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Introduction

CHRISTY DESMET

All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.

I’d prefer art to mirror life, if that’s all the same to you.

(Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, probably the best-known and most frequently quoted of all Shakespeare parodies, includes a wonderful travesty of Hamlet’s Nunnery scene. In Stoppard’s revision, the Nunnery scene and Mousetrap play follow one another helter-skelter, fractured further by squabbles between the Players and Shakespeare’s minor courtiers. Hamlet enters and intones the portentous line: “Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered” (Stoppard 1967:75). “Good, my lord, how does your honour for this many a day?,” Ophelia responds on cue. “It’s like living in a public park!,’’ Rosencrantz objects, as his conversation is interrupted by the inexorable demands of Shakespeare’s script. The Players move on to the Mousetrap’s dumbshow, only to be interrupted again by Hamlet, who enters shouting at Ophelia: “I say we will have no more marriage.… To a nunnery go!” (78).

Shakespearean appropriation begins precisely in moments like

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