Product Description

Two minor characters from "Hamlet" offer a novel view of the melancholy Dane.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9504 in Books
• Published on: 1973-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 118 pages

Customer Reviews

Background is important...
If you know your HAMLET and you know your WAITING FOR GODOT, this will be one of the most engaging pieces of theatre you have ever seen or read. It is simply a sensational bit of writing: funny, erudite, challenging, obtuse etc etc. If however you dont know those two other texts, then you're in trouble. As I was, the first time I saw this.

Rosencrantz And Guildernstern Are Alive
This play is often compared to "Waiting For Godot", most unfairly in my view, as Stoppard's early masterpiece is, above all else, brilliantly funny. Not in the way of an ironic, navel-gazing comedy about the horror of life, but in the way that makes the audience laugh out loud with genuine laughter.

Actually, of course, it IS about the horror of life, and of modern life at that, many of the greatest comedies have a tragic undercurrent, think of Sir Toby's "Chimes at midnight" speech giving texture and shadow to the sunny japes of "Twelfth Night", or of Woody Allen's best films, hovering over the line of comedy and neurotic bathos ("The Purple Rose of Cairo"..."Radio Days".)

Here, the early speech about a man who sees a unicorn sets a tone of lonely wistfulness that the blatant failures of the protagonists to match up to the epic events unfolding around them, obvious even to the duo themselves, continues throughout the play.

An odd effect of seeing only snippets of "Hamlet" is to make that work seem a real action packed epic. In reality, perhaps, "Hamlet" itself is very similar to "Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead", the heroes of both prove in the end, despite endless talking and dithering, indecisive and inadequate.

Stoppard's work is an updating of Shakespeare's, and a comment on the modern world, in that his heroes are not given the redeeming power of poetry. For them, the unicorn is always a deer...with an arrow in its head....

Fab! Fab! Fab!
It's funny, it's thought provoking, and it's so much fun to read. Probably more enjoyable if you're familiar with Shakespeare's Hamlet. And definitely a must if you enjoyed Beckett's Waiting for Godot, or Sartre's In Camera, as Stoppard takes the existential slant of a play within a play.

Don't just read it - GO AND SEE IT! A definite treat!