Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Tom Stoppard (1966)
“Two minor characters from Hamlet discover they are bit players in someone else's story — and that the story ends with them dead.”
At a Glance
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two minor courtiers summoned to Elsinore, the Danish court of Shakespeare's Hamlet. They have no idea why they were called, cannot remember anything before the play began, and struggle to understand what is happening around them. The Player and his troupe of Tragedians perform Hamlet's story back to them without them recognizing it. In the end, they receive a sealed letter they cannot read, are placed on a ship, discover they have been dispatched to their own execution, and die — helpless, confused, and without ever understanding the play they were in.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
One of the most celebrated English-language plays of the twentieth century. Won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1968. Became a standard text in AP English and college literature courses within a decade of publication. Made Tom Stoppard an overnight major playwright at twenty-nine. The play invented a genre: the literary parasite-text that comments on its host while being independently alive. It is simultaneously a play about Hamlet, a play about existence, and a play about the theater.
Diction Profile
Highly variable — rapid-fire wit and wordplay in Stoppard's scenes, full Elizabethan iambic pentameter when Shakespeare's Hamlet intrudes
Moderate but strategic