Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Tom Stoppard

      Grove Press

      New York

      Copyright © 1967 by Tom Stoppard

      Preface © 2017 by Tom Stoppard

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      Printed in the United States of America

      First Grove Press hardcover edition published: January 1967

      This Grove Atlantic edition published: April 2017

      ISBN 978-0-8021-2621-4

      eISBN 978-1-5558-4894-1

      FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

      Grove Press

      an imprint of Grove Atlantic

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      PREFACE

      When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in April 1967— performed by the National Theatre at the Old Vic—a play about Hamlet’s ‘excellent good friends’ had been on my mind for three years or so. I had spent part of the summer of 1964 in Berlin at a ‘literary colloquium’ for promising young playwrights, and my graduation piece was a sketch about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern finding themselves in England. I developed this backwards into a full-length play in which our heroes are discovered on their way to Elsinore, and it was accepted by the Royal Shakespeare Company. But the planned production fell by the wayside, and the RSC passed the script to the incumbent director of the Oxford Playhouse, Frank Hauser, who in turn passed it on to an undergraduate company, the Oxford Theatre Group. The OTG performed the play on the Edinburgh Festival fringe in August 1966. A review by Ronald Bryden in the Observer was such that when I returned to London it was to find a telegram from Kenneth Tynan, the literary manager of the National Theatre, asking to read the play.

      In

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