“'Wheels have been set in motion': geocentrism and relativity in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”
Résumé
By decentering our reading of Hamlet, Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead questions the legitimacy of centres and of stable frames of reference. His characters’ comical attempts at understanding their position suggest a postmodern view of the canon, yet their loss of bearings is relocated within a scientific paradigm which Stoppard partly derives from Shakespeare’s text. This paper will examine how Stoppard plays with the physical and cosmological models he finds in Hamlet, particularly that of the wheel and of circular movement, and gives a new scientific depth to the fear that time is ‘out of joint’.