Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a 1966 play by Tom Stoppard. It is an existentialist tragicomedy and is part of the Theater of the Absurd movement. It expands upon the stories of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters from William Shakespeare's Hamlet. In this play, Rosencrantzand Guildenstern are the main protagonists and Hamlet is the bit player, thus making it the inverse of the original play. The action of the play focuses on the misadventures of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern while they were offstage in Shakespeare's version, except for a few scenes in which the dramatic actions of the plays coincide. In these scenes, Shakespeare's script is used by Stoppard verbatim.

The two protagonists are portrayed as fools, ineptly stumbling through a world of intrigue which they are unable to understand even after clumsily debating various philosophical questions, with no conclusions. In the climax of the play, they attempt to deliver Hamlet to his death in England on Claudius's orders, but Hamlet escapes when their ship is seized by pirates and, as in Shakespeare's play, it is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who are killed by the English. In their final scene, some small insight into the nature of the universe at last dawns on them, but it is a rather stark realization: Their feeble attempts to control their own lives never had a chance of derailing their predetermined destinies.