On Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead

Tom Stoppard is one of the wittiest and most prolific playwrights in contemporary British Theatre.His high comedies of ideas have earned him a reputation as a special dramatist unequaled in the genre.As the focus of the critics in the field of theatre,Stoppard has a talent in making the stage a forum for his daringly inventive use of the language.It attracts many critics' attention to illustrate his play from different aspects.Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the key play for Stoppard's walking into the fields of British Theatre overnight when he was in his late twenties.Given the importance and uniqueness of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in Stoppard's theatre career,the author decided to make a deep analysis on how this play grounded in Shakespeare's Hamlet while it contained different absurd elements compared with Beckett's Waiting for Godot,and eventually showed the concern of the author about human reflections on modern civilization.The main body of this paper consists of three chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion.The introduction mainly attempts to give an overview of Tom Stoppard's biography.his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and academic criticism to his works at home and abroad.Chapter One seeks to decode why Stoppard selects Shakespeare's play as a peg to hang his plot and the different narrative focus in Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.Chapter Two focuses on discussing the influence from Samuel Beckett and the different absurd elements appearing in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead comparing with Wailing for Godot.Chapter Three explores Stoppard's reflections and concerns on modern civilization in this play.