Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Two minor characters from Hamlet stumble through the wings of Shakespeare's play, trying to figure out what's going on. Stoppard wrote it at twenty-eight and reinvented theatrical metafiction. It's Waiting for Godot crossed with Hamlet, and the combination is both hilarious and genuinely philosophical.
Without Hamlet fresh in memory, plenty of readers say they lost the thread entirely and wished they'd reread the original first, one admitting flat out “think i needed to reread Hamlet before reading this.” Others reject the philosophizing outright, dismissing two men debating death and coin flips for two hours as “High minded nonsense passed off as profound.” A cluster of low ratings describe the leads' business as filler rather than purposeful absurdism, the two of them “romping around stage being irrelevant in their puddles of pointlessness.” Taste for this brand of Beckett-adjacent comedy predicts the reaction almost perfectly: readers who don't already like Waiting for Godot call the wit strained, one summing the whole experience up as “a little contrived.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
