Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

LBST 402: Lecture on Stoppard, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern
Are Dead

[The following is the text of a lecture delivered in LBST
402 on April 10, 1997]

A. Introduction
For our final text of this semester (and the Liberal Studies
program) we are considering the first major work of a writer
who, in the thirty years since this play first appeared, has
emerged as a leading playwright in England, one of the most
popular and frequently produced writer there, (perhaps, with
the exception of Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber, the high priest of
McTheatre, the most popular). In selecting this play for
study, we want to provide at the end of the program some
attention to drama, particularly to some of the complexities
of what has come to be called Theatre of the Absurd, as well
as to offer something very funny (a quality lacking in much
of the twentieth century reading we have been engaged with
for the past semester). I know that some of you have been
having some difficulty with the text of the play, but I hope
an experience of the film has helped to bring out the
wonderful and often amusing verbal and theatricality fluency
of Stoppard's style.

In my discussion of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead I
want to focus on a number matters which may help explain the
sometimes bewildering style of the play and, in addition,
make some connections with works we have read in Liberal
Studies, so that this lecture is not only a partial
explication of the work but also something of a reminder of
some of the places where we have been.

B. Dramatic Horizons of Significance
Before turning to Stoppard's play, however, I'd like to
linger for a few moments on those plays we have read in
Liberal Studies: some Greek tragedies, Aristophanes's
Clouds, and Shakespeare's Tempest and, most importantly,
Hamlet. These all contain elements that seem to be lacking
in Stoppard's play_and our initial confusion, if there is
any, may stem in large part from our sense that we're
missing something that we are used to.

Traditional drama presents human actions in a social
context. The action characteristically moves from a normal
situation which is upset, through a series of conflicts as
the characters seek to cope with this upset, towards a final
conclusion in which something is resolved and a normality
(even if a transformed one, is restored). In the plays we
have read the conflict may be deeply ironic and the ending
tragic (as in, say, Oedipus the King) or it may be robustly
funny (as in, say, The Clouds) or more fantastic (as in,
say, The Tempest) but there is an overall logic to the
action, and the plot has a discernible shape: a beginning,
middle, and end. By the conclusion of the play, in other
words, through the actions of the participants, something
has been dealt with, resolved.

In these plays, furthermore, there is a discernible and
consistent logic in the actions of the characters. As
viewers, we are invited into their world, introduced to its
logic, and follow the unfolding of the conflict according to
the rules laid down by the play itself. The style of the
play may be very formal (e.g., in verse) or it may be
colloquially vulgar slapstick or it may be theatrical
fantasy, but throughout there is a logic which the
playwright does not violate, and we thus know where we stand
in relation to the depicted fiction and to the people in it.

I stress this point because our familiarity with traditional
and many conventional plays depends upon a consistency in
the logic of the represented fiction. If the logic and
dialogue are very close to everyday life, we call the style
naturalistic, or slice of life, or kitchen sink drama; if
the style is full of magic or non-natural events, we call
the style fantasy. Both styles are equally effective
(although many of us have our preferences), but we usually
demand from them consistency--so that the world of the
represented fiction (which is never an exact duplicate of
real life, for even the most naturalistic sounding dialogue
must be artistically compressed for dramatic purposes) has a
comprehensible logic and consistency upon which we can rely.

In the context of the works we read last week (Taylor's
Malaise of Modernity), we can say that these traditional
plays establish a "horizon of significance," a world ordered
by certain normative understandings which, even if they are
not ours, enable us to understand what is going on as a
coherent and accessible vision. The horizon of significance
comes to us through what the characters believe and how the
story establishes for us a sense of moral meaning.

With Stoppard's play at first we seem to be in quite a
different world. A common reaction to a script like that
of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is confusion.
Where are we? What are the rules of this world we are in?
How am I supposed to understand exactly what is going on and
why, when I'm not sure at any particular moment about what's
going on, what sort of reality I'm dealing with, and why
characters are behaving the way they are. Too much of this
seems either incomprehensible or just a silly game, the
point of which escapes me. So what's going on? Where is
the horizon of significance that I'm used to confronting?

