Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are dead
Acclaimed as a modern dramatic masterpiece, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead is the fabulously inventive tale of Hamlet as told from the worm’s-eve view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare’s play. In Tom Stoppard’s best-known work, this Shakespearean Laurel and Hardy finally get a chance to take the lead role, but do so in a world where echoes of Waiting for Godot resound, where reality and illusion intermix, and where fate leads our two heroes to a tragic but inevitable end.
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What Hacker News says
- I wrote an extended essay on “Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in high school… 1998-1999 period. I loved his screenplays even though I’m not a great fan of theatre in general. 88 is a ripe old age but it’s still deeply saddening.
- > “Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead”
I love that movie. Never got to see it on stage though, which I've read was superior.
- Almost everyone here will have seen a movie he was the screenwriter for or contributed to: Shakespeare in Love, Brazil, Empire of the Sun, even bits of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
A lot of folks here will have read either Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or Arcadia, which are still probably his best plays, and certainly the best introduction to his work. I personally also really like The Invention of Love, about the gloomy tortured homosexual poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman, which was also apparently Stoppard's favorite of his plays. It's definitely niche territory though and you might need to care at least just a little about A Shropshire Lad and latin textual criticism. The Coast of Utopia is even more packed with history and erudition, although worth a read; the currently top comment here is a quote from it about death, childhood, and the pursuit of happiness.
He had an interesting combination of traits that many HN readers will probably appreciate: erudite to the point of elitism, although never attended college; a self-described "small c. conservative in politics, literature, education and theatre" with libertarian inclinations, but he wrote a sprawling trilogy about 19th-century Russian socialist and anarchist exiles (The Coast of Utopia).
Now that he's dead, I want to go back and re-read all his plays, including the ones I never managed to get to before.
- And Tom Stoppard with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
- I've read about half of them, seen more than a bunch live and in film, enough to annoy the kids.
Some versions I like:
* David Tenant's Much Ado about Nothing. Kenneth Branagh's is good too, and easier to find.
* Branagh's Henry V.
* I actually like Mel Gibson's Hamlet.
* Almost any Midsummer's Night Dream. It's just a fun play, even kids can enjoy it.
* The Coen Bros' Macbeth on AppleTV
* Rosencrantx and Guildenstern are Dead. Hamlet, but exits are entrances.
- If we're going to start discussing fan fiction, we should mention the best:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ROSENCRANTZ-GUILDENSTERN-ARE-DEAD-S...
