unable to alter the scripted events.
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December of Drama 2015, day eighteen
"There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic
To human behaviour."
--Human Behaviour, by Bjork
This is obviously genius material, original "metatheatre" that still somehow reads like it always should have existed. Theater geeks may love it for the repackaging of Hamlet, presented from the viewpoint of two of the minor characters who are nevertheless killed off near the bloody finale, but it's also great for the absurdist and existentialist touches. I normally don't raise this issue with plays I read, but I feel like I'd need to see it performed to fully appreciate it. The third act, with its discussion of death in terms of the art vs. reality theme, was what I enjoyed the most.
"There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic
To human behaviour."
--Human Behaviour, by Bjork
This is obviously genius material, original "metatheatre" that still somehow reads like it always should have existed. Theater geeks may love it for the repackaging of Hamlet, presented from the viewpoint of two of the minor characters who are nevertheless killed off near the bloody finale, but it's also great for the absurdist and existentialist touches. I normally don't raise this issue with plays I read, but I feel like I'd need to see it performed to fully appreciate it. The third act, with its discussion of death in terms of the art vs. reality theme, was what I enjoyed the most.
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rosencrantz and guildenstern often mistake themselves for the other exactly like it happened for my friends dan and phil
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I fully believe that Hamlet is one of the most brilliant and powerful human stories ever written, and every time I read it I'm in absolute awe. I love what Stoppard does in this play, how brilliantly he plays with two unraveled threads of that story. I love that there are more questions than answers, but how it never feels pretentious, just earnest and poignant and both comic and profound. Like with Hamlet, there is a great deal of philosophical depth for those who wish to explore it, but it's just as easy to get lost in the sheer beauty of language like this:
“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
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"Scotland is a geographical accident".--Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom (now) retells the Hamlet tragedy from the point of view of two minor characters; history from the sidelines, as it were. The result is amusing and useful to those who like their history and fiction (same thing) explained not from the left or right but parallel.
Sir Tom (now) retells the Hamlet tragedy from the point of view of two minor characters; history from the sidelines, as it were. The result is amusing and useful to those who like their history and fiction (same thing) explained not from the left or right but parallel.
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من هم تو نمایشنامهی هملت همیشه به نقش این دو نفر فکر میکردم... همیشه اعتقاد داشتم بود و نبود این دو نفر تغییری تو روند نمایشنامه به وجود نمیاره و مرگشون هم یه واکنش شدید بوده. تو فیلم هملت به کارگردانی لارنس الیویه هم هر چند بسیار وفادارانهست این دو نفر از داستان حذف شدن... خوشحالم دیدم فقط من چنین حسی نداشتم و این نمایشنامه رو خوندم.
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