This is the basic question I wish initially to address. And
I want to approach it by repeating a common observation made
about this play, that it is very derivative (i.e., it
relies very heavily for its style and content on other
works). Often the term derivative is understood
pejoratively--a derivative work is inferior, not fully
original. That may be true here, but I'd like to reserve
judgement on that question. I do want, however, to
consider three major art works upon which Stoppard clearly
draws: the first is the great classic play from The Theatre
of the Absurd, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the
second is T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock," and the third, and most obvious, is Shakespeare's
Hamlet.

C. Theatre of the Absurd
First, by way of exploring some of the connections between
Stoppard's play and Beckett's, I'd like to introduce a term
familiar to most of you: The Theatre of the Absurd. This
term is very loose, but it refers specifically to the works
of a number of modern playwrights, particularly Beckett,
Ionesco, and Pinter (among others), whose plays share
certain characteristics, the foremost of which is that their
dramatic world seems to have become empty of any horizon of
significance or, indeed, anything reliable at all. It has
become, in a word, absurd, without logic and without the
comfortable reminders of a logical structure: a confidence
about time and space and memory.

In the Theatre of the Absurd the protagonists are discovered
in a world which they do not, indeed they cannot,
understand. It has no reliable meaning. Often, it is
featureless. The confusion is not a matter of a conflict
between competing meanings, but rather the absence of
anything that might help one to understand oneself, one's
purpose, or one's place in the social scheme of things.
Even the protagonist's identity is problematic. This
concept is, I think, clear enough to us--at least in a
general outline--from our discussions of modern art and some
of our discussions of Nietzsche and de Beauvoir. A sense of
the absurdity of the external world is, after all, a legacy
of some nineteenth century Romantic thought.

This, however, is not the only important criterion of this
literary style. The other essential component is that the
protagonists' attempts to deal with the world also register
as absurd. They become like clowns loose in madhouse or,
more appropriately perhaps, in a featureless desert. It is
important to grasp this second point, because it separates
what we might call existential drama from absurd drama.
Existential action also assumes that the world comes to us
void of horizons of significance. We have an urgent
priority to impose on that world our own projects, freely
chosen, and thus become a creator of values for ourselves.
The world gives us no fixed priorities for choosing one
project over another. But to be fully human, to achieve
the dignity of being human, we must act upon our freedom to
choose and launch ourselves into the world. This will not
bring us happiness (de Beauvoir insists upon that
repeatedly); it will, however, confer human dignity upon us.

The Theatre of the Absurd takes from us that dignity. Its
heroes lack whatever it takes to act confidently in the
world. They are essentially grotesque clowns, without a
sense of purpose and without the courage, energy, wit to
forge one for themselves. They spend their time anxiously
confronting an incomprehensible world, often desperate for
some reassurance that there is something or someone who can
help them out, but incapable of helping themselves. What
renders their situation all the more helpless is that they
have no reliable memory, so they cannot even orient
themselves and their present situation to what they once
were--they can create no intelligible historical narrative
for their lives. Hence, they are radically unsure of who
they are. The very idea of a self-initiated energetic
project is quite beyond them.

Most of the major attention in Absurdist Theatre focuses
upon how the protagonists try to cope. Since they are,
unlike traditional protagonists, incapable of independent
action, what they do is always the same: they wait for
something to happen, for someone to come along and provide
information, direction, or meaning. However, since the
world is absurd, such reassurance never arrives. If it
seems to arrive, the protagonists are incapable of
understanding it sufficiently. And so the plays typically
end as they start: with the protagonists waiting for
something. The structure of the story does not admit of a
firm ending (of the sort common in tragedy and comedy)
because either of those endings is value laden, that is, it
is making some form of affirmation about the world.

