W.s. Gilbert - Tumblr Posts
Ros. Ophelia!
Oph. (delighted and surprised) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern! This meeting likes me much. We have not met since we were babies!
Ros. The Queen hath summoned us, and I have come in a half-hearted hope that I may claim once more my baby-love!
Oph. Alas, I am betrothed!
Ros. Betrothed? To whom?
Oph. To Hamlet!
Ros. Oh, incomprehensible! Thou lovest Hamlet?
Oph. (demurely). Nay, I said not so – I said we were betrothed.
— W.S. Gilbert, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern”, 1874
if you haven’t read ‘rosencrantz and guildenstern’ (1874) you’re really fucking missing out
other line highlights include “He’s going to soliloquize! Prevent this, gentlemen, by any means” and “I can’t bear death! I’m a philosopher!”
So I’ve shared a few G&S-style parodies of Shakespeare here, but DID YOU KNOW that W.S. Gilbert himself actually wrote a parody of Hamlet? It’s called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and it really deserves to be better-known. Highlights include:
Everybody lives!
Ophelia describes Hamlet as “idiotically sane / With lucid intervals of lunacy”.
Claudius’s secret shame is not that he murdered Hamlet Sr., but that many years ago he wrote a spectacularly awful 5-act tragedy. Almost all copies have been destroyed and people are forbidden to even speak of it.
Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Ophelia steal the one surviving copy and trick Hamlet into putting on a production of this play to get him in trouble with Claudius.
There’s an amazing scene where Hamlet attempts to do his “To be or not to be” speech, only for R&G to keep interrupting him with unwanted commentary…
HAMLET To sleep, perchance to –
ROSENCRANTZ Dream. That’s very true. I never dream myself. But Guildenstern dreams all night long OUT LOUD.
GUILDENSTERN With blushes, sir, I do confess it true!
HAMLET This question, gentlemen, concerns me not.
…until finally:
HAMLET [really angry] Gentlemen, It must be patent to the merest dunce Three persons CAN’T soliloquize at once!
Interesting is that dramatist W.S. Gilbert who wrote "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" (1874) and shipped Rosencrantz and Ophelia died while attempting to rescue a young woman from drowning.
Rosencrantz and Ophelia in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead” (2009). The fragment is based on the play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” by W.S. Gilbert.