Tom Stoppard once described his artistic goal as follows:

I realized quite some time ago that I was in it because of the theatre rather than because of the literature. I like theatre, I like showbiz, and that’s what I’m true to…. I’ve benefited greatly from Peter Wood’s [a London theatre director] down-to-earth way of telling me, ‘Right, I’m sitting in J16, and I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me. It’s not clear.’  There’s none of this stuff about, ‘When Faber and Faber bring it out, I’ll be able to read it six times and work it out for myself.’ (Quoted Hayman, p. 8)

Some of us are drawn to solving play-puzzles, so I hope that this introduction to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which I confess, I have read at least six times) proves helpful. This is an honest and funny play. Stoppard brilliantly revisits Shakespearean notions of life and death.

The Playwright

Stoppard was born in 1937 in Czechoslovakia. He had an eventful childhood. Shortly before the Nazi occupation he and his family, who were non-practising Jews, fled to Singapore, where his father continued to practice as a doctor. In 1941, Stoppard, his mother and brother were evacuated to Darjeeling, India. His father was killed during the evacuation from Singapore in 1942. His mother remarried an Englishman and the family moved to England in 1946. From 1954 to 1963 Stoppard worked as a journalist, meanwhile writing three short stories which Faber accepted for publication. He visited Berlin on a Ford Foundation Grant from May to October, 1964, and while there wrote a one-act play in verse, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear. This dealt with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern–characters in Hamlet–before their departure from Denmark and upon their arrival in England. Stoppard revised the play several times:

i) Into prose, thus underlining the contrast between the modern idiom (his own idiom) and Shakespeare’s lyrical and dramatic language;

ii) The action concentrated on Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s experiences before they leave Denmark and on board ship. Their arrival in England was cut.

iii) Stoppard lengthened the play into three acts.

Virtually in its present form and with its present title, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acted on the fringe of the Edinburgh Festival in August, 1966. Favourable reviews attracted attention, and the script was given its first professional performance, in London by the National Theatre Company, in 1967. This production established Stoppard’s reputation once and for all, and since then revivals have been frequent. Meanwhile Stoppard has been a prolific creator, of a novel, of original stage, television and radio plays, and of film scripts and adaptations. You’ll find a long list of his titles at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Stoppard#:~:text=Stoppard’s%20most%20prominent%20plays%20include,’n’%20Roll%20and%20Leopoldstadt. 

The Theatre of the Absurd

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is an original contribution to a genre known as ‘the theatre of the absurd.’ This was founded soon after World War II by such playwrights as Samuel Beckett  (Irish; Nobel Prize winner) and Eugène Ionesco (Romanian-French; Nobel Prize nominee). Beckett’s seminal absurdist play was first produced in Paris in 1953. Written in French, Waiting for Godot does not tell a story but explores a static situation. Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting on a country road for someone to come and for something to happen. But no one comes and nothing happens. Act 2 repeats the non-happenings of Act 1 in a different order. Stoppard’s writing for the theatre was influenced by Beckett, whom he sincerely admires (see Ronald Hayman, Tom Stoppard, pp. 6-7). Like Waiting for Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead explores the situation of waiting. More happens in the later play, and what happens is frightening and inexplicable.

Most plays written in English from the Middle Ages until now do not give you life as it is, but a highly structured, heightened and controlled version suitable for presentation in a theatre. While characters like Hamlet are identifiable with real-life people, they are first and foremost products of the imagination. The events that they participate in are likewise inventions, if not by Shakespeare, by the authors who are his sources. Consider for a moment the skill needed to produce the dénouements (literally the ‘unknottings’ of the plots) in Hamlet, in other Renaissance plays like Ben Jonson’s Volpone, in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1770), or Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). The skill that produces the congruences of coincidences in such traditional drama is admirable, but the end product is art; it is removed from the real life that it strives to imitate, because life is almost never neat. Traditional plays are structured so that minimally their action has a beginning, a middle and an end. Climaxes and relaxation alternate in ways that ensure audience engagement. Life isn’t experienced like this, but as a continuum of ups and downs. Resolutions are rare; and such as they are, they lead into new situations and issues. Theatre of the absurd typically seeks to mimic this human reality more closely. It highlights the inconsistency of human behaviour and the unstructured nature of human experience.