Most of the drama in such plays--that is, the action that
takes place on the stage--consists of games which the
protagonists play, not because they have any sense of
creative play, but rather because they need something to
pass the time, to stave off the fear that always comes if
they confront their deepest feelings about the world and
their situation or even if they remain silent for any length
of time. So Absurdist Theatre is often very funny (or can
be played for laughs), simply because of the ludicrousness
of the ineffectual attempts (usually verbal) to confer
significance upon the passing of time, when one has no
resources. The most obvious example of this is Stoppard's
play is the verbal tennis game. The only thing allowed is a
fresh question. Statements are out (they make assertions);
repetitions are out; and rhetoric is out (because it brings
passion into the game). Questions pass the time, so long as
they are never answered and do not lead to an increased
level of emotion. The questions have no point_any
interrogative will do to keep the game going.

Thus, the emphasis on verbal humour is one of the major
attractions of Absurdist Theatre. In Waiting for Godot this
humour is set up as a conversation between one of the clowns
who wants to probe for significance (e.g., by trying to sort
out the significance of the thief who was saved) but is
ludicrously inadequate for the task and the other of the
clowns who is much earthier and keeps puncturing the
intellectual pretentiousness of the other. This is also
clearly a feature in Stoppard's play: Guildenstern agonizes
about the meaning of it all; Rosenkrantz is puzzled by his
companion's attitude and is constantly thwarting
Guildenstern's efforts. When Rosenkrantz gets caught up in
some time consuming activity, Guildenstern just gets
annoyed.

To acknowledge that these plays are often very funny does
not mean that we should miss the desperation underneath the
humour. In fact, Absurdist plays can often be very bleak or
very funny, depending upon the emphasis the director wishes
to establish (this is particularly true of Waiting for
Godot). The humour is potentially bleak because it depends
upon laughing at any attempt to discover significance--the
various resources which the protagonists seek to access are
all equally stupid. We are not dealing here with
traditional humour, in which a positive moral attitude helps
to establish what matters and what doesn't (e.g., in
Aristophanes's Clouds or Swift's Gulliver's Travels)--in
which many things are exposed as foolish but only to bring
out how certain other things really matter. Here we are
dealing with a particularly modern sense of humour--black
humour which sets up everything as equally ridiculous
(probability, classical literature, traditional
philosophical positions, religion, the human body, love,
even language itself).

Parenthetically, we should all be familiar with this style
of humour, although we might not have reflected on what lies
under it. For a good deal of what passes for comedy these
days--from Monty Python to This Hour Has 22 Minutes--is
basically absurdist. It depends upon, as we are all
familiar, the assumption that everything is equally silly,
equally subject to ridicule: politics, religion, education,
business--in short, all aspects of life are equally fit for
mockery. That, incidentally, may be why this form of humour
depends so heavily on the short skit and why one often tires
of it quickly: we are not getting anywhere with it.

This form of humour, which is a distinctive characteristic
of the twentieth century, was born, according to some
cultural historians (e.g., Paul Fussell), in the trenches of
World War I. Faced with what seemed like the ultimate
absurdity of their situation--death and destruction all
around, noble but increasingly meaningless traditional
rhetoric about honour, courage, patriotism, and so on, and
the only way out being an idiotic charge into the machine
guns, many soldiers responded with a howl of laughter at the
absurdity of it all--not just the absurdity of their
circumstances, but also the absurdity of their responses to
that situation. Out of that response (as it developed in
the trench literature) grew a new attitude, something we
have already touched upon briefly in discussing the
development in modern art, especially in the Dada movement.

At the base of much of this black humour (and especially in
Absurdist Theatre and in Monty Python) is the absurdity of
language itself. Instead of being, as it is in virtually
all the writers we have read, the keenest way of coming to
an understanding of ourselves and the world around us,
language in the absurdist world becomes one more
unpredictable, unreliable, slippery, deceiving feature of
experience. In Stoppard's play this point applies even to
the characters' awareness of their own names. But it also
emerges repeatedly in the frequently very funny ways in
which they are always misunderstanding each other.

GUIL: You can't not-be on a boat
ROS: I've frequently not been on boats.
GUIL: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.
ROS: I wish I was dead.

