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PRESENTS:
Directed by Jeremy Dubin Discussion Guide Directed by Jeremy Dubin
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About the Playwright: Tom Stoppard was born "Tom Straussler" in Zlin, Czechoslovakia on July 3, 1937. His family moved to Singapore in 1939 to escape the Nazis. Then, shortly before the Japanese invasion of Singapore in 1941, young Tom fled to Darjeeling, India with his mother and brother. His father, however, Eugene Straussler, remained behind and was killed during the invasion. In 1946, the family emigrated to England after Tom's mother married Kenneth Stoppard, a major in the British army. At the age of 17, after just his second year of high school, Stoppard left school and began working as a journalist for the WESTERN DAILY PRESS (1954-58) and the BRISTOL EVENING WORLD (1958-60). He began to show a talent for dramatic criticism and served for a time as freelance drama critic for SCENE (1962-3), a British literary magazine, writing both under his own name and the pseudonym William Boot. He also started writing plays for radio and television and soon managed to secure himself a literary agent. Stoppard's first television play, A Walk on the Water (1963) would later be adapted for the stage as Enter a Free Man (1968). Over the next few years, he wrote various works for radio, television and the theatre including "M" is for Moon Among Other Things (1964), A Separate Peace (1966), and If You're Glad I'll Be Frank (1966). He also wrote 70 episodes of A Student's Diary: An Arab in London for the BBC World Service. His first major success came with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966) which catapulted him into the front ranks of modern playwrights overnight when it opened in London in 1967. The play, which chronicles the tale of Hamlet as told from the worm's-eye view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare's play, was immediately hailed as a modern dramatic masterpiece. Over the next ten years, Stoppard wrote a number of successful plays, the most popular of which include Jumpers (1972) and Travesties (1974). Then, in 1977, after visiting Russia with a member of Amnesty International, Stoppard became concerned with a number of human rights issues which have manifested themselves in his work. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977) was actually written at the request of André Previn and was inspired by a meeting with Russian exile Viktor Fainberg. And Professional Foul (1977), a television play, was Stoppard's contribution to Amnesty International's declaration of 1977 as Prisoner of Conscience Year. Other works such as Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth (1979) and Squaring the Circle (1984) are direct attacks on the oppressive old regimes of Eastern Europe. Not all of Stoppard's plays, however, are political. One of his most recent works, The Invention of Love (1997), examines the relationship between famous scholar and poet A.E. Housman and the man he loved his entire life, Moses Jackson--a handsome athlete who could not return his feelings. The play opened to rave reviews at the Royal National Theatre in 1997. “We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.” --Guildenstern
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History of the Play: The first iteration of Stoppard’s play was written in 1964, and, unlike its modern counterpart, was only one act long and under the title Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Meet King Lear. Inspiration for the play came from a theater outing that Stoppard had with his agent Kenneth Ewing. The two men saw a performance of Hamlet at the Old Vic Theater in London, and Ewing commented that there should be a story about what happens to the two absentminded courtiers after they leave Denmark. Ewing joked that, depending on when in time one set the Hamlet legend, they might actually have encountered King Lear. Stoppard, using this idea as inspiration, created the play. With the addition of two more acts to the play and a change in title, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead was performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe on August 24, 1966. Afterward, it debuted on the London stage at the Old Vic theater, premiering on April 11, 1967. On October 9, 1967, the show opened on Broadway at the Alvin Theater. A year later, it moved to the Eugene O’Neill Theater. The play was an instant success, winning Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Scenic Design in a Play, Best Costume Design in a Play, and Best Producer.