Absurdist playwrights, including Stoppard, objected to what they saw as the first principle of traditional drama, that it should pretend to imitate life, but not do so, or at least not do so very exactly. Their plays depart from tradition in both characterisation and action.

a. Absurdist plays reject exposition as a theatrical contrivance, so information about characters’ pasts tends to be withheld. The characters exist, inexplicably, as at the deepest level, we all do.

b. Character in absurdist theatre is unstable and untrustworthy. In Ionesco’s Rhinoceros for example, all the characters turn into rhinoceroses. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the protagonists are at the mercy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. They are not always their modern selves, but intermittently perform the script of Hamlet as Shakespeare’s creations. Alarmingly, they sometimes forget their identities and call each other by their own names.

c. The Theatre of the Absurd abandoned the idea that dramatic action should follow a pattern of beginning-middle-end, while at the same time pretending to imitate life. The truth as they saw it is that life is messy and no one can predict the future. The non-plots—the undisciplined and unpredictable happenings—of absurdist drama embody this realisation.

d. Instead of seeking to engage the audience by pretending to imitate life, the Theatre of the Absurd imaginatively suggests and comments upon aspects of life from a distance.

Absurdist Paradoxes: Although their art deliberately defies reason and expectation, the absurdists’ goal was greater realism, objectivity and insight. These qualities stemmed from their ‘existential angst,’ i.e. their unhappiness about existence itself as being intrinsically unsatisfying and doomed to end in nothingness. Absurdist plays aim to shock audiences into sharing the authors’ despair at what they see as life’s meaninglessness and futility.

Extreme absurdists, such as Beckett and Ionesco, go farthest in their renunciation of traditional plot development and characterisation. Moderate absurdists, such as the British playwright Harold Pinter, use absurdist techniques sparingly, create recognisable realistic situations, and sometimes allow the action to develop according to expectation. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead hovers among these examples. The action does develop–it follows events in Hamlet–, but the timing of the intrusions from Shakespeare’s script is unpredictable. For the protagonists they are frightening and frustrating. Since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern inhabit the world’s most famous play, their fictionality is beyond doubt. Most of what they do and say is comic. But it’s impossible not to sympathise with these non-beings as they struggle with their non-existent but inexplicably changing world. Life is a puzzle.

The Structure That Isn’t

Sequential extracts from Hamlet, in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play a part, enter and leave Stoppard’s script. Such structure as the play possesses derives from these extracts, which create confusion and uncertainty as they impinge randomly on the protagonists’ questionable existence. Miming the unpredictability of life, the result is not a ‘structure’ as the term is applied to traditional drama. When they are not acting involuntarily in the script of Hamlet, Ros and Guil pass the time in games such as coin-tossing (pp. 7-12 etc.) and question-and-answer (pp. 30-36). Like most modern humans, they worry incessantly. They ask questions that are never answered. Unlike Hamlet, they do not die tragically after an athletic sword fight. Instead, they disappear quietly and without fuss, and like most humans are never heard of again: ‘GUIL. Now you see me, now you—‘ (p. 91).

In the intervals between the verbatim Hamlet enactments, Ros and Guil struggle to understand what Shakespeare’s script, which they often quote, means for them. For example, after they’ve read Claudius’s letter to the English king commanding Hamlet’s execution, Ros seeks a distraction:

ROS. The sun’s going down. It will be dark soon.
GUIL. Do you think so?
ROS. I was just making conversation. (Pause). We’re his friends.
GUIL: How do you know?
ROS. From our young days brought up with him (p. 79; Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2, line 11). 

Ros and Guil chat at length with the Player, who is the spokesman, as in Hamlet, for a troupe of six ‘tragedians’ that includes the small boy Alfred. Unlike Ros and Guil who fight desperately against the idea, the Player accepts that he exists only when the scripts in which he is a character are being performed: ‘GUIL. Aren’t you going to—come on?/ PLAYER. I am on’ (p. 24). Here the Player reminds the audience that, just like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a play. Like life itself, it exists only in the now, while it is being performed. In view of this anti-dramatic truth, the Player invites the audience to question their own reality,–are they, or are they not?  Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be‘? takes on a new dimension of meaning.

