STOPPARD, Tom.

£4,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. First edition, scarce hardback issue, inscribed by the playwright on the front free endpaper, "Brian - with best wishes & love, Tom, 9/67". A copy of a recent email from Stoppard speculating about Brian's identity is loosely inserted.Stoppard's play expands on the lives of two minor characters in Hamlet, imagining their lives "in the wings" of Shakespeare's tragedy. The two courtiers "play games, tell jokes, and have philosophical discussions in the intervals of time between the scenes in which they figure in Shakespeare's play. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead addresses such issues as free will, death, and personal identity, as the characters, much more fully developed by Stoppard than by Shakespeare, are still often mistaken for one another" (Ency. Brit.)The play was first performed in full at London's Old Vic on 11 April 1967. It transferred to Broadway later the same year and won four Tony Awards, including Best Play. Stoppard wrote and directed a film adaptation in 1990, starring Gary Oldman and Tim Roth.

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