Introduction to the Play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was Tom Stoppard's breakthrough play. It was a huge critical and commercial success, making him famous practically overnight. Though written in 1964, the play was published in 1967, and it played on Broadway in 1968, where it won the Tony for best play. The play cleverly re-interprets Shakespeare's Hamlet from the point of view of two minor characters: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The Laurel-and-Hardy-like pair are totally incidental to the action of Hamlet, subject to the whims of the King Claudius – who gets them to betray Hamlet – and then tricked by Hamlet into delivering a letter that condemns them to death. Stoppard's play turns Hamlet on its head by giving these two the main roles and reducing all of Shakespeare's major characters (including Hamlet) to minor roles. Written around and in-between the lines of Shakespeare's play, Stoppard brilliantly takes the main concerns of contemporary theater – absurdism, the inevitability of death, breakdown in communication and feeling – and inserts them into the text of a much earlier play.
Cincinnati Shakespeare Company The absurdist tradition that Stoppard is writing in suggests another enormous influence: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952). Beckett's play is just as important to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead as Hamlet is. Waiting for Godot consists of two tramps sitting on-stage bantering back and forth and waiting for someone named Godot, who never comes. Waiting for Godot changed theater by undermining many of its traditional values: plot, characterization, and dialogue that move the action of the play forward. By portraying the act of "waiting" on stage, Beckett's play also opened up new ideas about meta-theatrics (plays that are about plays – how they're made, how they're seen, and/or how they interact with society). Since the characters in Godot are in the same position as the audience – waiting for something to happen – much of their dialogue works on multiple levels and seems to hint at awareness on the part of the tramps that they're actually two characters in a play. Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in this absurdist and meta-theatrical tradition. It is very much influenced by Beckett, and much of the silly dialogue between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern simply would not have been seen in the theater before Waiting for Godot. It's as if Stoppard uses the innovations that Beckett brought to contemporary theater in order to pry open the minor Shakespearean characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Some critics think that Stoppard was too much under the influence of Beckett at this point in his career, but we think that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is something unique and independent of both Waiting for Godot and Hamlet. It is an almost universally acknowledged masterpiece of contemporary theater.
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From the Director: Jeremy Dubin “If you’ve been around at any of our public events you have probably heard me say that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is my favorite contemporary play. I’m going to let you in on a secret- it’s just my favorite play, no caveat or qualifier required. While I cannot say with certitude that this was the play that instilled in me a life-long love of language, I can say without a modicum of hesitation that it was a profoundly formative influence (I discovered around the same time as the Marx Brothers, and the two will forever be linked in my mind). Reading it was a watershed moment- I had never before read anything quite like it. And just as I knew if there was one performer I wanted to be like, it was Groucho, I knew and know if there was one writer that I wished most to be able to write like, it would be Tom Stoppard (and yes, I say this at risk of committing heresy against the sacrosanct position enjoyed by our house playwright). When I read Stoppard, I feel like Salieri gazing on the compositions of Mozart. Well actually, Salieri was a well-respected, oft-produced, popular composer, so it’s probably closer to the 18th century Viennese equivalent of Rick Astley gazing on the compositions of Mozart. Okay, Rick Astley cover band. Regardless, I often find myself awe-struck. Again, at risk of sacrilege, I am of the belief that his linguistic prowess in this mother-tongue of ours, is in the same strata as Shakespeare’s. He somehow takes a language I have spoken all my life, and surprises me with it, shows me things I never knew it could do, twisting, it turning it, spinning it, folding it in on itself with the inspired lunacy of an M.C. Escher painting, or perhaps more aptly a Rube Goldberg device. And if that were all he did, well, as my people say, Dayenu. But then there are the subjects Stoppard chooses to tackle. In this play philosophy, ranging from Locke & Hobbes to Kant to the uncertainty principle. In others, Chaos theory, the second law of thermodynamics, quantum physics. Subjects which, on the whole, might be considered to be abstruse, if not extravagantly incomprehensible. And he never talks down to his audience, frankly sometimes I wish he would- I’ll freely admit that Hapgood is still beyond me. To be able not only to understand these subjects, but to make them dramatically interesting, well he is a once-in-a-generation kind of mind, and fortunately for us he decided he wanted a career in the theatre. But he does more, much more. To begin, it’s funny. Really funny. It’s that particular brand of comedy- the comedy of Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, of Wile E. Coyote, and Chaplin’s Pixarian descendent Wall-E. A comedy underscored with pathos. A comedy that allows us to laugh at the little tramp eating his boot, even as our hearts break for him. The comedy that puts one in mind of that final epiphany that allowed Valentine Michael Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land, to at last understand what it means to be human: namely, laughter is a response not to joy, but to pain. It’s the kind of comedy that is able to, perhaps counter-intuitively, get at the truth in a way that tragedy can’t quite achieve. Because in order to get at the truth you need to sneak up, to, as Guildenstern might put it, “catch it unawares.” And then occasionally from out of this matter, there escapes a thin beam of light that, seen at the right angle, can crack the shell of mortality.
