coy evasions regarding the play's more trenchant themes (according to the playwright, the drama was chiefly "calculated to entertain a roomful of people" 3 ), critics have confidently posited several popular theories regarding the philosophical influences inherent in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and, rather than view the play as a piece written to please more than to instruct, have suggested that the play is too intellectual, too literary, too inaccessible. Normand Berlin called the play "derivative" and argued that Stoppard's obvious dependence on Shakespeare, Beckett and Pirandello causes the play to "think" too much which results in a lack of feeling "or [the] union of thought and emotion that we associate with Waiting for Godot and Hamlet. " 4 While not all critics argue that Stoppard's borrowings are detrimental to the play, most agree that the playwright is in some sense a "theatrical parasite"--a phrase coined by Robert Brustein in a 1967 article in the New Republic. Richard Andretta writes, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is based on Hamlet and Waiting for Godot. It is also reminiscent, in spite of Stoppard's protestations, of Pirandello's Six Characters in search of an Author and Each in His Own Way. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's bewilderment and angst, their metaphysical speculations and the games in which they indulge to while away the time and overcome their fears of the unknown resemble Vladimir's and Estragon's activities in Waiting for Godot. Their dependence on the script to give them directions and provide them with a purpose is similar to the six characters' plight in Pirandello's play. There are also references to Albee, Oscar Wilde, Osborne, and many others." 5
             As Andretta suggests, Stoppard resists, in part, this interpretive reading of his play. Stoppard does, of cour
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