Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Making a Point

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Making a Point

Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a humorous piece of self-reflexive theater that draws upon Shakespeare's Hamlet as the source of the story. The actual device of self-reflexive theater is used so well in Stoppard's play that it reads like the love child of a play and a compelling critical essay. The play is academic yet conversationally phrased and it deepens our understanding of the original play but also criticizes it. The aspect of self-reflexive theater is used to comment on theater itself but also as a presentation of ideas and analysis that had previously had no place on the plot-centric set-up of stage and audience.

The essay Rosencrantz and Guildensternare Dead: Theater of Criticism by Normand Berlin draws attention to the fact that Stoppard who was once a drama critic, writes from the critical perspective. When engaged in a non-reflexive play, we are too busy following the movement of time and events to really judge the play, but Berlin writes "In the act of seeing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, however, our critical faculty is not subdued. We are always observing the characters and are not ourselves participating...we are forced to contemplate the frozen state, the status-quo, of the characters who carry their Shakespearean fates with them.". The grand illusion of theater is the acceptance of the on-stage fantasy as real and existing separate from the people who are actually performing it. Watching theater had classically been an experience separate from the experience of analyzing the piece. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the author keeps us hovering between the two states, we are at once participating in the fantasy but consciously observing the boundary between reality and stage.

In Act 1, scene 3, Guildenstern (trying to act like Hamlet) and Rosencrantz hold a mock interview in order to practice for their royally assigned investigation into Hamlet's psychosis. They go through the key plot points of Hamlet culminating in this noteworthy exchange:

ROS. To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popped onto the throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner?

GUIL. I can't imagine!

Stoppard is commentating on Shakespeare's writing, by portraying onstage the ignorance that is required of the characters for the original plot of Hamlet to work. The "meat" of the scene isn't to insult the duo, but for the critically-inclined audience to analyze the sort of logical leaps we take in order to participate in a narrative. The traditional outlet for such observations were academic journals and essays but Stoppard is exhibits these ideas onstage for a mass audience.

The Player exemplifies my point (bloated and wriggling as it is) of the unique "space" that Stoppard is trying to occupy with the play. The Player is at once detached and involved in the happenings onstage (textual evidence? How about on page 25 when Guildenstern and the Player discuss fate. Guildenstern asks "Yours [fate] or ours?" The Player answers "It could hardly be one without the other"). The Player, in my opinion, diffuses the "Wating for Godot"-ness of Stoppards plot in his many speeches. The Player and his entourage not only understand what is going on (everybody is in a play) but also why everything is happening (because its what the audience finds entertaining). The Player also functions in the critical aspect of the work. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern much like the wide-eyed youths in an old episode of School House Rock need guidance in a strange world, and the fatherly, condescending Player monologues about why things are the way they are and what to expect next. He tells us of the precedent put forth by Greek tragedies, of humanity's own obsession with blood, sex and death (not real death though) and how a certain level of finality is required for a successful theater experience. Taking into account all his dumb-shows, speeches, and appearances, he clearly gives the audience the "meaning" that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem unable to grasp. They are characters in a play. They are in a great tragedy with lots of passionate themes. These type of plays are so powerful that it must ultimately end in death for those all those involved in order to give the audience satisfying sense of closure (Page 80, "The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means). If they were the only two who didn't die, the ending would be awkward. Again, this is an idea that would normally be found in dramatic criticism,