Somehow He Missed It

I cannot recall when I heard first about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead — just as Ros comes up blank when Guil asks him the first thing he remembers. It must have been sometime in my teens, when I was doing a bit of Shakespearean acting in high school and writing the occasional essay on Hamlet. Fraught family relationships and quests for justice make a big impression at that age. Whenever it was, I didn’t get the full story. I understood Tom Stoppard’s play was a retelling of the great tragedy from the perspective of two minor characters with odd-sounding names who come to a bad end. While this sounded mildly interesting, I was never sufficiently motivated to explore further, not when there were so many other books to read or not to read.

A little later, I discovered that R and G — as the work is affectionately and more briefly known — owed a lot to Waiting for Godot. But that wasn’t enough to recommend it to me...