Cincinnati Shakespeare Company Simply put, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are us. Nothing un-, sub-, or supernatural about it. It is simply a startlingly accurate, empathetic, funny and harrowing picture of the human condition. Though, knowing it is difficult to get perspective on a universe you are in, Stoppard takes the universe and nudges it a few inches to the left- fiction’s greatest prerogative. He clears away just enough of the recognizable and mundane detritus (a past for instance, that thing R&G are forced to take on faith, but really so are we all- this is where I’ve edited out an esoteric tangent about Descarte and his theory of an omnipotent malevolent Deceiver- you’re welcome), he’s cleared just enough away to allow us to see what lies beneath. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the human condition, the frustrating and baffling conundrum that is our existence, that thing we refer to as life, summed up more aptly and succinctly than with Guildenstern’s elliptical nugget “What a fine persecution. To be kept intrigued, without ever quite being enlightened.” And there it is.” “We're actors — we're the opposite of people!” -The Player
From the Actors: Justin McCombs (Rosencrantz): “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to play Rosencrantz in consecutive productions of Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. There are exciting opportunities and challenges to playing the same character in two plays separated by 400 years. The most important thing to remember for me in regards to our Hamlet production was to stay honest to Mr. Shakespeare. He certainly couldn’t have predicted that Tom Stoppard would have written such in depth philosophical and comical traits for Rosencrantz (and Guildenstern) centuries later, so it was important to not let my prep for R & G Are Dead misinform what Shakespeare’s function for these two was in Hamlet. In Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz need to remain positive and eager to please is much stronger than it is in Shakespeare’s. As he and his companion are stuck in a world they don’t understand, and don’t know the rules of, he tries hard to please his friend and stay upbeat. This manifests itself in countless moments of verbal wordplay between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It harkens back to the wit of Laurel and Hardy, and Abbot and Costello, a time of vaudeville that thrives in live performance. I was thrilled to be able to tackle this type of comedy with Billy Chace. Billy and I have been paired up time and time again during our tenure at CSC and this was an exciting challenge for us to tackle next. I’m excited to play this role because, within the cycles and repetition that two friends go through while being pulled in and out of Hamlet scenes, there is a humanity inherent in their struggles and their joys and there is a connection that keeps them together. I think the trickiest element of playing this role, for me, is the rapid switches from utter despair and bewilderment, to finding hope and opportunity in how to continue living in a world where we don’t know what our next move is. I guess that’s a lot like life. This play proves that it’s not just the prince who struggles with inaction and search for meaning in life. In truth, it happens to even the most common of characters.”
Cincinnati Shakespeare Company “Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.” --Rosencrantz
Billy Chace (Guildenstern): “The existential island that Rosencrantz & Guildenstern find themselves on is a daunting but delicious landscape for an actor; at once a harrowing limbo between life and death an yet the most familiar of places to be stuck: the stage. And so it goes with Tom Stoppard's meta-masterpiece, a play so fraught with existential conundrum, one feels like their pulling their lip over their forehead-- and yet the beauty of Stoppard's language creates a comforting and sometimes hilarious 'eye of the storm' within the battle of fate vs. chance. For me, reigning in the complexities of Guildenstern's intellectual journeys and making them accessible to others has been my greatest challenge as an actor-and I am giddily anxious to share them with an audience, the missing piece in our theatrical process- as the play states, without an audience, we don't exist.”
