When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (R&GAD) opened in New York, an interviewer asked Stoppard what it was about. “It’s about to make me very rich,” came the Wildean (Malquistian?) response. The play had already made Stoppard’s name: Harold Hobson, in the Sunday Times, described the 1967 National Theatre production as “the most important event in the British professional theatre” since the opening of Pinter’s The Birthday Party in 1958. One of the springs of the play is probably Oscar Wilde’s observation in his prison letter De Profundis that the two deracinated courtiers are “little cups that can hold so much and no more,” who, in their dealings with the machiavellian Danish court, find themselves “merely out of their sphere”: a state of terminal bewilderment which, Wilde says, means that genuine tragic status “is really not for such as they.” However, the Wildean influence on Stoppard’s early work goes beyond this specific instance, and is demonstrably at work before Travesties. When the young Stoppard - then a journalist on the Bristol Evening World - had declared himself “a confirmed addict and admirer (literary)” of Wilde, he was acknowledging an affinity we can trace in Stoppard’s emerging aesthetic ideas and dramatic practice. Indeed, the way that Stoppard appropriates Wilde is central to our understanding of his characteristic strengths and weaknesses as a dramatist.