Rosencrantz

Please respond to both (2) of the two topics in this thread for fifteen (15) points, thirty (30) total.

A. To what extent do you think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead achieves the necessary empathy to make its audience care about the fate of its protagonists and thereby enable its audience to apply what they may have learned from the experience of the play to their own lives? What are the “truths” or lessons that the play’s themes might potentially deliver to its audience? Do you think its audience “will know better next time”? Which medium, the read play or the movie, creates greater empathy? (15 points )

Discuss the contribution Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet makes to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, beyond the obvious lending of characters and the intersections of the dramas, particularly at Elsinore. Are there themes and motifs in Shakespeare’s play that make it especially appropriate as a partner and resource to a twentieth-century drama? What are they? Is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead a “tragedy” in the same way that we consider Hamlet a tragedy? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern end “unhappily” or “unluckily”? Please respond to at least one other student’s post. (15 points)