Plot Synopsis: The play concerns the misadventures and musings of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters from William Shakespeare's Hamlet who are childhood friends of the prince, focusing on their actions with the events of Hamlet as background. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is structured as the inverse of Hamlet; the title characters are the leads, not supporting players, and Hamlet himself has only a small part. The duo appears on stage here when they are off-stage in Shakespeare's play, with the exception of a few short scenes in which the dramatic events of both plays coincide. In Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are used by the King in an attempt to discover Hamlet's motives and to plot against him. Hamlet, however, mocks them derisively and outwits them, so that they, rather than he, are executed in the end. Thus, from Rosencrantz's and Guildenstern's perspective, the action in Hamlet is largely nonsensically comical.
Cincinnati Shakespeare Company The two characters have generally interchangeable, yet periodically unique, identities. Thus, Rosencrantz frequently confuses his own name with Guildenstern's, and other characters appear to have difficulty distinguishing them. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are portrayed as two clowns or fools in a world that is beyond their understanding; they cannot identify any reliable feature or the significance in words or events. Their own memories are not reliable or complete and they misunderstand each other as they stumble through philosophical arguments while not realizing the implications to themselves. They often state deep philosophical truths during their nonsensical ramblings, yet they depart from these ideas as quickly as they come to them. At times Guildenstern appears to be more enlightened than Rosencrantz; at times both of them appear to be equally confounded by the events occurring around them. After the two characters witness a performance of The Murder of Gonzago—the story within a story in the play Hamlet—they find themselves on a boat taking prince Hamlet to England with the troupe that staged the performance. They are intended to give the English king a message telling him to kill Hamlet. Instead, Hamlet discovers this and switches the letter for another, telling the king to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. During the voyage, the two are ambushed by pirates and lose their prisoner, Hamlet, before resigning themselves to their fate and presumably dying thereafter.
R&G Trivia: Stoppard never attended college. He dropped out at age 17 due to academic boredom. Also, when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was performed at the National Theatre in London, it made Stoppard the youngest playwright ever to have his play performed there. (Source: Bloom's Major Dramatists: Tom Stoppard, edited by Harold Bloom) In The Simpsons episode "Tales from the Public Domain," the two characters Carl and Lenny have their names altered to Rosencarl and Guildenlenny. The highly acclaimed Trader Joe's caramel popcorn is known as "Rosencrunch and Guildenpop." “Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?” --Rosencrantz
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What’s With All the Coins? A coin can only do one of two things. It can either come up heads or it can come up tails. As bets go, betting on the flip of a coin is pretty straightforward. Yet, in Stoppard's play, a coin toss becomes an immensely complicated thing. When you throw up that quarter, there are many more questions than whether or not it will come down heads or tails. A coin toss is a classic example in classes on probability. It is one of the first things that comes to mind when we talk about 'chance': heads I win, tails you lose. In the first scene of the play, the coin comes down heads over one hundred times in a row. The chances of this happening are one in 2 to the 100th power. In other words, the chances are very, very small. All of a sudden, it seems that tossing a coin is no longer about chance, but about fate. This is what gets Guil so scared. It's like he is getting a sign from above. To him, it's that big. Usually in books, getting "a sign from above" is a good thing, so why is Guil so scared? The reason is that this sign is ambiguous. It's unclear. One way to think about it: what if God sent you a message in Morse code and you didn't know Morse code? Guil tries to consider a bunch of different explanations for what is going on. One is, in fact, divine intervention. One of the more creative ideas he has is "Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for the sins of an unremembered past". From the very start of the play, the coin focuses in on major issues: are our lives controlled by chance or by fate? If they're controlled by fate, is there any way of knowing what that fate is? Either way, is there any