The push to absurdist theatre, however, also grew out of the
experience of World War II. And to make this clear I want
to refer briefly to a story with which many of you will be
familiar: The Diary of Anne Frank. In this well known
story, a group of Dutch Jews seek refuge in an attic from
the persecution of the Final Solution. There they construct
for themselves as normal a life as they can manage, shutting
out the external world as far as possible with the daily and
annual rituals of life, as if the important thing is just to
keep hanging to on the normal way of doing things. Near the
end of the war, they are discovered and taken away.

This story was made into a play and a film. And whenever I
see this story performed dramatically, I am struck with the
relationship between this story and the Theatre of the
Absurd, which grew out of the ashes. After all, what
happens in this story? The small Jewish community in the
attic spends a lot of time waiting. They pass the time by
hanging onto the traditional activities--worship, young
love, religious festivals. And we, as audience, respond to
this as a powerful affirmation of the human spirit.

Yet it doesn't take much of a shift of perspective to see
the activity of these Jewish people as absurd. After all,
the world outside the attic has become an irrational and
deadly nightmare. And what are they doing? They are
pretending it isn't there. They are going through a series
of traditional formulas, which are absolutely ineffectual
against the power and the horror of what is going on and
what eventually breaks in upon them. They are, in a sense,
playing games. True, they don't think they are games (hence
the play is not an absurdist one), and I am not suggesting
that the Diary of Anne Frank is absurdist theatre. But it
wouldn't take much to make it an absurdist piece. All one
would have to do is to turn the participants into grotesque
clowns, so that the various social and religious rituals
they go through to pass the time become exaggerated into
comic futility; then we would have the essential ingredients
of Absurdist Theatre: the ineffectual trying to cope with
the incomprehensible.

Now, what I have been talking about is clear enough in
Waiting for Godot, and some of the parallels with
Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are obvious enough, so
that we can recognize Stoppard's acknowledged debt to
Beckett--especially in the delineation of the two main
characters, their verbal patter, their insecurity about
their identity and memories, their constant questioning
(which usually is not something in search of an answer but
simply a means of expressing their anxiety or passing the
time), and their anxious confusion about what they are
doing. Whether this qualifies Stoppard's play as an
absurdist piece or not is a question I'd like to defer for
the moment.

D. The Prufrock Connection
We should see an immediate connection between Eliot's "The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Stoppard's play
(another acknowledged debt). What comes out particularly
strongly (and this is a dominant feature of Beckett's style
as well) is the reliance on romantic irony throughout.

You may recall that when we discussed Eliot's style, I
called attention to this matter of romantic irony, the
procedure by which apparently significant gestures or
assertions or decisions are made only immediately to
collapse: In a minute there is time for decisions and
revisions which a moment will reverse. We discussed then
how this movement--the generation of a decisive energy
followed by a collapse of that energy--happens throughout
Eliot's poem and indeed governs the structure of the entire
piece (so that the initial decisiveness in the resolution to
set out to ask an overwhelming question ends with Prufrock's
acceptance of his own inability to do anything decisive and
of the final triviality of his life).

A great deal of the humour in Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern
Are Dead emerges from this technique. This is nicely caught
in the very opening scene of the two protagonists in the
film--Rosenkrantz gathers himself to say something, but
before anything can come out, the moment has passed, and
Guildenstern has moved on. All Rosenkrantz has managed to
utter is an unintelligible grunt.

Beyond that, of course, Stoppard creates in his two main
characters a mood characteristically like Eliot's:

No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; withal, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

They have no heroic aspirations--they just want to survive
(but for what purpose they are not sure), getting enough
information to allay the anxiety they feel about their
situation. They are aware of their own inadequacies and
have accepted them, not out of a sense of humility or of
satisfaction at being content with who they are, but because
they lack the resources to do anything different.

