Lost Meets Hamlet Via Stoppard?
Special thanks to Ryan for pointing this out! Ryan alerted me to a play called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, which chronicles the lives of two characters played out against the backdrop of events from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
In Hamelt, the two characters are charged with determining Hamlet’s motives, and plans. Instead they, themselves are killed. The characters are thrust into the universe of Hamlet in much the same way that Paulo and Nikki were thrust into ours, by the will of the writer. Inasmuch, they seem to serve no valid purpose and are generally mocked throughout for being the extraneous folk they are.
In "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead", however, much like Expose is Nikki and Paulo, the playing field is reversed and they are the major characters with Hamlet seeming to be the character with misappropriated importance.
More info can be found at Wikipedia.
That’s definitely an interesting parrellel. There’s even the play within a play motif with that show Expose. And if memory serves me correctly (it’s been a long time since I’ve read the play) I believe there are blatant allusions the the two characters impending doom, similar to what we saw in Expose.
And to allude to Stoppard’s other well known work, Shakespeare in Love, it (our LOST episode) even had a bit with a dog.
Comment by JakeNRoland — March 29, 2007 @ 12:14 pm
it was a good episode, but in no way did it make either of them “iconic” personally I was thinking they were going to become the adam and eve skeletons in some sort of time warp angle.
Comment by cekma — March 29, 2007 @ 12:51 pm
Not much to say about this article, but I wanna go out and say that the movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a pretty funny little flick. The two scenes that stand out is the “tennis” scene, and the scenes involving one of them flipping the coin to the point where it ALWAYS lands on one side… then all of a sudden it lands on the other, and he just quits! Guess you had to be there, but I really laughed hard at that.
Comment by alarose20 — March 29, 2007 @ 12:56 pm
One reason I enjoyed this episode is because from the beginning it make me think of “a play called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead”. Which by the way is written by the great William Shakespeare.
Comment by iowalost815 — March 29, 2007 @ 3:47 pm
EXPOSE = APRIL FOOLS
YES VERY MUCH LIKE TOM STOPPARD’S PLAY, GOOD CALL…
DEFFINATELY A “FILLER/FLUFF” EPISODE!
Comment by BARRY DINGLE — March 29, 2007 @ 3:59 pm
Hey Barry, how do you know that episode’s like The Man From Talahassee aren’t the filler, and this is the real gravy?
Comment by Dusk — March 29, 2007 @ 5:44 pm
Uh, one huge difference in Stoppard’s play and this episode of Lost: the play is a separate entity that exists outside the play of Hamlet. This particular episode of Lost exists *within* the show. Now, this is not a criticism of the show, because I enjoyed it. But the parallel isn’t much of one in this case.
A real parallel would be if Shakespeare had actually stopped his play and started writing an Act that involved Ros/Guild. That’s similar to what happened with Lost.
Comment by John Salerno — March 30, 2007 @ 10:06 am
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in the Stoppard play, have no backstory - that’s part of the joke of the play, they really are how Shakespeare conceived them, minor, paper-thin interchangeable characters useful only to move the plot forward a bit.
The point of the play is how they wake up to their role existance as real people, but of no importance and with no ability to influence their world. Their conversations become meditations on life, death and the role of individuals in society.
Unfortunately, Nikki and Paulo are no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Worse yet, I agree that Nikki’s return from the dead was foreshadowed after the wrap of her Expose episode.
If only they could get Stoppard to write a Lost script or two…
Comment by Mike B. — March 30, 2007 @ 12:50 pm