hope of having free will? This becomes very explicit in Act Two. After speaking with Hamlet, Ros and Guil try to figure out what is going on. Guil says something very important, so important that we're going to include the whole quote right here: GUIL: Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are … condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one – that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. (He sits.) A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty – and, by which definition, a philosopher – dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security. (2.67) There is no explicit mention of coins here, but there is a lot of talk about fate and order, and "two-fold security" seems to harken back to the way a coin can fall: either heads or tails. Just as someone who throws a coin up in the air knows that it will either fall heads or tails, the Chinaman knows that he is either one thing (a philosopher) or the other (a butterfly). He has only two options, and though he does not know which one is true, he can be reassured that at least he only has two options. Guil, by contrast, is afraid of things becoming too
Cincinnati Shakespeare Company arbitrary. He is so uncertain of his situation that it almost feels like he is trapped in a whirlpool. If someone just told him, "Guil, you are either X or Y, but I can't tell you which one," then he would be immensely relieved. Now what's all this business about "if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost." Take some time and meditate on this one – this idea is far out. What Guil is saying is that we have to be able to believe that we can act spontaneously, that not everything in the world is ordered. In other words, we have to believe that we can act freely. If we don't have free will, life starts to seem really meaningless really fast. Go back through and read some of the banter between Ros and Guil: it's like they're trying to prove this line. They're trying to prove that they can act spontaneously, that they can act freely. The coin is another way that this belief manifests itself. We believe that when we throw up a coin it is not already decided which way it will come down. There must be two possibilities! If we start to believe that the flip of a coin is already predetermined, then fate subsumes chance. What we mean is that all the things that we call "chance" are suddenly seen to be fate, just more subtly expressed. This is what gets Guil so freaked out in the beginning. It's starting to seem like there is no such thing as chance, which means that there is no such thing as free will. There's one other thing about a coin: it's money. You bet on it because you are acting in your own self-interest. When Guil asks Ros what he would do if all of the coins had come down tails (so Guil would win instead of Ros), Ros says that he would check the coins. Guil then says, "I'm relieved. At least we can still count on selfinterest as a predictable factor". What this means in the context of our earlier discussion is that all of this stuff about fate and chance isn't just philosophical mumbo jumbo: it's very tied into what matters most to us – whether or not we are free. On another level, self-interest might play a role in the debate about fate and chance. Is it possible to act against one's own self-interest? If it's not, then is anyone really free?
Themes: Language and Communication: In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the two title characters often play with words. They pun off of each other's words without much intention of moving their dialogue toward a set purpose. Instead, they are simply goofing around, like two kids throwing a ball back and forth. At the same time, however, the consistently poor communication in the play seems to hint at a broader breakdown in understanding between the characters that may help send the play into its tragic spiral. Language is sometimes seen as an empowering way of writing one's own fate, but for Ros and Guil it often seems like an impotent tool, best suited for idle speculation.
Isolation: In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, main characters Ros and Guil, when left alone in the play, often suffer from feelings of isolation. In the opening and closing scenes of the play, it is just Ros and Guil alone on stage. One wonders if it is the degree to which these two are isolated that has led to their constant idleness and passivity, or if things worked the other way around. From the very start of the play, however, it does seem as if Ros and Guil are marked, as if they are moving toward their deaths, simply passing through the action of the play. The sense of isolation reaches its highest pitch, perhaps, when it is just the two of them in the dark on the boat in the last act. It is, in a sense, a premonition of death, or a fear of what death might be: bodiless nothingness, with only the mind working.
