Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was
Tom Stoppard's breakthrough play. It was a huge critical and commercial success, making him famous practically overnight. Though written in 1964, the play was published in 1967, and it played on
Broadway in 1968, where it won the
Tony for best play.
The play cleverly re-interprets
Shakespeare's
Hamlet from the point of view of two minor characters: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The
Laurel-and-Hardy-like pair are totally incidental to the action of
Hamlet, subject to the whims of the King Claudius – who gets them to betray Hamlet – and then tricked by Hamlet into delivering a letter that condemns them to death (check out the Shmoop's guide to
Hamlet; it's useful to know the basic plot). Stoppard's play turns
Hamlet on its head by giving these two the main roles and reducing all of Shakespeare's major characters (including Hamlet) to minor roles. Written around and in-between the lines of Shakespeare's play, Stoppard brilliantly takes the main concerns of contemporary theater – absurdism, the inevitability of death, breakdown in communication and feeling – and inserts them into the text of a much earlier play.
The absurdist tradition that Stoppard is writing in suggests another enormous influence:
Samuel Beckett's
Waiting for Godot (1952). Beckett's play is just as important to
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead as
Hamlet is.
Waiting for Godot consists of two tramps sitting on-stage bantering back and forth and waiting for someone named Godot, who never comes (check out Shmoop's guide to
Waiting for Godot for more detail).
Waiting for Godot changed theater by undermining many of its traditional values: plot, characterization, and dialogue that move the action of the play forward. By portraying the act of "waiting" on stage, Beckett's play also opened up new ideas about meta-theatrics (plays that are about plays – how they're made, how they're seen, and/or how they interact with society). Since the characters in
Godot are in the same position as the audience – waiting for something to happen – much of their dialogue works on multiple levels and seems to hint at awareness on the part of the tramps that they're actually two characters in a play.
Stoppard wrote
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in this absurdist and meta-theatrical tradition. It is very much influenced by Beckett, and much of the silly dialogue between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern simply would not have been seen in the theater before
Waiting for Godot. It's as if Stoppard uses the innovations that Beckett brought to contemporary theater in order to pry open the minor Shakespearean characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Some critics think that Stoppard was too much under the influence of Beckett at this point in his career, but we think that
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is something unique and independent of both
Waiting for Godot and
Hamlet. It is an almost universally acknowledged masterpiece of contemporary theater.