The Cherry Orchard Cherry Orchard" was Chekhov's tribute to himself. Many of the characters in the play hearken back to his earlier works and are based on people he knew in his own life. It should also be noted that his boyhood house was bought and torn down by a wealthy man that his mother had considered a friend. The breaking guitar string in acts 2 and 4 hark back to his earliest works. Finally the classic "loaded gun" that appears in many of Chekhov's plays appears here, but this is his only play in which a gun is shown but not fired.
The Seagull "Hamlet"). There are many allusions to Shakespearean plot details as well. For instance, Treplyov seeks to win his mother back from the usurping older man Trigorin much as Hamlet tries to win Queen Gertrude back from his uncle Claudius. "The Seagull" was first translated into English for a performance at the Royalty Theatre, Glasgow, in November 1909. Since that time, there have been numerous translations of the text—from 1998 to 2004 alone there were 25 published versions. In the introduction of his own version, Tom Stoppard wrote: "You can't have too many English Seagulls: at the intersection of all of