Cincinnati Shakespeare Company Fear: In the opening of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, there is a long string of coin flips that come up heads, which frightens Guil, one of the main characters. He later attempts to reason through how the laws of probability could seemingly be suspended, and at one point concludes, "The scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear" (1.73). What Guil means is that we fear the unknown (such as death). Science, by trying to make things comprehensible, attempts to reduce this fear. By coming to know things about our world and the laws by which it works, we try to feel more at home in it, more like we have a handle on what is happening. The alternative – recognizing just how little we know about the world around us – causes fear. Versions of Reality: In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the play-within-a-play is packed within a clear context and is used by Hamlet to send a message to Claudius. For us as the audience of Stoppard's play, however, the distinctions between a play and reality get totally jumbled. First, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is nothing but a play on the stage. Secondly, it is a play that interacts with the action of an earlier play, Shakespeare's Hamlet. Third, it is unclear to what extent the Player and his Tragedians are driving the action of the play and to what extent the "real" characters are in control of what is happening. The difference between drama and reality is called into question, most explicitly in the arguments between Guil and the Player.
Passivity: Ros and Guil may be at the center of the action in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but they certainly don't drive it. It can be seen most clearly in Act II how they are just left to sit around and wait unless someone else crosses the stage or tells them what to do. Another main character, the Player, seems to suggest that they should be more active and that Guil shouldn't waste so much time questioning things, but Guil is less concerned with action than with freedom of action. Yet, in the end, the fact that Ros and Guil betray their friend Hamlet makes their passivity morally significant; their failure to act may play a role in their own fates.
Fate and Free Will: This theme is introduced in the very first scene of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, where the long string of coins tosses coming up "heads" seems to suggest that the laws of probability have been suspended. The way that fate operates in the play is largely through the words of William Shakespeare. Since Stoppard's play works within the framework of Shakespeare's Hamlet, his characters are bound to undergo a certain series of events – their fate was "written" in 1600. Main characters Guil and Ros have the most freedom when they manage to get out of the action of the Hamlet storyline, but in these times they often find themselves bored and listless. The relationship between Stoppard's play and Shakespeare's allows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to ask the question: to what degree do fate and chance control our own lives?
Mortality: So, you probably noticed that the word "dead" in the title Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and that there is a lot of discussion of death in the play. Stoppard's play is intensely aware of the fact that we will all, one day, die. It is also aware of the fact that death simply cannot be captured in art. The main character, Guil, sees death as the negative, as a blind spot in the mind – something that humans are incapable of thinking about. As a result, he sees acted out deaths in plays as pretense – claiming to put something on stage that one cannot. In contrast, Guil's rival, the Player, thinks that no one can tell the difference between an acted death and a real one, and he thus decides to give his audiences the sort of entertainment they want – death, and lots of it.
Cincinnati Shakespeare Company Discussion Questions: 1. Ros and Guil play a number of word games, whether they be "questions" or role-playing different scenarios. How are these word games different than other more traditional games that they might play? Why do they often speak of words as the only things that they have to play with? 2. How do failures of communication lead to the tragic ending of the play? 3. Why do Ros and Guil seem so dependent on the words of others to know what is happening to them at any given moment? Why do they put all their trust in language, rather than experience? What is Guil's biggest fear? In what circumstance is he willing to show fear? 4. Why do certain characters in the play, the Player in particular, seem incapable of experiencing fear? What would it take to frighten the Player? 5. Guil and Ros constantly seem like outsiders in the play. Why are they so alienated from the rest of the cast? What factors lead to their isolation? 6. What is the relationship between isolation and control in the play? Do Ros and Guil seem more in control of their situation when they are on their own or when they are in the company of others? 7. How do other characters define isolation and how does it effect their actions? For example, how does Hamlet's sense of isolation from court differ from the isolation the Player feels when he finds that he is not playing to an audience? 