Sir Tom Stoppard, early works.

6. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is probably Sir Tom Stoppard’s best-known and most studied play, and is one of the most original and inventive works in post-war British theatre. Beneath the verbal and visual ingenuity lies a concern with serious philosophical questions having to do with the opposition between determinism and free will, and reality and illusion, and it is part of Stoppard’s genius that he manipulates the medium of theater itself. to reflect intellectual themes. .

The play is structured around the idea that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s situation as supporting characters in Hamlet, trapped within the plot of Shakespeare’s play, is equated with man trapped in a deterministic universe. Thus, the work functions along two levels, and occasionally three, as the work draws attention to itself as a work, in relation to us, the audience.

Stoppard has used Rosencrantz and Guildenstern exactly as Shakespeare created them, that is, as flat underdeveloped characters, with minimal and ineffectual roles, largely unaware of the events into which they have been dragged, and whose deaths go almost unnoticed, and the has transposed them into a 20th-century language by equating them with the antiheroes of the Theater of the Absurd. Indeed, the play owes a clear debt to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the manner of Vladimir and Estragon, waiting, not knowing what they are waiting for, in an incomprehensible, perhaps meaningless, universe in which that death is the only certainty. The appearance of The Players also mirrors, structurally, the appearance of Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot.

The theme of fate versus free will is introduced in the opening scene: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are tossing coins, and the coins have come up heads ninety-two times in a row. The act of tossing a coin is an act of free will, and the result apparently depends on chance, but in the long run it seems that the attempt to influence the future by an individual act of free will is futile, because the result has been predicted. Thus we have a picture in which free will and determinism coexist, with free will operating in the short term and determinism in the long term. This duality is later demonstrated again when, in a scene reported but not shown in Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are on a ship bound for England.

‘Guil: Where we went wrong was getting on a ship. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along, as inexorably as wind and current. (Act 3.)

Free will and determinism are present in their world, but whichever way you look at it, they cannot escape their imminent death.

The inevitability of death is also the axis around which Stoppard builds his exploration of the reality versus illusion dichotomy. Rosencrantz tries to understand death as a reality, but is unable to fight against the illusions that the mind throws up in the face of the unknown.

‘Ros: It’s silly to be depressed about it. I mean you think of it as being alive in a box, you keep forgetting to take into account the fact that you’re dead. (Act 2)

When a troupe of actors arrives, The Players, specialists in illusion, the entire relationship between illusion and reality is called into question.

‘Guil: You die so many times: how can you expect them to believe in your death?

Player: On the contrary, he’s the only guy they do believe in. They are conditioned to it. I once had an actor who was sentenced to hang for stealing a sheep. . . I got permission to hang it in the middle of a play. . . And you wouldn’t believe it, it just wasn’t convincing. It was impossible to suspend one’s disbelief. (Act 2)

The suggestion is that we cannot believe in reality even when we see it, and are too eager to believe in illusions. The player proves his point later when Guildenstern stabs him and he falls to the ground and ‘dies’. Guildenstern is fooled by the player’s act, thinking that he has killed him, until the player revives and says

For a moment you thought that he had… cheated on you. (Act 2)

‘Deceived’ by substituting reality for illusion, implying that we can never be absolutely sure whether something we perceive is reality or an illusion, a theme that appears repeatedly in Stoppard’s work and is exemplified by After Magritte (1970) , whose thesis could be paraphrased as: what we ‘know’ depends on how we choose to interpret what we think we see.

In addition to these philosophical themes, Stoppard is exploring a moral theme in the play; the moral and spiritual desolation of a civilization without God. The loss of meaning of life in the absence of God is suggested in this speech by the player:

‘You don’t understand the humiliation of that, being fooled by the only assumption that makes our existence viable: that someone is watching. . . We promised identities, secure in the conventions of our trade; someone would be watching. And then gradually nobody was. (Act 2)

The view that modern man is adrift in a meaningless universe without God is in accord with the absurd view of man that Stoppard is working with, but Stoppard goes further and says something about the moral decline that follows modernity. adoption of a philosophical position that denies the existence of God. The Actors are supposed to bring culture to the king’s court, but they are ‘a comic pornographer and a rabble of prostitutes’ (Act 1), and their plays are bawdy performances in which, for a price, the public can participate. That this particular situation may extend to modern society as a whole is suggested by the frequent repetition of the phrase ‘the times are what they are’, and is reinforced by Guildenstern’s comment ‘The very air stinks’ (Act 1); a joking reference to Hamlet’s line: ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’. (Hamlet 1.iv.90)

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