"Amid this diversity, Stoppard was a Shavian writer. Like the last great English playwright before him, George Bernard Shaw, Stoppard stages ideas full of emotion: “I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself”, as he told Kenneth Tynan. In this spirit, he enjoyed avoiding ideological and philosophical commitments by making jokes. When asked what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was about he replied that it was about to make him a lot of money."

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