At the end of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the
persona acknowledges that he is, in effect, already dead to
all intents and purposes. And in a sense we might,
considering the title of Stoppard's play, say much the same
about Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern throughout the course of
the action. In the world in which they inhabit, there
doesn't seem to be a very firm line drawn between life and
death; the latter is merely an exit, casual, unexciting, as
insignificant as the details of the lives they live.
Vladimir and Estragon contemplate killing themselves because
that might bring them something exciting and unexpected,
like an erection. But of course they cannot do that. In
the text of Stoppard's play, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern
simply disappear. Are they dead? Will they return to
repeat the experience next time? We don't know. But it
doesn't really matter--their lives are so trivial anyway
that, like Prufrock they have died long ago. In a very real
sense, Vladimir, Estragon, Rosenkrantz, Guildenstern, and
Prufrock are all extreme examples of what Nietzsche calls
the "last men," the living dead, as inauthentic and non-
human as it is possible to get.

E. A Reservation: The Question of Friendship
For all these similarities, it is also necessary to
acknowledge that Stoppard's play contains at least one very
important element missing in Waiting for Godot and in "The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and that is the element of
friendship between the two protagonists.

This element is important because, as we view this piece, I
think we come to respond to these two characters in a manner
significantly different from our response to those other
characters I have just named. Vladimir and Estragon have
been together a long time, and yet they do not seem to
express any particular friendship for each other. They
cannot embrace, because they are repelled by the stench of
garlic. It's clear that they need each other and are
petrified at the thought of being alone. So their
relationship is based upon a deep individual anxiety rather
than upon anything expressing a positive value, such as
friendship. Prufrock gives us no indication that he has any
friends (although he does seem to have many acquaintances).

With Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, however, the emphasis is
different (certainly in the film this is brought out).
There is a sense of comradeship about them, a genuine
affection and closeness (which is occasionally physical), so
that we do not see them, as we tend to see Estragon and
Vladimir, as two creatures with no joy in life.
Rosenkrantz, for example, delights in showing off to
Guildenstern, always inviting him to see his new discovery
(an experiment, a paper plane, a recently fallen apple), and
he is never angry when the experiment misfires or
Guildenstern crumples up his creation. There is, in other
words, an acceptance of each other, which suggests a certain
mutuality between them. And that clearly counters somewhat
(even if only in a small way) the absurdity of their
situation. They do have something of value in their lives.

To this we can add (if we are talking about the film) the
wonderful playfulness of Rosenkrantz, who is forever
wandering through Elsinore with a charming, almost child-
like curiosity and inventiveness. That he stumbles across
and re-enacts many of the great experiments in science
without every quite realizing it establishes him as a person
genuinely endearing (as well as adding a great intellectual
delight for the spectator). This quality is entirely
lacking in many Absurdist plays (particularly those of
Beckett, where we have no reason to find anything
particularly comforting in the characters).

Beyond this point, there is also a sense that Rosenkrantz
and Guildenstern have more of a specific identity than, say,
Vladimir and Estragon. They are Elizabethans, with a
certain amount of money. So there is something of a
historical identity, and the similarity between them and the
people they encounter suggests something like a common
cultural basis. In Beckett's play, by contrast, the
characters have names which suggest that they have nothing
in common (Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, Lucky, the Boy), and
their clothes s very little about their specific origins,
least of all that they share some common historical or
cultural milieu.

F. The Player King
Given the close, obvious, and acknowledged connections
between Stoppard's play, Eliot's poem, and Beckett's play
(to say nothing about the relationship to Hamlet), can we
conclude that Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is, in
the final analysis, a very skilful but very derivative play
that does little more than integrate in an amusing way much
more important works? Well, maybe. That is a charge that
has been levelled with some justice at Stoppard (in the term
theatrical parasite). But before endorsing that judgement,
I think we should consider the most original aspect of
Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the memorable figure
of the Player King.

The figure of the Player King injects into Stoppard's play
the fascinating complexities about levels of illusion, the
relationship of art of life, and especially the very nature
of theatrical fiction. I don't know that I can begin to do
justice to this dimension of the play, but I would like the
make a few fairly obvious points.

