Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

by Tom Stoppard

Paperback, 1968

Status

Available

Call number

822.914

Tags

English literature, fiction, drama, postmodernism, existentialism, satire, absurdism, comedy, metafiction, Shakespeare

Genres

Collection

Your library

Publication

Grove Press (1968), Paperback, 126 pages

Description

Drama. Fiction. HTML: Acclaimed as a modern dramatic masterpiece, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead is the fabulously inventive tale of Hamlet as told from the worm's-eve view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare's play. In Tom Stoppard's best-known work, this Shakespearean Laurel and Hardy finally get a chance to take the lead role, but do so in a world where echoes of Waiting for Godot resound, where reality and illusion intermix, and where fate leads our two heroes to a tragic but inevitable end. Tom Stoppard was catapulted into the front ranks of modem playwrights overnight when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in London in 1967. Its subsequent run in New York brought it the same enthusiastic acclaim, and the play has since been performed numerous times in the major theatrical centers of the world. It has won top honors for play and playwright in a poll of London Theater critics, and in its printed form it was chosen one of the â??Notable Books of 1967" by the American Library Association.… (more)

Media reviews

The New York Times
This is a most remarkable play. Very funny. Very brilliant. Very chilling.
— 1 more
The New Yorker
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead [is] verbally dazzling...the most exciting, witty intellectual treat imaginable.

User reviews

LibraryThing member jwhenderson
Tom Stoppard has been writing plays for more than a half century. Some that I have had the opportunity to read or see in performance include Arcadia, Travesties, The Invention of Love, Night and Day, and his great trilogy The Coast of Utopia. But before all of these he burst onto the world theater
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 scene with a dramatic masterpiece titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Both a tragicomedy and a parody of sorts, it focuses on the two courtiers, Ros & Guil (for short), whose existence we owe to William Shakespeare and his tragedy Hamlet. Stoppard's play exists behind the scenes of Shakespeare's play as we follow the two courtiers on their predicted way to death.

As the play opens we meet Ros and Guil in "a place without any visible character". Guil is tossing coins and Ros is calling heads, which is unusual only in that the coin keeps coming up heads and apparently has been for some time. This leads them to a brief discussion of the law averages and the law of diminishing returns. One wonders, they wonder, about the nature of reality and time. Has it "stopped dead"? Can they remember what just happened not too long ago. Guil asks:

"'What is the fist thing after all the things you've forgotten?'
Ros: Oh I see. (Pause.) I've forgotten the question.
Guil: Are you happy?
Ros: What?
Guil: Content? At ease?
Ros: I suppose so." (p 16-17)

Guil speculates that they must be operating under supernatural forces and proceeds to provide a lengthy scientific commentary that is as much designed to ward off fear as it is to convince Ros of Guil's point. But instead of reassuring Ros it leads into a discussion of death and what it is like to be dead. Guil's reassurance to Ros: "But you are not dead." is lost among their speculations. Their tenuous connection with reality is quickly established and with the imminent entrance of a group of theatrical players, "The Tragedians", this theme will be expanded through metaphor and wordplay to the point that the whole play appears as a dream, or more likely a nightmare ending in death.

The nature of their existence as characters reminds one of Godot's Vladimir and Estragon. Indeed, the absurdity of their condition and even some of their dialogue demands such comparison. Stoppard’s play goes beyond the hopelessness of Vladimir and Estragon’s absurd condition and provides much more comic entertainment. The two are shown whiling away their time on the fringes of the “major play”, whose echoes they are eager to absorb but whose significance remains enigmatic. Hence, despite all their efforts to “act”, when the crucial moment comes and it rests upon them to warn Hamlet, they fail. They thus fall short of having the text “rewritten” in their favor, and prepare their own untimely, yet (inter)textually predestined, deaths.
The theme of appearance versus reality is sustained by a profound metadramatic discussion on art versus real life. This begins with the entrance of the Tragedians and their playful invitation for Ros and Guil to be not only spectators but, if they are willing to pay a slightly higher price, participants in the performance of a tragedy--performed for their sole benefit. While they do not join the players the question of appearance versus reality which was suggested even earlier continues to vex the two courtiers. Throughout the play their are comic moments, usually redounding from word play. One moment was reminiscent of an Abbot and Costello routine with Ros and Guil going back and forth with confusion over "what" and "why" (p 68).