Act One

Much of Act 1 is an imaginative construction of Ros and Guil’s first meeting with the Players (pp, 15-24). In Hamlet this event is off-stage but mentioned by Rosencrantz: ‘We coted [overtook] them on the way and hither are they coming to offer you service‘ (Act 2, Scene 2, lines 306-307). Later Ophelia and Hamlet act out in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern what in Shakespeare’s tragedy is Ophelia’s report to her father of Hamlet’s apparently mad confrontation with her (p.25; Hamlet Act 2, scene 1, lines 85-99). Claudius’s and Gertrude’s commissioning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet follows (pp. 25-27; Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2, lines1-39), and then Polonius’s claim, adorned with flattery, that he knows the cause of Hamlet’s ‘lunacy‘ (p. 27; Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 40-50). Hamlet’s sarcastic conversation with Polonius (Act 2, Scene 2, lines 203-221) and warm first greeting to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (p. 38; Act 2, Scene 2, lines 221-225) conclude the Act.

Act Two

Most of the Shakespearean takeovers, of Stoppard’s script and therefore of Ros’s and Guil’s existence as modern young men, occur in Act 2, which quotes liberally from the three central acts of Hamlet:

• Hamlet welcomes Ros and Guil to the Danish court; he belittles Polonius (p. 39; Act 2, Scene 2, lines 352-373);
• Hamlet instructs the Players on the evening’s performance (p. 44; Act 2, Scene 2, lines 507-520);
• Claudius and Gertrude question Ros and Guil about their meeting with Hamlet (p. 52; Act 3, Scene 1, lines 10-31);
• Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy is inaudible, as Ros and Guil discuss how they should approach him; Hamlet’s conversation rejecting Ophelia begins (p. 53; Act 3, Scene 2, lines 57-94);
• The Players perform the dumbshow in Hamlet of the poisoning of the king (pp. 55-56; Act 3, Scene 2, lines 116-27);
• Hamlet completes his rejection of Ophelia, followed by Claudius’s conclusion that love is not the cause of Hamlet’s malaise (p.56; Act 3, Scene 1, lines 145-49; 161-68);
• Claudius flees from the play-within-the play (The Murder of Gonzago; The Mousetrap), which has performed his murder of his brother (p. 62; Act 3, Scene 2, lines 254-55);
• Claudius commands Ros and Guil to find Polonius’s body and bring it to the chapel (pp.62-63; Act 4, Scene 1, lines 32-39);
• Ros and Guil’s fruitlessly question Hamlet about the body’s location (p. 66; Act 4, Scene 2, lines 2-27);
• Claudius questions them, just as fruitlessly (p.67; Act 4, Scene 3, lines 12-16);
• Claudius arrests Hamlet for questioning (p. 67; Act 4, Scene 3, line 15);
• With Fortinbras’s captain, Hamlet discusses the Norwegian army’s attack on Poland (pp. 68-69; Act 4, Scene 4, lines 9-14, 29-31);
• Ros and Guil debate their fate over the soliloquy (silenced) in which Hamlet makes Fortinbras’s readiness for war a spur to his revenge (p. 69; Act 4, Scene 4, 32-66).

Act Three

The setting for Act 3 is the ship transporting Hamlet, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as his custodians, to England. In Hamlet Hamlet’s sea adventures aren’t performed–he reports them to Horatio in Act 4, Scene 6, lines 11-25 and Act 5, Scene 2, lines 1-62. Stoppard’s version fills out Hamlet’s reports with performance. Three large barrels in a row and a striped umbrella become visible as the scene gradually lightens (pp. 71-72). The barrels probably reference the dustbins inhabited by Nag and Nell in Beckett’s seminal absurdist drama, Endgame (1957).

Act 3 proceeds as follows:

(1) A sequence in which Ros and Guil search for and eventually find and read the letter from Claudius arranging Hamlet’s execution by the king of England (pp. 76-79; Hamlet Act 5, Scene 2, lines 16-24);

(2) Hamlet, now a sinister figure as befits a murderer-by-proxy, substitutes for Claudius’s letter a forgery redirecting Claudius’s execution order from himself to Ros and Guil. Immediately upon their arrival in England they are to be killed (pp. 80-81; Hamlet  Act 5, Scene 2, lines 1-62);

(3) Located by Ros, who can hear the music they are playing, the Player and company emerge from the three barrels (p. 82).

