Use of Metadramatic

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, is written by Tom Stoppard in an absurdist style. The play is a transformation of Hamlet. Stoppard has featured two of the minor characters from Hamlet passing the time with ingenious word games and pondering the questions of their plight rather than trying to shape events and change their destiny. They accept their fate as if they would be able to attain a transitory moment of identity in death. Stoppard has used the canons of the metadramatic to comment on the existential nature of theatre itself.

Richard Hornby has explained the term metadrama as "drama about drama; it occurs whenever the subject of a play turns out to be, in some way, drama itself." The history of metadrama shows that it is not solely a new modernist notion. Plato referred to the theatrical metaphor, which was later on introduced in the Renaissance. Its birth were in the concepts of life as a dream and the world as a stage. The metatheatrical play present actions that are strange, absurd