Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Gilbert)
Encyclopedia
W. S. Gilbert
Sir William Schwenck Gilbert was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for his fourteen comic operas produced in collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, of which the most famous include H.M.S...
, a parody of Hamlet
Hamlet
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...
by William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
. The main characters in Gilbert's play are King Claudius
King Claudius
King Claudius is a character and the antagonist from William Shakespeare's play Hamlet. He is the brother to King Hamlet, second husband to Gertrude and uncle to Hamlet. He obtained the throne of Denmark by murdering his own brother with poison and then marrying the late king's widow...
and Queen Gertrude
Gertrude (Hamlet)
In William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Gertrude is Hamlet's mother and Queen of Denmark. Her relationship with Hamlet is somewhat turbulent, since he resents her for marrying her husband's brother Claudius after he murdered the King...
of Denmark, their son Prince Hamlet
Prince Hamlet
Prince Hamlet is a fictional character, the protagonist in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. He is the Prince of Denmark, nephew to the usurping Claudius and son of the previous King of Denmark, Old Hamlet. Throughout the play he struggles with whether, and how, to avenge the murder of his father, and...
, the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are characters in William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. They are courtiers who are set by the king to spy on Hamlet, using their claimed friendship with him to gain his confidence. The characters were revived in W. S...
, and Ophelia
Ophelia
Ophelia is a fictional character in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. She is a young noblewoman of Denmark, the daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes, and potential wife of Prince Hamlet.-Plot:...
.
Gilbert's play first appeared in Fun magazine
Fun (magazine)
Fun was a Victorian weekly magazine, first published on 21 September 1861. The magazine was founded by the actor and playwright H. J. Byron in competition with Punch magazine.-Description:...
in 1874 after having been rejected for production by several theatre companies. The first performance of the work was not until June 1891, a benefit matinée at the Vaudeville Theatre
Vaudeville Theatre
The Vaudeville Theatre is a West End theatre on The Strand in the City of Westminster. As the name suggests, the theatre held mostly vaudeville shows and musical revues in its early days. It opened in 1870 and was rebuilt twice, although each new building retained elements of the previous...
in London. The play finally ran at the Court Theatre
Royal Court Theatre
The Royal Court Theatre is a non-commercial theatre on Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is noted for its contributions to modern theatre...
from 27 April 1892 to 15 July, about 77 performances, with Decima Moore
Decima Moore
Lilian Decima, Lady Moore-Guggisberg, CBE , better known by her stage name Decima Moore, was an English singer and actress, known for her performances in soprano roles with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and in musical comedies. She was the youngest of ten siblings...
as Ophelia, Brandon Thomas
Brandon Thomas
Walter Brandon Thomas was an English actor, playwright and song writer, best known as the author of the farce Charley's Aunt....
as Claudius and Weedon Grossmith
Weedon Grossmith
Walter Weedon Grossmith , better known as Weedon Grossmith, was an English writer, painter, actor and playwright, best known as co-author of The Diary of a Nobody with his famous brother, music hall comedian and Gilbert and Sullivan star, George Grossmith...
as Hamlet. An amateur performance in 1900 featured P. G. Wodehouse
P. G. Wodehouse
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE was an English humorist, whose body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, poems, song lyrics, and numerous pieces of journalism. He enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years and his many writings continue to be...
as Guildenstern. The play also enjoyed a production in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
at the Murray Hill Theatre in 1900. A charity performance in 1902 featured Gilbert himself as Claudius, with Nancy McIntosh
Nancy McIntosh
Nancy McIntosh was an American-born singer and actress who performed mostly on the London stage. Her father was a member of the notorious South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which had been blamed in connection with the 1889 Johnstown Flood that resulted in the loss of over 2,200 lives in...
as Gertrude. Gilbert again played Claudius at a charity performance in 1904 at the Garrick Theatre
Garrick Theatre
The Garrick Theatre is a West End theatre, located on Charing Cross Road, in the City of Westminster. It opened on 24 April 1889 with The Profligate, a play by Arthur Wing Pinero. In its early years, it appears to have specialised in the performance of melodrama, and today the theatre is a...
