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Messages Of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead

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Them? They’re Dead
(A Discussion on the Messages of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead) What if you were not the main character in your own story? What if your only purpose in life was to further the life of another? For the two characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this is the case. They serve little purpose, other than to show the lengths that Claudius will go to to overcome Hamlet. However, they are entirely flat characters, and in the end are given meaningless deaths, not even worthy of being shown onstage. Enter Tom Stoppard. He asked the question ‘who are these characters when they aren’t serving the end of someone else?’ Thus, a new play was born. While it may seem to have no value other than comedic, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead contains many worthwhile messages. …show more content…

The audience will know the inevitable fate of the show’s main characters, and so Stoppard will constantly make references to their untimely demise. This is seen very early in the play when a coin is found. No matter how many times they toss the coin, it always lands on heads. The audience knows that by the end, no matter how many they toss, in the end they will lose the two that matter. By including these sorts of scenes, Stoppard makes the audience question how often in life do these small ironies occur for ourselves? Always something there pointing towards some ultimate end, and yet never able to grasp the importance because we, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, can not know our own

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