Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Hamlet Quotes

More than any other contemporary British playwright, Tom Stoppard populates his plays
from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to The Invention of Love (his portrait of the poet and scholar A. E. Housman)
with characters from life and literature. But one cannot always tell the difference between those who are real and those who are imaginary. ~ Mel Gussow

The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody. ~ Tom Stoppard

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it. ~ Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard was refreshingly candid when, after the successful premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he was asked what the play was about: It's about to make me a lot of money. ~ Clive James

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said
no. But somehow we missed it. ~ Tom Stoppard

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn't take it. ~ Tom Stoppard

I want a good story, with a beginning, middle and end. ~ Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard's other work includes: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, After Magritte, The Real Thing, Enter A Free Man, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink (a stage adaptation of his own play, In the Native State) and The Invention of Love. Arcadia ~ Tom Stoppard

Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something
constructive?
Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid ... ? ~ Tom Stoppard

Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else. ~ Tom Stoppard

We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure. ~ Tom Stoppard

When Rosencrantz asks Hamlet, "Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your grief to your friends"(III, ii, 844-846), Hamlet responds, "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me." (III,ii, 371-380) ~ William Shakespeare

HAMLET
I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?
GUILDENSTERN
My lord, I cannot.
HAMLET
I pray you.
GUILDENSTERN
Believe me, I cannot.
HAMLET
I do beseech you.
GUILDENSTERN
I know no touch of it, my lord.
HAMLET
It is as easy as lying. ~ William Shakespeare

Some people consider the way Shakespeare was writing about Ophelia as erotomania-that she was delusional in thinking that Hamlet was in love with her. But I don't think so. ~ Jack White

We need more bodies, 'cause it's not looking enough like the last scene in Hamlet already.
Chopper Jim Chopin ~ Dana Stabenow

Hamlet, that's the only role there is, finally. The only role. After that, you settle down and only do the fun things on stage. ~ Stephen Lang

The books are all leather, and the titles are old. I pause at a collection of Shakespeare. Othello. Romeo and Juliet. A Midsummer Night's Dream. I pull Hamlet out and look at it, but then set it back down on the shelf.
I pass a row of books on philosophy, and another on astrology. Up and down I go, pausing now and then, but not pulling any books out. I'm not sure what I expected to find. The Idiot's Guide to Time Travel? ~ Mandy Hubbard

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. ~ William Shakespeare

Pretend to be mad and talk a lot. Then - and this is the important bit - do nothing at all until you absolutely have to and then make sure everyone dies. ~ Jasper Fforde

Mad I call it, for to define true madness, what is't to be nothing else but mad? ~ William Shakespeare

Slipping in blood, by his own hand, through pride,
Hamlet, Othello, Coriolanus fall.
Upon his bed, however, Shakespeare die,
Having endured them all. ~ Louise Bogan

Hamlet and Victor Frankenstein are each obsessed with death. Hamlet's whole story is a philosophical preparation for death; Victor's is an intellectual refusal to accept it. ~ Kenneth Branagh

During the next few years I wrote a series of Martian pensées, Shakespearean "asides," wandering thoughts, long night visions, predawn half-dreams. The French, like St. John Perce, practice this to perfection. It is the half-poem, half-prose paragraph that runs as little as one hundred words or as long as a full page on any subject, summoned by weather, time, architectural facade, fine wine, good victuals, a view of the sea, quick sunsets, or a long sunrise. From these elements one upchucks rare hairballs or a maundering Hamlet-like soliloquy. ~ Ray Bradbury

SHAKESPEARE

What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more

(Hamlet)

There is no one kind of Shakespearean hero, although in many ways Hamlet is the epitome of the Renaissance tragic hero, who reaches his perfection only to die. In Shakespeare's early plays, his heroes are mainly historical figures, kings of England, as he traces some of the historical background to the nation's glory. But character and motive are more vital to his work than praise for the dynasty, and Shakespeare's range expands considerably during the 1590s, as he and his company became the stars of London theatre. Although he never went to university, as Marlowe and Kyd had done, Shakespeare had a wider range of reference and allusion, theme and content than any of his contemporaries. His plays, written for performance rather than publication, were not only highly successful as entertainment, they were also at the cutting edge of the debate on a great many of the moral and philosophical issues of the time.

Shakespeare's earliest concern was with kingship and history, with how 'this sceptr'd isle' came to its present glory. As his career progressed, the horizons of the world widened, and his explorations encompassed the geography of the human soul, just as the voyages of such travellers as Richard Hakluyt, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir Francis Drake expanded the horizons of the real world. ~ Ronald Carter

He exists on two planes. He sees the story as He tells it, while He weaves it, shapes it, and sings it. And He stepped inside it. The shadows exist in the painting, the dark corners of grief and trial and wickedness all exist so that He might step inside them, so we could see how low He can stoop. In this story, the Author became flesh and wandered the stage with Hamlet, offering His own life. In this story, the Author heaped all that He loathed, all that displeased Him, all the wrongness of the world, onto Himself. ~ N.D. Wilson

I started to realise that it wasn't for me. Perhaps I didn't have to give my Hamlet before I died, that the world might be an OK place without my Hamlet, in fact. ~ Eric McCormack

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass..." Hamlet. ~ William Shakespeare

To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. ~ J.B. Priestley

Be all the dork that I can be?" he tried.
Her turn. "Hamlet: To dork, or not to dork, that is the question." She smiled proudly, thinking of another. "The apparel 'oft proclaims the man!"
He chuckled. "Hamlet again, but this time with an English accent: Though this be madness, yet there is method in it. ~ Anne Eliot

Where is Polonius?
HAMLET
In heaven. Send hither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him i' th' other place yourself. But if indeed you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby. ~ William Shakespeare

If I have to do battle with you a thousand times to prove my point, I'll do it.'
The queen unwisely asked, 'But to prove what point, my dear Hamlet?'
'That I loved Ophelia! Fifty thousand brothers, with all the love they can summon, would not equal my love for here. Ophelia, Ophelia. ~ John Marsden