Ros and Guil

How has the reading of your transformed text, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, altered your reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet?

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one of the unsurpassed tragedies on the universal stage dealing with timeless ideals in an ever-changing world. Hamlet investigates the meaning of life and the search for truth in a time plagued by changing perceptions about man’s place in the universe. Stoppard’s, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (RAGAD), is an appropriation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet which illuminates and contrasts these existing values, forms and characteristics whilst the context aids in shedding light on contemporary issues. Contextual influences allow the respective composers to delve into metaphysical debates in an Elizabethan context and a 1960s post modernist context. The transformation of values in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead highlights the universality of the old text whilst both retain textual integrity and value. Shakespeare’s Hamlet aimed to inspire pity and terror in order to inform the audience of society’s problems in comparison to Stoppard who aimed at entertainment; however both texts explore the perpetual questions about the nature of humanity. The transformation process shows how timeless themes explored in the parent text, Hamlet, can successfully depict social quandaries of the 1960s, an existentialist view of contemporary society and a modern response to long-standing beliefs about fate and the perception of God.

At the time of writing Hamlet in 1601, Elizabethan England was emerging in a period marked by change, ferment and