Re-visiting Intertextual Reverberations in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: An Exploration of the Creative Foot Prints of Tom Stoppard

Abstract

Unconventionally, Tom Stoppard marked his entry in his very first full-length play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. A great deal of criticism of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead harps unnecessarily upon the sense of Stoppard's derivativeness, or his place within a movement, the absurd tradition. He creates a series of characters those, although ultimately defeated by social and metaphysical forces provoke or embrace a human compassion which transcends the relativistic ethics of an absurd universe. The reality of Stoppard's text lies in the fact that”albeit being in debt to other writers of the absurdist tradition”his characters put up a relentless struggle to keep up their integrity as individuals and try to come out of the textual fate that predetermines their death at the end. The present paper tries to seek the originality in Stoppard's play where he manipulates the ‘echoes' that are evident at a first glance, for his own purpose to set up a world that connects both the Elizabethan and the modern and subverts the so-called grandeur in the customs of both.