Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

by W.S. Gilbert

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: Plays

48 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1891

About the author

British playwright and lyricist Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (18 November 1836 – 29 May 1911) wrote a series of comic operas, including Her Majesty's Ship Pinafore (1878) and The Pirates of Penzance (1879), with composer Sir Arthur Sullivan.

This English dramatist, librettist, poet, and illustrator in collaboration with composer Sullivan produced fourteen comic operas, which include The Mikado , one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre.

Opera companies, repertory companies, schools and community theatre groups throughout and beyond the English-speaking world continue to perform regularly these operas as well as most of their other Savoy operas. From these works, lines, such as "short, sharp shock", "What, never? Well, hardly ever!", and "Let the punishment fit the crime," form common phrases of the English language.

Gilbert also wrote the Bab Ballads , an extensive collection of light verse, which his own comical drawings accompany.

His creative output included more than 75 plays and libretti, numerous stories, poems, lyrics and various other comic and serious pieces. His plays and realistic style of stage direction inspired other dramatists, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. According to The Cambridge History of English and American Literature , the "lyrical facility" of Gilbert "and his mastery of metre raised the poetical quality of comic opera to a position that it had never reached before and has not reached since."

Reviews

[Rachel Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a ridiculous little play. It's as if W.S. Gilbert wanted solely to troll William Shakespeare (and somehow Tom Stoppard, though his play was decades away) by turning the infamous play-within-a-play scene in Hamlet into a complete farce. A silly and amusing read about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern trying to stop Hamlet from making soliloquies by setting him up in a plot to anger Claudius. It's probably funnier to those who have read both Shakespeare and Stoppard, because I could see connections to both of those before-and-after plays.

[Mora]

i do not know where sara dug this one up but SOMEone (ws gilbert) clearly found the character of hamlet annoying. this is so bizarre. here is the link for future (?) reference

[Kimberley Shaw]

What a gorgeous little one acter. Would love to see this performed.

[Peyton Zaletsky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is so silly I enjoyed. Totally ship rosencrantz and ophelia