The play’s enormous theatricality is afforded by the playful handling of Hamlet as well as the abundant use of (comic) reasoning. We even find Guil mimicking Hamlet with the comment, "Words, words. They're all we have to go on."(p 41) But one wonders what value the words are when the existence of the characters is as fragile as it seems in this play. By foregrounding epistemological uncertainty as ethically relevant, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead announces one of the abiding preoccupations of Stoppard's own future writing. It also entertains the happy reader with a delightfully intellectually stimulating play.
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LibraryThing member Cariola
A reread for me; I'm teaching it alongside [Hamlet] in my Honors course. It's a bit of a philosophical puzzle, as well as a hilariously dark existentialist comedy. What exactly is Stoppard trying to do here? Is he merely deconstructing a classic play? Or making a comment on fate and our lack of
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 control over our lives? As Hamlet himself comes at last to learn:

There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.

Unfortunately, our boys are trapped as mere characters in a play, doomed to enact the same story to the same fateful end, over and over again. Yet somehow, they never quite manage to achieve Hamlet's state of acceptance.

I will be curious to learn what my students think of this one!
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LibraryThing member ReadHanded
Brilliant. I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a play written by Tom Stoppard, but it is fantastic.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is at once comic, deep, and absurd. It focuses on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters from
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 Shakespeare's Hamlet. Summoned to court to help their depressed friend, Hamlet, the two almost indistinguishable characters meet a ridiculous band of players, talk nonsense (and good sense), and press on inevitably toward their own end.

The play opens with the two friends flipping coins. Each time, the coin inexplicably turns up heads - almost one hundred times in a row. Rosencrantz takes this phenomenon in stride, but Guildenstern is worried and tries to think of possible explanations. This strange and unnatural set of events set the tone for the rest of the play.

Throughout the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern banter back and forth hilariously and confusingly. Take this excerpt, for example:

GUIL: Has it ever happened to you that all of a sudden and for no reason at all you haven't the faintest idea how to spell the word - "wife" - or "house" - because when you write it down you just can't remember ever having seen those letters in that order before...?
ROS: I remember -
GUIL: Yes?
ROS: I remember when there were no questions.
GUIL: There were always questions. To exchange one set for another is no great matter.
ROS: Answers, yes. There were answers to everything.
GUIL: You've forgotten.
ROS (flaring): I haven't forgotten - how I used to remember my own name - and yours, oh yes! There were answers everywhere you looked. There was no question about it - people knew who I was and if they didn't they asked and I told them. (pg. 38)

No one in the play, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves, know which character is which:

ROS: My name is Guildenstern, and this is Rosencrantz.
GUIL confers briefly with him.
(Without embarrassment.) I'm sorry - his name's Guildenstern, and I'm Rosencrantz. (pg. 22)

In reading the play, I am told before each line who is speaking it, but it's probably more difficult to keep them both straight when watching the play. Stoppard definitely does this on purpose - the audience can't tell the two main characters apart, the other characters can't tell the two main characters apart, and even the two main characters themselves struggle with their identities. Does it matter who is who? Are the two characters and their roles interchangeable? Does this concept translate to people in the real world?

One of my favorite lines in the play comes during Act Three when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are on the ship to England. The ship is attacked by pirates, allowing Hamlet to escape. Guildenstern starts to panic - they are supposed to deliver Hamlet to the English king and now cannot:

GUIL (rattled): But he can't - we're supposed to be - we've got a letter - we're going to England with a letter for the King -
PLAYER: Yes, that much seems certain. I congratulate you on the unambiguity of your situation.
GUIL: But you don't understand - it contains - we've had our instructions - the whole thing's pointless without him.
PLAYER: Pirates could happen to anyone. Just deliver the letter. They'll send ambassadors from England to explain... (pg. 120)

"Pirates could happen to anyone"! I love it! I literally laughed out loud when I read that.

I loved Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and definitely plan to reread it at some point. It helps to have read or seen Hamlet before reading or seeing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead because the plays overlap.
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LibraryThing member davadog13
Fantastic play, instantly one of my favorites. It is to Hamlet what Fool is to King Lear. Except better written. I love the idea of these characters feeling completely lost whenever they aren't specifically a part of the action of Hamlet. Add to this the fact that there is quite a bit of philosophy
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 woven into the script about life, death and everything and you've got a play that is both humorous and impressively thought-provoking.
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LibraryThing member janerawoof
The author has taken two unimportant [dare I say expendable?] characters from Hamlet, turned Hamlet on its head and made these two [Ros and Guil, as the author calls them] the main actors: more than a mere plot point in the original. Also, the Player [leader of the travelling theatrical troupe of
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 tragedians] is very important in moving the action [such as it is] along. Ros and Guil are clueless throughout: why have they been summoned to Denmark? What does the king want them to do? What and why is Hamlet's 'transformation'? What will be their fates? Surreal humor, absurdism, silliness, a touch of sadness, and fantastic wordplay make this play--interspersed with relevant scenes from Hamlet--a modern classic. It's a play within a play within a play... I thought it was hilarious. It would help to know at least a basic synopsis of Hamlet.

