Hamlet through the Looking Glass: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Film as Text. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Tom Stoppard, 1990) follows two men, Rosencrantz (Gary Oldman) and Guildenstern (Tim Roth), as they attempt to navigate their place and function in a royal court to which they seem to have been summoned. The film is intensely intertextual, alluding to and drawing on the play texts of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Stoppard's own Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, as well as on the wider theatrical conventions of Renaissance tragedy and twentieth-century Theatre of the Absurd.