Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead

Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead presents the audience with Shakespeare's Hamlet, as seen through the eyes of two characters whose actual tragic roles are so minimal; they can hardly be considered important parts of the original play. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are involved in a drama the meaning and import of which they can hardly grasp. Indeed, they cannot even manage to secure their own identities in the work. Stoppard specifically creates these characters in this manner so as to utilize them to present illogical ideas. Specifically, these characters act as tools to define the indefinable. Death has no definition, and yet, Stoppard manages to utilize Ros and Guil to give a clear explanation of death. For Stoppard, death
Ros questions Guil towards the end of the play, "Do you think death could possibly be a boat?" Guil, obviously the brighter of the two, quickly responds, "No, no, no…Death is…not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not be on a boat." Ros misunderstands this stating, "I've frequently not been on boats." (Stoppard 108) These few lines of communication shared between the two characters demonstrate a sense of Stoppard's comedy, but much more importantly indicate Stoppard's view of his characters and their fated deaths. William Gruber comments that, "Both twisted syntax and twisted logic are appallingly true: wherever they are—on boats, on the road, within a court—it is the fate of Ros and Guil never to be." (Gruber 298) In fact, Ros and Guil never truly exist throughout the play because it is already fated they will die as they did in Shakespeare's work three hundred years ago, and thus they are non-existent. In a sense Stoppard is telling each and every single member of his audience that they too don't exist because they are fated to die and become "non-existent". "We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it, before we know there are words, out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its
However, after only a few moments The Player leaps up and graciously receives applause. Jozef de Vos comments that, "In Stoppard's play this parody of death is even fortified by the subsequent series of deaths enacted by the players. Here it seems the parody turns into a painful, cruelly absurd mockery of life and death, an adequate finale to this sour comedy." (de Vos 156) Because The Player enacts death so many times he proves that death truly is merely a perception of the human mind. Humanity only understands death when it comes to them in terms they understand, because in reality, there is no such thing as death. The Player even directly states after acting out a fake death, "it is the kind they do believe in—it's what is expected." (Stoppard 123) Death is man's explanation to what happens when one no longer lives. The Player enacts the only form of death humanity can understand, which exemplifies that true death must be a state of non-existence, a concept which it is difficult for us humans to