(4) The pirates’ attack, reported by Hamlet as full of danger and risk (Act 4, Scene 6, lines 11-25), creates slapstick confusion (pp. 85-86). All leap into the barrels. When the lights come up, the left-hand barrel, into which Hamlet leapt, has disappeared. Ros and Guil have been abandoned by the script! Next they read the letter substituted by Hamlet commanding their execution in England. Ros first, and then Guil disappear. Shakespeare’s script, on which their existence depends, has not provided them with a death scene.

(5) The anti-climax of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (p. 92) is the aftermath of Hamlet (Act 5, Scene 2, lines 349-368). In both plays the stage is strewn with the corpses of Hamlet, Laertes, Claudius and Gertrude. An English Ambassador reports the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and demands: ‘Where should we have our thanks?’ Horatio asks Fortinbras for permission to ‘speak to the yet unknowing world/ how these things came about….all this can I truly deliver.’ Then, like everyone’s life, ‘The play fades, overtaken by dark and music.’

 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Hamlet

Stoppard’s achievement is to give a voice to two underdogs who are casually characterised and illogically denigrated in the classic text that created them. By remaking Hamlet as a contemporary drama, Stoppard uncovers the clay feet of an idol of middle class and academic western culture. He sends a refreshing breeze through a closed room that is musty with reverence.

• Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a cultural icon; cultural iconoclasm is the purpose of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
• Despite its status as a revenge tragedy, Hamlet floats on a substratum of Christian belief.
• The characters concern themselves constantly with good and evil.
• But Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead assumes a modern reality, lacking both God and hope.
• The characters have no interest in good and evil. Their only concern is to avoid not existing, an avoidance which their twentieth-century world view excludes.

A. The Title: Stoppard’s title quotes the line near the end of Hamlet (Act 5, Scene 2, line 352) in which the Ambassador from England reports Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s executions to the Norwegian victor Fortinbras. In Hamlet this announcement merely ties up a loose end in the plot; no one on stage shows any sympathy or concern for the two who have been killed. Earlier Hamlet dismissed their deaths as fitting for king’s flatterers. Though of ‘baser nature‘ (lower class) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern chose to interfere in fights between their betters (‘mighty opposites’): ‘Why, man, they did make love to this employment’ (Act 5, Scene 2, lines 56-62). In other words, the pair got what they deserved–hoping for payment, they interfered in matters above their rank.

A fact sometimes overlooked is that in Hamlet Rosencrantz and Guildenstern did not know that the letter from the Danish king that they were taking to his English counterpart commanded Hamlet’s death. They manipulate a friendship out of self-interest, but are not guilty of conniving a friend’s death. Stoppard makes huge dramatic capital out of this omission, mistake, or at least problem in Hamlet.
See: https://jcu.pressbooks.pub/shakespearesmajorplays/chapter/hamlet-story/; https://jcu.pressbooks.pub/shakespearesmajorplays/chapter/hamlet-characters/

B. Stoppard Remakes Shakespeare’s Characters.

Hamlet speaks more than half the lines in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Stoppard moves Ros and Guil and the Players into the vacated central space.

a. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Shakespeare creates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as flatterers and time-servers: they do not hesitate to sacrifice their friendship, to deceive Hamlet, in order to curry favour with the king. Stoppard recreates Ros and Guil as ordinary likeable young men who are confused and deeply anxious about their situation and their fate. In these respects they are representative modern humans. Many humans have a religious faith; others are atheists; more are agnostics; ultimately, like Ros and Guil, all humans disappear.