8. Guil and Ros spend most of the play as spectators. Do they have a choice? Is this the result of their passivity or the result of their situation? 9. Are there times in the play when not acting is a better choice than acting? 10. Is Guil's hostility to the Player and his view of life as drama somehow bound up with Guil's inability to act in ordinary life? 11. Are there points in the play when passivity takes on moral significance? When and how? How many distinct realities are there within the play? Is the reality inhabited by Ros and Guil different than that inhabited by the Player, than that inhabited by Claudius and Hamlet? If these realities are different, then how are they different? 12. Do drama and real life constitute two different versions of reality? How does the play distinguish between them? Does this distinction ever break down? 13. How can you explain the fact that the characters sometimes act as if they know that they are in a play? Are these moments different from the rest of the play? Does it interfere with your ability to understand the rest of the play? Does it make the play seem fake and contrived? 14. How can the fact that the action of Stoppard's play is already determined by Hamlet be used as a metaphor for fate? 15. Do the characters seem happiest when they feel that they have free will or when they sense that their fate has already been written? 16. What is the relationship between fate and free will that is symbolized by the boat? Do Ros and Guil find this a desirable relationship? Should they? 17. Look closely at some of Guil's descriptions of death. What does it mean to say that death is "not"? If death is unthinkable, then why does Guil even feel the need to discuss it? Is his attempt to describe it completely vain? 18. Given the Player's description of a tragedy in Act Two, is Stoppard's play a tragedy ("The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily")? (2.316) 19. What are the major similarities and differences between Ros's view of what a play should do, and Guil's view of how a play should relate to reality? 20. Does Stoppard's play pay homage to Hamlet or does it ridicule it?
Advanced Questions: 1. What description does Tom Stoppard provide of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s dress, and what does it reveal about their characters? 2. What does Guildenstern’s reaction to the coin toss suggest about his values? 3. In the passage between “The law of probability, it has been oddly asserted…” and “What suspense?” How does Stoppard create comedy?
Cincinnati Shakespeare Company 4. What are the existential implications in the scene thus far? 5. What does Hamlet mean when he says, “Let me comply with you in this garb, lest my extent to the players (which I tell you must show fairly outwards) should more appear like entertainment than yours”? Why is this statement ironic? 6. Why is Rosencrantz’s repeated line “He murdered us,” significant? 7. In Act 3, what word creates ambiguity, and comedy as a result, in Guildenstern’s question,“What are you feeling?” 8. Why does Guildenstern yelp? How does the action that prompts Guildenstern’s yelp contribute to an existing motif in the play? 9. Why does Guildenstern like boats, and how might this eliminate his angst about personal responsibility?
Classroom Activities: Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate: The differences in Guil's and the Player's views of death come from the fact that Guil desires that his death be significant while the Player understands that death is the most commonplace thing in the world. Play out Act 2, Scene 2 (from line 219) of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but with the knowledge of what has happened in Rosencrantz&Guildenstern Are Dead. Discuss how this changes the scene.
Other Resources: Related Links on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead And Now, the Real Thing - Stephen Moss' biography of Tom Stoppard is well-written and entertaining. It includes an overview of his life and works, in addition to anecdotes and excerpts from previous interviews. The New York Review of Books: Pragmatic Theatre - An essay by Tom Stoppard drawn from a speech given at the New York Public Library. It includes topics such as the control over information given to the audience, the editing process, and the importance of theater to art in general. Stoppard in Love - An article discussing Stoppard's and director Marc Norman's Shakespeare in Love. Reviews: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - Roger Ebert's review of the movie version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Hamlet Online - A comprehensive resource on Shakespeare's Hamlet. Six Characters in Search of an Author, L Pirandello, 1921 - A link to the full-text version of Luigi Pirandello's play, often cited as a significant precursor to Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Hamlet Haven - An online, annotated bibliography of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Sources: http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc46.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_and_Guildenstern_Are_Dead
Cincinnati Shakespeare Company http://www.shmoop.com/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead/ http://www.gradesaver.com/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead/study-guide/related-links/ http://www.tpet.com/media/productPDF/305318.pdf
