Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead

Han Yue Emerald Liu

Dr. Whaley

Drama 105

7 December 2014

Play Analysis

Tom Stoppard wrote a magnificent stone-breaking play at 1964 in England, it is called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and then published in 1967 in Theater of the Absurd, and it played on Broadway in 1968 where it won the Tony Award for the best play. The play was a huge success on both critical and commercial aspects, which made him famous practically overnight. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was influenced by Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It carried the storyline from Hamlet that set the foundation of the play as tragedy; it incorporated the techniques of play-acting from Waiting for Godot.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead re-interprets

Furthermore, when they re-open the letter later to discover that Hamlet has changed the letter, which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will be "put to sudden death." R&G do not take any action of change the situation. Guildenstern says, "But why? Was it all for this? Who are we that so much should converge on our little deaths? Who are we? The player responds, "You are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. That is enough." This conversation is the mean idea of the play. R&G have spent their whole journey waiting to be told what to do and take no definitive action in control their own fate. Therefore, there are few important themes are setup in the play to enhance the major dramatic

The world in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern live lacks order, and it is hard for the audience to follow the play. However, imagination allows people that live in this world to find order as Stoppard implies that we do. As the Player says, "There's a design at work in all art." Art comes from imagination. Art and the real world are in conflict. The Player is exited to find Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; it because his imagination, his art, and his control are nothing without an audience. Yet the player’s art frustrates Guildenstern to the point where he strikes the Player. It is because the theater seems as if there are definite answers to all of Guildenstern's philosophical questions. In order to reach out to the only certainty he can be sure of, Guildenstern exclaims, "No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death." The tension of conflict created by this theme is that the audience is watching or reading a play; the author comments on the ultimate lack of order in the world by presenting the audience with a logical medium. Stoppard also uses his characters to comment on the verisimilitude of theatre. While Guildenstern criticizes the Player for his portrayal of death, he believes the Player's performance of death at the time where Guildenstern thinks he has stabbed him with a knife. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern believe