In Hamlet Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are hard to distinguish from each other, but Stoppard makes Ros an innocent and Guil thoughtful, learned and aware. They act the vaudeville roles of a comedian (Guil) and his stooge (Ros).  Typically, Guil looks for a solution to their situation, while Ros tries, unsuccessfully, to hide from it:

GUIL. (turning on him furiously): Why don’t you say something original! No wonder the whole thing is so stagnant! You don’t take me up on anything–you just repeat it in a different order.
ROS: I can’t think of anything original. I’m only good in support.
GUIL. I’m sick of making the running.
ROS. (humbly): It must be your dominant personality. (Almost in tears.) Oh, what’s going to become of us! (And Guil comforts him, all harshness gone.) (p. 75)

Neither their differences in personality nor their up-and-down friendship affect the inevitability of Ros and Guil’s disappearance.

b. The Players

In Hamlet the Players are professionals, of lower rank than the court figures, but respected by Hamlet the prince for their talent and skill. Polonius remains snobbishly aloof, but Hamlet welcomes them as friends. He performs one of their earlier roles, which he enjoyed, verbatim and from memory.

By contrast, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the players evoke pathos. Existing on the edge of starvation, they will act or do anything for the money they need to survive. The boy actor Alfred sums up their desperate commitment to their trade. Although he is not female, not unsullied and not (yet) dead, Alfred is eager to act ‘the corpse of the unsullied Rosalinda’ (p. 46).

c. Hamlet

Despite his questionable actions, such as his killing of Polonius and execution-by-proxy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, audiences of Shakespeare’s tragedy are invited to feel both for and with Hamlet. We are sorry for his isolation (Horatio is his only true friend); we are drawn into his dilemmas and we learn from his insights. But Stoppard’s extracts from Hamlet, strategically placed and framed by Ros’s and Guil’s anxiety and puzzlement, transform Shakespeare’s hero into a character who is darkly comic and sinister in his self-absorption and heartlessness.

In a wonderfully irreverent summing up of the never-ending debate among critics over Hamlet’s ‘madness’, Ros concludes that Hamlet is ‘stark raving sane’ (p. 49). Stoppard remakes Hamlet’s philosophical questioning as pretentious and pompous. His immortal soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be,’ is reduced to inaudibility as Ros and Guil debate with each other over whether to ‘accost‘ him (p. 53). On board ship, Hamlet relaxes behind a gaudy striped umbrella, an irreverent comment the black mourning clothes always worn by the original. While Ros and Guil panic, Hamlet sleeps. Behind the umbrella and under the cover of darkness, he replaces Claudius’ letter with the forgery that ensures their deaths. In sum, Stoppard’s Hamlet is centred on his own affairs to the exclusion of others. This is not an impossible reading of Shakespeare’s hero. From Ros and Guil’s perspective, Hamlet is both all-powerful and malign. Stoppard’s final judgment comes from the audience:

(HAMLET comes down to footlights and regards the audience. The others watch but don’t speak. HAMLET clears his throat noisily and spits into the audience. A split second later he claps his hand to his eye and wipes himself. He goes back upstage.) (p. 84)

Literary iconoclasm could hardly go further!

C. Shakespeare’s and Stoppard’s Language: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead jokes frequently about the puzzle that Shakespeare’s language poses for present-day audiences and readers. The language of Hamlet is richly poetic, inventive, varied, and crammed with neologisms (words not recorded in English in earlier or contemporary works); but Shakespeare’s fascination with words and Hamlet‘s four and half hours of playing time make it hard-going for modern audiences and readers. The Player makes the point with reference to the Dumbshow that opens the play-within-the-play (Hamlet, Act Three): ‘You understand that we are tied down to a language that makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style’ (p. 56).

Style is a modern writing criterion, but the language choices in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead use contrast to underline the point about obscurity. As much as Shakespeare, Stoppard delights in the witty manipulation of language:

1. Usually the language of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is modern and simple. Ros especially speaks his thoughts honestly, e.g. ‘I want to go home’ (p. 26); ‘We don’t owe anything to anyone’ (p. 29);
2. The language is sometimes parodic, e. g. Guil’s attempt at the beginning to solve their dilemma by philosophy and scientific reasoning is diverted by Ros into speculations about whether or not fingers and toenails grow after death (pp. 10-12);
3. Ros and Guil’s language choices powerfully convey their tension and terror.
4. But often their simple language is beautiful, e.g. Guil’s evocation of an autumn landscape captures the poetry and the terror of time’s passing:

Autumnal–nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day…Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it…. Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses…deep shining ochres, burnt umber and parchments of baked earth–reflecting on itself and through itself, filtering the light. At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewhere, by repute. Yesterday was blue, like smoke. (p. 68),

Another metaphor captures the unavoidable ending of time:

We’ve travelled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or explanation. (pp. 87-88).

