"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966. The play belongs to the post Osborne and Beckett theatrical generation in which authors could no longer be pigeonholed neither from the political nor from the stylistic point of view. Stoppard later transformed the play into a film script which won the Golden Lion at the XLVIII Venice International Film Festival in 1990. The reason behind the success of this tragedy is the popularity of "Hamlet". Written during the last years of the Elizabethan era, it shows the gradual dissolving of its core values: the fact that nothing seems to have sense any more is deeply rooted into the Shakespearean tragic hero, and his dilemma mirrors the fear of the modern man of losing his own role and, with it, his own identity.
Stoppard re-writes the Shakespearian drama not by altering the plot, but by presenting it through the eyes of two minor characters, thus by performing a ‘poetical misunderstanding’ of Hamlet – a device that, with its discussion, parody, ridicule, and, sometimes, celebration of the typical values of traditional culture, belongs to the common practices of postmodern authors in their depiction of reality.
