Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a 1966 play by the British playwright Tom Stoppard that retells the events of Shakespeare's Hamlet from the viewpoint of its two most disposable courtiers. For the HSC, it is studied in English Extension 1 for the elective Shakespearean worlds.

Tom Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the mid-1960s, and it made his name when the 1966 Edinburgh Festival Fringe production was picked up by the National Theatre in 1967. He took two of the most disposable figures in the Western canon - the interchangeable courtiers whom Hamlet sends to their deaths almost without noticing - and gave them a whole play of their own: the same events as Hamlet, seen from the wings, by the two people the tragedy has no time for.

The play opens with the courtiers spinning coins on a bare stage. Every coin comes down heads, ninety-two times running, and neither man can remember much beyond being "sent for". They meet the Tragedians, a troupe of travelling players led by a knowing Player who treats all the world as theatre, before the machinery of Hamlet sweeps them up. At Elsinore they are set to discover the cause of Hamlet's madness and fail comically; in the dumbshow of "The Murder of Gonzago" they watch, without recognising it, an enactment of their own coming deaths. On the boat to England they discover the sealed letter ordering Hamlet's execution, reason themselves into leaving well alone, and after the pirate attack find the letter has been switched: it now orders their own deaths. Guildenstern stabs the Player in furious protest, only for the actor to rise, applauded. The two men disappear, and the stage becomes the final scene of Hamlet, where an Ambassador announces that "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead."

Written for a post-war audience that had read Beckett and Camus, the play pours a Renaissance revenge tragedy through the filter of the absurd.

The play's deepest concern is its own method. Stoppard stages the relationship between an original and its re-vision: the margins of Hamlet become the centre and its centre the margin, so we feel the arbitrariness of who "counts" in a canonical text. The courtiers' bafflement is, literally, the bafflement of minor characters with no lines except when the main plot needs them - when they try to act on their own initiative they find their "spontaneity was part of their order", the "order" being nothing other than Shakespeare's fixed script. The conversation runs both ways: Stoppard's void is bounded by a tragedy whose ending cannot be rewritten, and the ending hands us back to the original with the exact sentence by which it disposes of them.

Because their story is already written, the courtiers are the purest possible image of characters without free will. The coin that falls heads ninety-two times announces a world in which probability is suspended and the outcome fixed; Guildenstern feels himself carried by "Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are... condemned", the broken-off syntax enacting the loss of control it describes. The play's most desolate recognition is that the moment of choice is already past: "There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said - no. But somehow we missed it."

Where Hamlet frames death as meaningful - judgement, revenge, heaven and hell - Stoppard's appropriation leaves it as pure negation. Guildenstern insists "Death is the ultimate negative. Not being. You can't not-be on a boat.", while the Player offers only the theatrical death, the thing actors "do best", repeatable and applauded. Rosencrantz reaches the play's tenderest image by accident, imagining death as being shut in a box for ever - feeling arriving where argument cannot.

The play is relentlessly metatheatrical, and identity in it is a function of being watched. The Player's paradox "We're actors - we're the opposite of people!" and his creed "Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true." dismantle the moral certainty Hamlet assumes, and the Tragedians' worst humiliation is to be "tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable - that somebody is watching". The courtiers, who exist only when Hamlet needs them onstage, are people made entirely of role - and when the role ends, so do they.

• Possession
• As You Like It
• The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy
• 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
• The Glass Menagerie
• Memento
• All HSC English resources