SOURCE: "The Circle and its Tangent," in Theoria, Pietermaritzburg, Vol. XXXIII, October, 1969, pp. 37-43.

In the essay below, Lee employs the image of a circle and a line tangential to it—representing the world in Stoppard's play in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstem are "people" and its intersection with the world of Hamlet, in which they are "characters"—to elucidate the structure of Stoppard's drama and its relation to Shakespeare's tragedy..

Almost every critic or reviewer who has written on Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstem are Dead has paid tribute to the dramatist's "brilliant idea" in linking his play about two supporting actors with the play in which they act their parts. But once they have shown that they understand that a "brilliant" and even audacious idea is involved, they stop without doing justice either to the full brilliance of the idea, or to the detail in which it...