D. Stoppard Lightens Tragedy with Pathos, Comedy and Vaudeville Techniques: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead relieves a philosophy of despair with humour.

Given the meaninglessness of existence and the inevitability of death, what can humans do?

• The first answer is, they can honestly recognise the terror of their situation—Life’s length is fixed; no significant extension is possible.
• The second answer is, unlike all the other doomed creatures, they can laugh!

Vaudeville-style, Ros and Guil constantly ask and answer questions of each other and, when he is onstage, of the Player. Many questions and answers are one-liners. All are directed to escaping their situation, if not physically then by distraction. The exchanges are sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying. Ros and Guil grow more desperate as the action moves towards its ending.  Both, but especially Ros, invite the audience’s compassion. Alfred, the most pathetic of the players, comically evokes the suffering of humanity–a paradox if ever there was one! The players’ music simultaneously brightens and darkens.  All these features undermine by contrast the tragic grandeur of a classic play like Hamlet.

An example of vaudeville clowning occurs on pp. 63-64. Obeying Claudius’s command (Hamlet Act 4, Scene 1, lines 36-37), Ros and Guil are looking for Polonius’s dead body. Their dialogue reveals the indifference with which Polonius’ death is treated in Hamlet by everyone except his children, Laertes and Ophelia:

GUIL: Good God, I hope more tears are shed for us!…
ROS: Well, it’s progress, isn’t it? Something positive. Seek him out. (Looks around without moving his feet.) Where does one begin…? (Takes one step towards the wings and halts.)
GUIL: Well, that’s a step in the right direction.
ROS: You think so? He could be anywhere.
GUIL. All right–you go that way, I’ll go this way.
ROS: Right. (They walk towards opposite wings. ROS halts.) No. (Guil halts.) You go this way–I’ll go that way.
GUIL: All right. (They march towards each other, cross. ROS halts.)
ROS: Wait a minute. (GUIL halts.) 

And so it goes on for another page. Guil’s assessment is hilarious: Well, at last we’re getting somewhere. But at every moment the dark truth of human beings’ reluctance to die threatens to overwhelm bright surface comedy.

Philosophy

Let’s look at some of the ideas with which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead confronts audiences and readers:

1. Humans have no control over their entrances and exits, and very little over what happens in between.

The pervasive metaphor of the theatre conveys this insight. A mysterious messenger has wakened Ros and Guil to the only reality they are ever to know:

GUIL: …Then a messenger arrived. We had been sent for…. (p. 12)
ROS (promptly): I woke up, I suppose. (Triggered.) Oh–I’ve got it now–that man, a foreigner, he woke us up.
GUIL: A messenger. (He relaxes, sits.)
ROS: That’s it–pale sky before dawn, a man standing on his saddle to bang on the shutters–shouts–What’s all the row about?! Clear off! –But then he called our names. You remember that–this man woke us up.
GUIL: Yes.
ROS. We were sent for.
GUIL. Yes. (p. 13)

Ros and Guil go over the scenario twice more (pp. 28, 91). They can’t identify the messenger. They don’t understand the dimension that they left behind, nor the dimension—previously unimagined—to which they have awakened.

We can interpret the messenger’s call as birth–a sudden transition into being, after which maturing humans awaken to their presence in a world unthought of and unchosen. You’re here but, beyond the physical mechanics of conception and birth, you don’t know how or why. Stoppard finds an analogy for this lack of control in the powerlessness of characters to resist Shakespeare’s script. Ros and Guil are part of the script; they don’t understand it, but they can’t refuse to act it out. They have to submit to Hamlet’s verbal victories, to their voyage to England, to Hamlet’s rewriting of Claudius’s letter. Finally, like real humans, at the moment decided by the script, they disappear.