, and in a 1908 revival at the Lyceum Theatre starring Marion Terry
Marion Terry
Marion Bessie Terry was an English actress. In a career spanning half a century, she played leading roles in more than 125 plays. Always in the shadow of her more famous sister Ellen, Terry nevertheless achieved considerable success in the plays of W. S...
.
A televised performance of the play was given in 1938 with Grahame Clifford
Grahame Clifford
For the film editor with a similar name, see Graeme Clifford.Grahame Clifford , was an English opera singer and actor primarily known for his work in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and as principal baritone of the Royal Opera Company, Covent Garden.-Life...
as Claudius, Erik Chitty
Erik Chitty
Erik Chitty , was an English film and television actor.-Early life:Chitty was the son of a flour miller. He attended Dover College and Jesus College, Cambridge where he was one of the founders of the Cambridge University Mummers, before training at RADA and becoming a professional actor...
as Guildenstern, Leonard Sachs
Leonard Sachs
Leonard Sachs was a British actor.-Early life and career:Sachs was born in South Africa in the town of Roodepoort, Transvaal...
as Rosencrantz, and Peter Ridgeway as Hamlet. The play continues to receive occasional productions. It figures in the plot of the 2009 film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead is a 2009 American independent film written and directed by Jordan Galland. The film's title refers to a fictitious play-within-the-movie, which is a comic reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and its aftermath and whose title is a reference to the play...
.
Background
1874 was a busy year for Gilbert. He illustrated The Piccadilly Annual; supervised a revival of Pygmalion and Galatea; and, besides Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he wrote CharityCharity (play)
Charity is a drama in four acts by W. S. Gilbert that explores the issue of a woman who had lived with a man as his wife without ever having married. The play analyses and critiques the double standard in the Victorian era concerning the treatment of men and women who had sex outside of marriage,...
; a play about the redemption of a fallen woman; a dramatisation of Ought We to Visit Her? (a novel by Annie Edwardes), an adaptation from the French, Committed for Trial, another adaptation from the French called The Blue-Legged Lady, a play, Sweethearts
Sweethearts (play)
Sweethearts is a comic play billed as a "dramatic contrast" in two acts by W. S. Gilbert. The play tells a sentimental and ironic story of the differing recollections of a man and a woman about their last meeting together before being separated and reunited after 30 years.It was first produced on...
, and Topsyturveydom
Topsyturveydom
Topsyturveydom is a one-act operetta by W. S. Gilbert with music by Alfred Cellier. Styled "an entirely original musical extravaganza", it is based on one of Gilbert's Bab Ballads, "My Dream". It opened on 21 March 1874 at the Criterion Theatre in London and ran until 17 April, for about 25...
, a comic opera
Comic opera
Comic opera denotes a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending.Forms of comic opera first developed in late 17th-century Italy. By the 1730s, a new operatic genre, opera buffa, emerged as an alternative to opera seria...
. He also wrote a Bab
Bab Ballads
The Bab Ballads are a collection of light verse by W. S. Gilbert, illustrated with his own comic drawings. Gilbert wrote the Ballads before he became famous for his comic opera librettos with Arthur Sullivan...
-illustrated story called "The Story of a Twelfth Cake" for the Graphic Christmas number.
Gilbert first shopped the script for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in early 1874 to Henry Irving
Henry Irving
Sir Henry Irving , born John Henry Brodribb, was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility for season after season at the Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as...
, who showed interest but became busy with other projects. He next offered it to William Montague at the Globe Theatre
Globe Theatre
The Globe Theatre was a theatre in London associated with William Shakespeare. It was built in 1599 by Shakespeare's playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and was destroyed by fire on 29 June 1613...
, and Montague also expressed interest but later became unavailable. Gilbert next tried his friend Marie Litton and her Court Theatre
Royal Court Theatre
The Royal Court Theatre is a non-commercial theatre on Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is noted for its contributions to modern theatre...
company. Failing to find a producer, he published the piece in Fun, even though he was unhappy at Funs choice of a new editor to succeed the ailing Tom Hood
Tom Hood
Tom Hood , was an English humorist and playwright, son of the poet and author Thomas Hood. A prolific author, he was appointed, in 1865, editor of the magazine Fun. He also founded Tom Hood's Comic Annual in 1867....