The players bring into our consideration of the absurdity of
the world a sense that we can find order in art. After all,
there is a script. And art confers on human actions,
especially on human death a certain significance: on the
stage people can live significant, active lives and they can
die magnificently. Furthermore, there is a logic to the
action:

PLAYER: There's a design at work in all art--surely you
know that? events must play themselves out to aesthetic,
moral and logical conclusion.
GUIL: And what's that, in this case?
PLAYER: It never varies--we aim at the point where everyone
who is marked for death dies.
GUIL: Marked?
PLAYER: Between 'just deserts' and 'tragic irony' we are
given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent.
Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they
can possible go when things have got about as bad as they
reasonably get.
GUIL: Who decides?
PLAYER: Decides? It is written.

Art, in other words, is quite at odds with the world as
Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern perceive it. Art confers
order. The style the players offer may be, as he admits,
run down, seedy, a product of indifferent times, but what
they offer is not absurd. The only problem is, of course,
that it's a fiction, something invented, and is quite
meaningless without an audience. It is not a world unto
itself. Hence, in the text, the Player King becomes very
angry when he has to confront the fact that Rosenkrantz and
Guildenstern abandoned them in the woods in the middle of
the performance.

And by the same token Guildenstern is finally provoked to
significant action at what he perceives to be the futility
of mere theatre. When he strikes at the Player King, he
expresses a finally explosive anger at the way in which the
Player King, because he lives in the world of illusion, has
all the answers that Guildenstern never finds:

GUIL: But why? Was it all for this? Who are we that so
much should converge on our little deaths? (In anguish to
the PLAYER) Who are we?
PLAYER: You are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. That's
enough.
GUIL: No_it is not enough. To be told so little_to such an
end_and still, finally, to be denied an explanation . . .
PLAYER: In our experience, most things end in death.
GUIL: (Fear, vengeance, scorn) Your experience?--Actors!
(He snatches a dagger from the PLAYER's belt and holds the
point at the PLAYER's throat: the PLAYER backs and GUIL
advances, speaking more quietly.)
I'm talking about death_and you've never experienced that.
And you cannot act it. You die a thousand casual
deaths_with none of that intensity which squeezes out life .
. . and no blood runs cold anywhere. Because even as you
die you know that you will come back in a different hat.
But no one gets up after death_there is no applause_there is
only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death.

Guildenstern is trying at last to do something, to make
contact with the only reality of which he is sure. And he
is utterly convinced that he has succeeded. He claims the
Player doesn't know death. But the Player King convinces
Guildenstern that he is dead. By some final irony, without
knowing it, Guildenstern has finally done something, only to
discover that it's just a pretence, part of an improvised
drama, complete with an audience who duly applaud.

The play itself is full of references to that fact that it
is a play (from the opening comment during the initial coin
flipping "There is an art to the building up of suspense")
Thus, as we watch a play, we see within that fiction a
professional seller of fictions offering something that is
lacking in the main represented fiction. Much of the
intellectual delight we get from the play comes from this
tension--what exactly is real here? Stoppard's treatment of
this aspect of the play is dazzling, entertaining, and very
thought-provoking (for some people at least).

In this aspect of Stoppard's play, there are some
significant differences between the text and the film. In
the text, the represented real world is the world of
Elsinore, into which Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are
summoned. That world is, in some respects, a travesty of
Shakespeare's Hamlet--conveying well the deceitful,
bewildering logic of the place (from the incessant plotting
to the behaviour of Prince Hamlet)--but it is given to us as
the real world. The Players are, as in Shakespeare's play,
professional entertainers who show up at Elsinore, put on
their play, and have to stow away in a hurry once Claudius
is upset.

And yet things are not quite that simple, because we, in the
audience, know that the world of Elsinore is not real--it
comes from another play, and although Shakespeare's poetry
is butchered in Stoppard's dialogue, nevertheless the words
and actions are close enough to Shakespeare's original to
remind those who know Hamlet that this world may be
presented to us as the real world in Stoppard's work, but it
is simply one more fiction. That complicates things.