The Players apply the same theatre metaphor to themselves. Perhaps because they are familiar with scripts, they understand and accept their situation more readily than Ros and Guil: ‘We’re tragedians, you see. We follow directions–there is no choice involved. The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.’ (p. 58)

In Act 3 the boat transporting Hamlet, with Ros and Gul as his guards, to England is another metaphor for humans’ fundamental lack of self-determination, their subjection to fate. Aboard, Ros and Guil are free to move around, to talk, to wait, and to amuse themselves: ‘GUIL: One is free on a boat. For a time. Relatively.’ (p. 73). But in other respects they are powerless. They do not determine the route of the voyage, its length, or its destination:

Free to move, speak, extemporise, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact—that we, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bearing a letter from one king to another, are taking Hamlet to England. (p. 73)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead vividly dramatises human beings’ existential powerlessness.

2. People will do anything to escape from their existential aloneness and insignificance.

Humans can’t bear the idea of being alone in the universe—hence the huge financial and ideological support for space exploration. If humans are unable to believe that their actions are watched, then their actions and they themselves fade into insignificance–their existence becomes indistinguishable from non-existence.

Stoppard extends the theatrical metaphor to convey this insight. The worst fate that the Players can imagine is to perform to no audience, i.e. no watchers. Distraught, the Player conveys this after Ros and Guil have been distracted from watching their performance:

                  We’re actors…we pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade; that someone would be watching. And then, gradually, no one was. We were caught high and                                 dry. [….]  The silence was unbreakable, it imposed itself upon us; it was obscene. We took off our crowns and swords and cloth of gold and moved silent on the road to Elsinore.                           (p. 46)

The famous last words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet are ‘The rest is silence’. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead repeatedly evokes the enigma of silence–discussed further below.

The Player’s point is that if no one is watching, then the Players don’t exist; when humans die, when they are no longer on stage, no longer to be seen or heard—they don’t exist; and usually–in most respects–it’s as if they never have existed.

3. The identity of humans shifts as their contexts change: identity is unstable.

Think of how different the new-born baby is from the child, the child from the teenager, the teenager from the adult, the adult from the older person—at each stage we identify with a different self. (See melancholy Jaques’ list of ‘seven ages’ in As You Like It, Act 2. Scene 7.) We humans may not possess a constant ‘core’ to our being. When Ros and Guil are caught up in Shakespeare’s script (the occasions are listed above under ‘Structure’), they transmute into Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, characters very different from their modern selves. Similarly, the Players remake themselves as required by the different scripts they enact. Guil makes the point: a Chinese philosopher ‘dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him in his two-fold security.’ (p. 43) Unlike actors and humans, who deal daily and hourly with multiple selves, the lucky philosopher had to come to terms with only two!  

4. Death is certain: everything in life is designed to distract us from death’s inevitability.

Hamlet performs or narrates the deaths of eight named characters (Stoppard p. 60; there are nine if you count King Hamlet), and refers to the deaths of numerous soldiers, sailors and pirates. Its most famous and evocative scene (Act Five, Scene 1) is set in a graveyard, where skulls and bones, treated with no respect, mingle with the decay and dirt. Death, as the title indicates, is likewise central to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Ros and Guil play games, tell jokes, affirm friendship, argue with each other and the Players, etc. etc.—all as a way of distracting themselves from this truth:

• The death theme enters the play with Ros’s comments on the growth (or not) of fingernails and toenails after death (p. 13).
• Quotes from Hamlet about the airlessness of the grave, and Hamlet’s longing for death extend the subject (p. 37).
• The next discussion, in Act Two (pp. 50-51), evokes death (or life??) in a coffin. Death, it emerges, is full of paradoxes and riddles:

 ROS: …. ask yourself, if I asked you straight off–I’m going to stuff you in this box now, would you rather be alive or dead? Naturally, you’d prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all. I expect. You’d have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking–well, at least I’m not dead! in a minute someone’s going to bang on the lid and tell me to come out. (Banging the floor with his fists.) ‘Hey you, whatsyername! Come out of there!’
GUIL: (Jumps up savagely) You don’t have to flog it to death! (Pause.)
ROS: I wouldn’t think about it, if I were you. You’d only get depressed. (Pause.) Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?

           The crazy fact is that this macabre dialogue is extremely funny!