It was most witty and I loved the rapid-fire patter, especially when Ros and Guil "play at questions", along with each keeping score on the other [like a tennis match--e.g., "two---love"; "foul"]. I read this play with text in hand watching the movie, written and also directed by Tom Stoppard. The movie had visual elements the play did not; and the play had dialogue that had been cut from the movie. So together, they were a good fit. Later, I read the text aloud. Seeing a theatrical performance would not go amiss. This play is most highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
Like Waiting for Godot with a better sense of humour and a worse, meaning less inexorable, sense of total existential dread. And let's face it, if you're going to existential drama like this for laughs, you're probably a bit misdirected to start. (So advantage Beckett, is what I mean to say.) Weird
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 to think the meaningless absurdity of life ever seemed so fretworthy.
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LibraryThing member greeniezona
My sisters and I were kind of obsessed with this play (and movie) when we were younger. So when I saw this book at a garage sale for ten cents, I had to buy it. Then I spent most of the afternoon in a lawn chair in my yard, reading it.

It was, of course, every bit as clever in this later reading.
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 But it was perhaps more biting in its commentary on how much control we have over our own lives -- and when do we know if we're living our own stories, or are just side stories in someone else's play?

But as my friend Heather points out, "at least there is the comfort of companionship."
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LibraryThing member BenKline
A very entertaining and fairly funny (existentialist) play. Having a knowledge of Hamlet definitely will ADD to your understanding and enjoyment of the play, but is definitely not a requirement. I enjoy off-beat plays/books where they take side-characters from a previous work and re-work them to
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 have their own 'true moments'.
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LibraryThing member deckla
Tom Stoppard writes witty, upside down plays from odd perspectives, and this is one of them. R & G, minor characters from Hamlet, are the focus here, and the events in Hamlet are viewed from their perspective. It's a comedy and one of the running jokes is that no-one can figure out which is R and
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 which is G. There is some question as to whether the whole play is a flashback and R & G are already dead, or whether they simply cannot avoid their fate. I enjoyed the scene on the boat (when they are sailing with Hamlet to England) the most. Occasionally the fourth wall is broken. The play begins with a coin toss--and the question throughout the play is: rigged or chance. Another question the play confronts: how real is the theater? And its opposite: how real is life?
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LibraryThing member the_awesome_opossum
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is written as the inverse of Hamlet - practically a sort of textual foil. While Hamlet confronted the difficulty of action and the gravity of death, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead approaches it from the opposite angle, that life is mundane and death is
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 absurd.

The setting of the drama (or lack thereof) is also inverted: most of the scenes of this play take place in Hamlet's "offstage," as we see the title characters gambling or hanging out with the players when they're not performing. When the play does touch back on Hamlet, incorporating scenes from the original, they sound "acted" in contrast to the candid and quotidian scenes of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Really, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem to be the only characters in the play who are unaware that they are in a play, actors with or without their consent.

As one of the players says, "We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else." It's an irreverent piece of PoMo, taking the piss at Hamlet's expense. The irreverence isn't meant to undermine the point of the drama completely, but just to make both the audience and actors aware of the theatricality and limitations thereof on stage.
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LibraryThing member amandacb
R&G are Dead by Tom Stoppard focuses on two minor characters from Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. Stoppard continues to use the drama mechanism but intertwines modern English with Shakespeare’s early modern English. The fleshing out of the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show the
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 audience that the two are more worthy of attention than in Shakespeare’s play; they are indicative of “Everyman,” falling prey to the whims of fate and to the invariable bloodbath that concludes Shakespeare’s tragedies (and histories). Rosencrantz is the more passionate character while Guildenstern is shown to be more logical and rational, wanting to talk things through. The play does switch back and forth from comedy (sometimes almost slap-stick) to tragedy and it can be hard to follow at times.

Notable quotes:

Guildenstern: “The scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defense against the pure emotion of fear. Keep tight hold and continue while there’s time. Now—counter to the previous syllogism: tricky one, follow me carefully, it may prove a comfort. If we postulate, and we just have, that within un-, sub- or supernatural forces the probability is that the law of probability will not operate as a factor, then we must accept that the probability of the first part will not operate as a factor, in which case the law of probability will operate as a factor within un-, sub- or supernatural forces. And since it obviously hasn’t been doing so, we can take it that we are not held within un-, sub- or supernatural forces after all; in all probability, that is. Which is a great relief to me personally” (17).

