Nicholas Nickleby, Or, How I Survived Seven Hours of Dickens

In his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard has one of the title characters explode at a band of travelling tragedians, who make their living by performing heart-tugging plays with endings full of corpses.   “Actors!” he snaps. “The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn’t death! You scream…