• Towards the end of Act Two (pp. 60-62), GUIL and the Player compare stage deaths with real deaths. The Player describes Hamlet as ‘a slaughterhouse! –eight corpses all told.’ Guil objects: ‘Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn’t death!’ The Player narrates an occasion when his staging of a real execution was a ‘disaster’: theatre audiences don’t believe in real deaths. In response GUIL arrives at the definition of death that the play later enacts: 

 It’s just a man failing to reappear, that’s all that’s real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back–an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.

          From the beginning of history, humans have struggled to deny, hide, poeticise, philosophise or otherwise avoid this truth.

• In Act Three (pp. 89-90), at the point where, in a conventional play, we would expect a climax, GUIL restates his realisation: ‘But no one gets up after death—there is no applause–there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that’s—death—-‘(p. 89). Stabbed by an enraged Guil with a retractable blade, the Player performs a convincing death (p. 90). The members of the troupe follow suit (p. 90).  But GUIL rejects their tragic, romantic staging of death. In poetic modern English, he describes the reality:

No…no…not for us, not like that. Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over….Death is not anything…death is not…It’s the absence of presence, nothing more…the endless time of never coming back…a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound…. (The light has gone upstage. Only GUIL and ROS are visible as Ros’s clapping falters to silence.)

       Death is not an instantaneous dramatic act. It is a perpetual non-existence, an everlasting non-presence. Ros and Guil are here; then they are not here.

5. What is real?, OR, When is anything real?, OR, What is the nature of reality? 

One suggestion is, death is real. The concomitant suggestion is, nothing is real, at least not for long. Guil raises the problem in philosophical terms on pp. 11-12. Like the run of ninety-two consecutive ‘heads’ in coin-tossing, existence–of the world, animals, humans, everything–defies the law of probability. Later, GUIL’s conclusion from this phenomenon is not comforting:

GUIL: We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered. (p. 43) 

Further byplay with the coins reveals that both Ros’s hands are empty—a physical demonstration that the true nature (or basis?) of reality is nothingness.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead repeatedly demands that the audience squarely confront the blurred dichotomy of ‘real’ and ‘not real’, e.g.:

• When are Ros and Guil and the Players real? When they are acting out the script of Hamlet and (in the Players’ case) other scripts, or when they are left to be ‘themselves’ because they are not required by their scripts?
• Are the Shakespearean characters–Hamlet, Ophelia, Claudius–who act only in (Stoppard’s version of) the script of Hamlet, more or less real than Ros and Guil and the Players in their times out of the script?
• In their ‘times off’ Ros and Guil sometimes stare out at the audience. They mirror the audience staring back at them. So, what is the reality status of the audience? Can we be sure they are real, when they are visible to beings who themselves are of dubious reality? Is real life any more real than the fictional life of a play?
• The Players’ dumb show–their rehearsal of The Murder of Gonzago or The Mousetrap in Hamlet,–adds an extra level of illusion. We therefore we end with four levels:

1) the audience in the theatre–real or not real?;

2) Ros and Guil and the Players–real in their times out of the script of Hamlet?;

3) the dominating script of Hamlet—real or unreal?;

4) The Murder of Gonzago—definitely unreal.

Stoppard’s multiplication of the real/not real dualism is, to put it mildly, intriguing.

Bibliography

Page references are to: Tom Stoppard. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. London: Faber and Faber, 1976.
Act, scene and line numbers in Hamlet are as in Bernard Lott’s edition, London: Longman’s Green, 1968.

C. W. E. Bigsby. Tom Stoppard. Writers and Their Work, No. 250. Liverpool University Press, 1976.

Martin Esslin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.

Ronald Hayman. Tom Stoppard. Contemporary Playwrights. London: Heinemann, 1977.

F. H. Londre. Tom Stoppard. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. (Chapter Two discusses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.)

J. Russell Taylor. Anger and After. Revised Edition. London: Methuen, 1969; pp. 318-20.

See Tristram Kenton’s photo in The Guardian of Joshua McGuire and Daniel Radcliffe as the title figures in the 2017 revival of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Old Vic. A photo of the Player and his troupe appear on the same page: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/mar/08/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead-review-daniel-radcliffe-stoppard-old-vic-london