Gertrude is one of Shakespeare’s most ambiguous queens. She is a role that compresses arguments about sexuality, maternal authority, dynastic legitimacy, and conscience into remarkably few lines. Yet her afterlives are abundant. Read alongside the chronicles that prefigure Hamlet (Saxo Grammaticus and François de Belleforest), Shakespeare’s queen stands at the junction of piety and power; read through Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film, she is reframed within an Oedipal optics; rea

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead! (1990) USA Tom Stoppard Can any of us change our fate when we cannot even remember it? The action starts almost immediately. Here we have two men on horses riding through a steppe of a mountain. The two companions find an ordinary gold coin on the road. Rosencrantz (Gary Oldman) and Guildenstern (Tim Roth) stop to pick up their good fortune. Rosencrantz quickly realizes that although the coin they have found is seemingly ordinary…. the e