In the film, there is an enormously significant difference
in the very final scene. For the last thing we see is the
wagon packing up from the position in the forest where
Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern first met them and moving up
that featureless landscape down which the two riders first
travelled. How are we supposed to interpret this?

Well, the most obvious conclusion I can come to is that this
scene is telling me that all the action has all taken place
within the players' wagon. The world of Elsinore, in other
words, rather than being the real political world into which
Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern and the Players move, is here a
creation of the players. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern have,
in effect, purchased their way into a production of Hamlet
and, because of the logic of the script (pages of which are
blowing through many scenes) must move inexorably to their
deaths, as it is written.

This treatment (in the film) brings (I think) some clarity
into the use of the different theatrical metaphors as it is
established in the text, but the issue is still sufficiently
complex. In the film we appear to have a real world which
consists of featureless white rock and an uninhabited
forest, through which Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern move
without any clear sense of purpose or direction other than
the hazy memory of a royal summons, and through which the
Players lead their wagon, without our knowing its
destination. In the forest, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern
get literally swallowed up by the players in the scripted
drama. This adds something of an ominous reverberation to
the play which I have no intention of resolving.

But it seems to me to turn the Player King into something
rather more malevolent than he is in the text (where he has
nothing to do with the disappearance of Rosenkrantz and
Guildenstern). In fact, as I look at the final image in the
film of the players' wagon inching itself up the rock face
where we first met Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, I am
reminded of a venomous black insect which has just consumed
prey_luring the two protagonists into its world with a
promise of order, only to swallow them up and move on
somewhere.

A Final Comment

All right, so Stoppard has injected into what he has drawn
on an intriguing and sophisticated theatrical metaphor, and
he has given Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern a more human
dimension than Beckett does to his new protagonists. But
does Stoppard have anything to say? Is this play offering
us anything which we might want to characterize as a vision
of experience? Or is it, by contrast, simply a dazzling
display of verbal and theatrical sophistication?

I must confess I find this question difficult to answer ever
since I first encountered Stoppard's writing. For it
strikes me that those who argue that this play has little
moral substance may well be correct. And Stoppard has
characterized his own work as "retreating with style from
the chaos." I don't find that amid all that witty talk and
inventive staging anything really substantial. I am filled
with delight, but not moved. And what I take away from this
play is a sense of the wonderful cleverness of the author
rather than anything in myself or the play to reflect upon.

In that sense, we might say that Stoppard has moved beyond
the Theatre of the Absurd into what has come to be termed a
post-modern style. Here we might recall Nietzsche's call
for us to appropriate our cultural past and turn it to our
own original purposes, deriving from the process the highest
delights of human life: the joy in artistic play. Stoppard,
it strikes me, is following Nietzsche's project. He is
appropriating the past_Eliot, Beckett, Shakespeare_but
unlike a modernist like Eliot or Kafka he has no particular
respect for it. He is not mourning the loss of meaning (as
in Eliot) or making reference to the past religious
consciousness (like Kafka) or lamenting the loss of meaning
in the world (like Beckett). If anything, Stoppard is
mocking Shakespeare's play, emphasizing its irrational
barbarity and weirdness. He is having fun, creating
startlingly new and original metaphors and reinterpreting
the past, not with a sense of what its past meaning might
be, but rather to suit himself.

Hence, the main emphasis in Stoppard's play is imaginative
exuberance of the author himself, the skill of an original
genius at work. Because Stoppard is so intelligent,
inventive, and theatrical, his play creates a marvellous
work of art. One has to see or read the work many times to
get a sense of its richness. But those riches do not, I
think, have much to tell us about ourselves or the world we
live in. In a work like this, as in so much modern art, we
are not invited to view the world differently once we have
experienced what the artist has to say. Does that make this
inferior? I'm not going to answer that. After all, times
being what they are. . . .

Bibliography

Cahn, Victor L. Beyond Absurdity: The Plays of Tom Stoppard
(Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1979)

Jenkins, Anthony. Critical Essays on Tom Stoppard (Boston:
G. K. Hall, 1990)

Stoppard, Tom. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
(London: Faber and Faber, 1967)