42 pages • 1 hour read
Tom StoppardRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1966A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Futile Struggle Against Absurdity
Like many plays emerging from the Theater of the Absurd movement, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead pits its protagonists against life’s uncertainty, randomness, and meaninglessness, while demonstrating the futility of trying to understand existence. With no memory of Hamlet—presumably one of their closest friends—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern find themselves stuck in Elsinore performing tasks with “nothing to go on” (96) aside from what they are told by people they do not remember. They spend much of their time confused about what is happening around them, who they are, and what they should do. They exist in an absurd universe where “ninety-two coins spun consecutively” can “come down as heads ninety-two consecutive times” (14) without any explanation or meaning and “most things end in death” (114). The two of them, especially Guildenstern, would like to find “a kind of harmony and a kind of confidence” (13), but neither of those things can exist in their world.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not recognize the absurdity of existence until after the messenger summons them to Elsinore before the start of the play. This arbitrary event opens their eyes to phenomena they cannot decipher. Rosencrantz insists that “there were answers everywhere [he] looked” (33) before the messenger arrived, which suggests that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are looking at the absurdity that always existed for the first time in their lives. Guildenstern compares the feeling to not being able to spell words like “wife” or “house” as though one “just can’t remember ever having seen those letters in that order before” (33). The things thought to be safe and certain are now tinged with uncertainty, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern experience an existential crisis.
The coin toss scene in Act I is the first and strongest example of the impossibility of assigning meaning and certainty to phenomena. Guildenstern is convinced that there must be a scientific reason for why the coins only land on heads. He turns towards rationalization to provide an answer, but the act of rationalization is as irrational as the coins, since Guildenstern’s logic is circular and provides no clear answers. What he does not understand is the fact that the coin phenomenon has no deeper, objective meaning. The coins exist as random objects acting randomly. The opening scene introduces both the randomness and meaninglessness of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s world, foreshadowing future failures to pin down meaning.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern continuously fail to make the uncertain certain. For example, when Claudius commands them to spy on Hamlet and discover why he acts as he does, they become overwhelmed by the possible causes and fumble in their quest. They cannot determine whether Hamlet’s behavior stems from his father’s death, Claudius’s usurpation, or Hamlet’s attraction to Ophelia. All they learn are his “symptoms” (51), and even then, they struggle to describe his moods and can only come to the nonsensical conclusion that Hamlet is “stark raving sane” (61). In addition to their failure to understand Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fall short in determining which way the wind is blowing and where they are in the context of the four cardinal directions. Their failure to orient themselves signifies their lack of a sense of direction—literally and metaphorically, geographically and existentially.
While absurdity is unconquerable in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the Player insists that it is a natural reality that must be accepted and lived with. He tells the frenetic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that “uncertainty is the normal state” (60) and their existential angst is a universal feeling. He prescribes a cure: “Relax. Respond. That’s what people do. You can’t go through life questioning your situation at every turn” (60). The Player, much like the philosopher Albert Camus, knows that all attempts to fully know and find meaning in the universe and existence are bound to fail, and that the best course of action is to carry on and act naturally. As an actor, he knows the show must go on, and since life is a show for him, he believes life must go on as well.
Determinism Versus Free Will
In addition to struggling in the face of absurdity, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are extraordinarily indecisive; elements within the text suggest that they may be unable to make decisions at all. Although the pair’s universe is chaotic and random, destiny and fate still seem to exist amidst the chaos. In a short conversation in Act I, Guildenstern and the Player hint at the possibility that chance and fate may paradoxically exist side-by-side in their universe. This paradox makes sense if chance is understood as a random event that is somehow dictated by forces out of the characters’ control and comprehension. However, if chance is marked by determinism, questions regarding free will and the ability to choose naturally emerge, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead serves as a space for philosophical inquiry into those questions.
In one sense, the fates of every character are predetermined since they exist within a world that is carefully crafted by a playwright. When the Player claims that destiny is “written” (72), he speaks literally; he knows that he and the rest of the characters in the play are fictional characters created by Shakespeare, who determines their fate and the outcome of their actions. Shakespeare decrees that Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes, Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern die throughout the course of Hamlet. Inspired by Shakespeare, Stoppard does not grant Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the freedom to escape their demise; they are “marked for death” (72) just as they are in Hamlet.
