Word: stoppard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Death is the theme of the play, and it could be said of Stoppard as Eliot said of another dramatist...
...Stoppard has chosen to use Hamlet as a metaphor for existence. Through his fable he marches good Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern blindfolded. They know little of their roles and less of themselves. In fear and trembling, they jolly their way to their doom. Every man does the same, Stoppard implies, for no man can divine the purpose of existence except to know that life is uncertain and death is sure...
They kill the time with intellectual vaudeville-puns, word games, syllogistic oneupmanship. As they do so, it becomes apparent that Stoppard owes fully as much to Samuel Beckett as he does to Shakespeare. R. and G. are transparent replicas of the two tramps who wait for Godot. But where Beckett's dialogue almost expires in pauses of resignation, Stoppard's lines pant with inner panic. Delivered with comic ardor at machine-gun speed, R. and G.'s interchanges combine mental verve with spiritual desolation. It is as if the quiz kids of Wittenberg U. found themselves desperate...
...feel that their existence is a cheat: "To be told so little to such an end-and still-finally-to be denied an explanation." Here and elsewhere, Stoppard comes perilously close to singing the self-pity blues, or life-is-a-dirty-trick. All men and women submit to fate, but they are not all Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns...
...Stoppard, 30, rather thinks they are: "Almost everybody thinks of himself as nobody. A cipher, not even a cog. In that sense, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are everybody. I feel that I am like that." A sense of dislocation and exile comes naturally to him. The son of a Czech doctor, Tom Stoppard was born Tom Straussler. The family moved to Singapore when he was two and his father was killed in World War II. Tom went to school and lived in Darjeeling, Calcutta, Delhi and Lahore before coming to England at the age of nine and taking his stepfather...