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Article: Wilde's THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST and Stoppard's ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD.
- Article from:
- The Explicator
- Article date:
- January 1, 2000
- Author:
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The two chief plays that are major influences of Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are, of course, Hamlet and Waiting for Godot. But Stoppard also refers to other plays. One of them is The Importance of Being Earnest. At the beginning of act 2, Cecily discovers that Miss Prism has written a three-volume novel and says, "How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much." Miss Prism's pompous reply is, "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means" (page 376). This is echoed in act 2 of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when the Player says, ...
Related newspaper, magazine, and journal articles:
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Article: Tom Stoppard
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition;
700+ words
...Tom Stoppard 1937-, English playwright ... prominence with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), a witty ... See P. Delaney, ed., Tom Stoppard in Conversation (1994 ... Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard (2001).
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