Whenever Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are presented with opportunities to take hold of their destinies, they act passively, suggesting that they may have no options after all. Guildenstern balks at the idea of taking Hamlet to England, but Rosencrantz convinces him to go along with Claudius’s plan since “[they have] come this far” (87) already. They docilely and unthinkingly do as they are told even after learning the real reason why Hamlet is bound for England. Rosencrantz insists, “We could have done worse. I don’t think we missed any chances” (103). In this statement, Rosencrantz reveals that he is resigned to be passive since he does not think he has been afforded any opportunity to do otherwise so far in the plot. However, his resignation is not contentment. He laments, “We don’t question, we don’t doubt. We perform” (100). He contemplates suicide as an alternative to doing as he is told but does not go through with it because he thinks the act might be expected of him. He has neither the power nor the option to kill himself since the plot of Hamlet dictates that he dies at the hands of the King of England and not his own.
At the end of Act III, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern recognize that they are condemned to die, but nothing can be done. Before he vanishes from the stage, Guildenstern suggests that “there must have been a moment, at the beginning, where [he and Rosencrantz] could have said—no” (116). Guildenstern’s wishful thinking does not hold up in the face of the many hints that their deaths are unavoidable. The play’s title, the dumbshow, and the witty jokes about death throughout the play all come together with Shakespeare’s original work to suggest that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cannot make the choices that would allow them to escape death. However, the act of being passive can be seen as a choice since one can choose not to choose. In the end, Stoppard leaves questions regarding the existence of free will unanswered.
The Relationship Between Theater and Reality
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead provides commentary on how theater imitates real life and vice versa by utilizing metatheatre: theatrical elements that draw the audience’s attention to its existence as a dramatic work. The play knows that it is a play and reminds the audience of this through the characters’ dialogue. Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and the Player break the fourth wall repeatedly, either by speaking about life as a performance or by acknowledging the audience and their own fictionality. In addition, they explicitly discuss what theater should do and how realistic it should be. Through these conversations, Stoppard uses the play as a vehicle to talk about the relationships between the stage and real life, and between fiction and reality.
When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern first meet the Player, they are shocked to discover that his troupe performs plays with sexual acts that the audience can participate in, instead of classic Greek tragedies. Guildenstern considers the Tragedians to be “obscene” and pornographic rather than artistic since there is “no enigma, no dignity, nothing classical, portentous” (22) in their brand of theater. The Player points out that the Tragedians have “a kind of integrity” (23) and artistry that other troupes do not possess because the Tragedians are willing to “do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off” (23).
Here, he runs against the ancient rules of theater, which state that theater must “transport [the audience] into a world of intrigue and illusion” (19) by including fantastic elements such as “ghosts and battles […] heroes, villains, tormented lovers” (19). The dramatists who forged these rules looked at theater as an “exit being an entrance somewhere else” (23), meaning they believed there should be a divide between reality and theater. To provide an escape from reality, theater should be notably unrealistic and include “clothes no one ever wore” and lines “no man ever spoke” (57). However, the Player does not believe that there should be any divide between reality and theater, so he peppers his play with “murder, seduction, and incest” (73) since it is—according to him—what audiences wants and what grounds the play as realistic. The Player is a self-aware character who knows that his reality exists within the confines of a play, so his disdain for the divorce between theater in reality is more than an artistic distaste. He legitimately does not believe that it is possible to distinguish between the two in a world such as his. When Guildenstern admits, “I’d prefer art to mirror life” (73) in Act II, the Player replies, “It’s all the same to me, sir” (73) because it literally is “all the same to [him]”.
Despite his desires, Guildenstern does not believe it is entirely possible for art to mirror real life. He doubts the Tragedians’ abilities to replicate and express the act of death perfectly onstage. While watching the dumbshow in Act II, he says, “You scream and you choke and sink to your knees, but it doesn’t bring death home to anyone—it doesn’t catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says—'One day you are going to die.’ […] You die so many times; how can you expect them to believe in your death?” (76). In his opinion, a dramatic, expected pantomiming of the process does not come close to the unexpected, real thing, and audiences are not really convinced by it. The Player disagrees by stating that stage deaths are “the only kind [audiences] do believe” because “[audiences] are conditioned to it” (76). Here, he insists that people get their understanding of death from fiction, and therefore they expect death to resemble fiction and vice versa. Through his “death,” after Guildenstern stabs him with the prop knife, the Player demonstrates that reality does not simply inform art; art also informs people’s understanding of reality.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead shows that there is a very thin line between theater and reality. They constantly bleed into one another and are informed by one certainty: There is a beginning and an end, and “most things end in death” (114). The characters in tragedies have a “talent” (75) for dying since they are scripted to die by the playwright. All humans are “scripted” to die by fate, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead derives its sense of tragedy from the fact that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are condemned to die without any opportunity to change their fates. Stoppard wants to emphasize the similarities between theater and reality with his messages regarding absurdity and determinism, and he knows that the best way to do this is through the very medium he wishes to discuss: theater.
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