Guildenstern: “Consistency is all I ask!”
Rosencrantz (quietly): “Immortality is all I seek…” (45)

Player: “Well, it’s a device, really—it makes the action that follows more or less comprehensible; you understand, we are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style” (77).

Guildenstern: “…And then again, what is so terrible about death? As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don’t know what death is, it is illogical to fear it” (110).
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LibraryThing member sparklegirl
This play makes me so happy. It's hilarious and moving in ways I don't fully comprehend. I could read into it more fully if I owned it.
LibraryThing member Becky221
Not a fan of theater of the absurd. It felt like Three Stooges meet Shakespeare. (Maybe this comes off better on the stage.) The only positive was that I re-read Hamlet so I could better understand the roles of R & G.
LibraryThing member les121
Weird and hilarious! It makes me really want to see the production.
LibraryThing member marysargent
This play, based on Hamlet, is full of word games, chance, ideas of meaninglessness, of the impossibility of knowing the bigger picture, etc. The invented dialogue of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is occasionally interrupted by the Shakespearian dialogue of Hamlet where the action coincides.
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 Entertaining, creative, and very well done.

I particularly like the idea of building a story around minor characters in another work. It feels like real life; there's always more than what you are seeing, and there are other ways of seeing things..

I think seeing it performed would add a tragic dimension to it, not accessible to me in merely reading it.
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LibraryThing member Griff
The outcome is the same, but the view point is quite different. The Hamlet story from off to the side - an indirect view provided by R&G as they ponder life and fate. Wonderful word play and existential conversation. Having just seen an excellent performance of Shakespeare's play at Stratford,
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 Ontario - this was a wonderful complement.
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LibraryThing member Girl_Detective
A silly, yet provocative take on two minor but important characters from Hamlet. An existential take on Elizabethan drama that provides much to think on.
LibraryThing member robertjgarcia4
A great book, great play, and okay movie.
LibraryThing member dsbs
Honestly didn't like this much. It may be because I read it immediately after I read Waiting for Godot, but I thought it relied way too much on that work, and was way too pleased with itself, to stand on its own as literature.
LibraryThing member KBroun
By the fifth page, I wanted to kill them myself. This spinoff of Shakespeare's masterpiece produces two of the most annoying/frustrating characters I have ever seen. Their rediculous antics and annoyingly repetitive dialogue help to create characters the reader is glad to see killed off. This book
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 is not for everyone (including me) and I would most likely never recommend it, especially to students. However, if I was forced to recommend it someone, it would only be to HS seniors enrolled in AP/Honors English, since they would have studied Hamlet as juniors.
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LibraryThing member AlCracka
Well, this was fun. I liked the part with the unicorns!

I should probably have saved this for my dimly-planned re-read of Hamlet. For that matter, I should have re-read Hamlet six months ago before I tackled Infinite Jest.
LibraryThing member Iralell
Funny and poignant. Read Hamlet first.
LibraryThing member DawnFechter
Grade 9 and up. This is the story of two minor characters from the Shakespeare play “Hamlet”, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. R &G are Hamlet's school friends who are called to Denmark by Hamlet's uncle, the King of Denmark. R & G are given the task of cheering him up. But when that fails and the
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 King realizes that Hamlet is a threat to his life so, R & G are given the task of sending Hamlet to his death. Hamlet turns the tables on this plot and has R&G killed instead. In this play scenes with from Hamlet are intermixed with Shakespeare’s epic play to give you a better picture of these two minor characters. This play makes us think about R& G deaths and why they happen unlike in Hamlet where it is unimportant.
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LibraryThing member Rhinoa
A play set within Hamlet following Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who are mere bit parts in the famous tale. It's full of nonsense and intrigue, I would really like to see this on the stage and have it come alive properly.
LibraryThing member weikelm
My favorite play. Smart and philosophical, but it never takes itself too seriously. Goofy, yet, thought provoking, I loved how the two leads are greeted so interchangable by the other characters that even they get confused, but behind the scenes, they have very distinct personalities. I got to
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 perform the role of Rosecrantz for this play in college and it was an absolute joy.
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Subjects

Adaptations
Drama
English drama
Features

Awards

Tony Award (Winner — Play — 1968)
New York Drama Critics' Circle Award (Play — 1968)
Notable Books List (1967)
ALA Outstanding Books for the College Bound (Drama — 1999)

Language

English

Original publication date

1966

ISBN

none

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