.
Of Gilbert's acting in the role of Claudius in 1904, The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
wrote: "His Claudius was certainly admirable. He would play Claudius in Hamlet finely, only the part would give him no chance of making the 'points' he makes so well."
Synopsis
Tableau IIn blank verse
Blank verse
Blank verse is poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the sixteenth century" and Paul Fussell has claimed that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse."The first...
, King Claudius of Denmark confesses to his wife, Queen Gertrude, a secret crime of his youth: not that of killing anyone; rather, he was guilty of writing a five-act tragedy. The tragedy closed half way through the first act as a result of derisive laughter from the audience. The humiliated Claudius decreed that anyone who mentions the play must be executed. The king puns: "The play was not good – but the punishment of those that laughed at it was capital." The queen counsels Claudius to forget about it and steers the conversation to the problem at hand: Prince Hamlet, a philosopher whose sanity is in doubt ("Opinion is divided.... Some [say] that he's really sane, but shamming mad"), suffers from an alarming "tendency to long soliloquy." To cheer him up, she has sent for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to divert her son with merriment. Perhaps they will also cheer the king.
Unfortunately, Rosencrantz is in love with Hamlet's fiancée, Ophelia. She joins in their plan to break her unwanted engagement to the mercurial prince: Guildenstern and Rosencrantz will trick Hamlet into playing Claudius' tragedy before the king and thereby incur death. The only surviving copy of the play is in the study of Ophelia's father, the Lord Chamberlain
Lord Chamberlain
The Lord Chamberlain or Lord Chamberlain of the Household is one of the chief officers of the Royal Household in the United Kingdom and is to be distinguished from the Lord Great Chamberlain, one of the Great Officers of State....
(the state censor). Ophelia is confident that she can steal it – her father sleeps very soundly after reading all the "rubbishing" new plays all day.
Tableau II
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell the Queen that they will have Hamlet play a leading part in some court theatricals to distract him. Hamlet enters, and she begs them to prevent him from soliloquizing. Hamlet begins, "To be – or not to be," but they interrupt him, turning the soliloquy into a trio, and urging him to commit suicide. Hamlet responds: "It must be patent to the merest dunce/Three persons can't soliloquize at once!"
Ophelia is terrified by the ghosts from "five thousand plays" that haunt her father's study, "chattering forth the scenes [that her] poor father wisely had cut out." But she manages to remove the manuscript. The conspirators show Hamlet the five-act tragedy "Gonzago" (without revealing its authorship). They use reverse psychology, urging him not to produce it. They tell him that it is too long and all the parts are insignificant except his own – "A mad Archbishop who becomes a Jew to spite his diocese" and is forced to murder and soliloquize throughout the work. Hamlet insists on performing the tragedy. Thus, the play within a play becomes a trap for Hamlet (rather than Claudius).
Tableau III
Rosencrantz tells the king and queen that Hamlet has chosen a tragedy but intends to play it for laughs. Before the play begins, Hamlet instructs his players on his (and W. S. Gilbert's) theory of comic acting:
"I hold that there is no such antick fellow as your bombastical hero who doth so earnestly spout forth his folly as to make his hearers believe that he is unconscious of all incongruity".
The First Player responds indignantly that the actors know their craft. King Claudius and his court attend the performance, and soon the audience is roaring with laughter, except for Claudius, who realizes that it is his own banned play. Claudius condemns Hamlet to death. Ophelia suggests that instead of killing the prince, the King should banish him to "Engle-land", where "dwell a cultured race." Claudius assents, commenting, "They're welcome to his philosophic brain." Hamlet is banished, and Rosencrantz embraces Ophelia.
See also
- Rosencrantz and GuildensternRosencrantz and GuildensternRosencrantz and Guildenstern are characters in William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. They are courtiers who are set by the king to spy on Hamlet, using their claimed friendship with him to gain his confidence. The characters were revived in W. S...
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are UndeadRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are UndeadRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead is a 2009 American independent film written and directed by Jordan Galland. The film's title refers to a fictitious play-within-the-movie, which is a comic reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and its aftermath and whose title is a reference to the play...