Back in college, I had a brilliant professor who breathed Shakespeare. In class, she would sit on top of the table, her legs crossed like an Indian in a tepee, and she would recite lines from memory. “To be or not to be, that is the question.” That table was her stage. And we were her audience.
Hamlet was one of the plays we read. It’s a classic Shakespearean tragedy—they all die in the end, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern included. We don’t know much about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, except that they are Hamlet’s friends (and the fact that they have curious and difficult-to-pronounce names.) I wanted to know more about them.
And then I came across an old copy of Tom Stoppard’s play entitled Rosencrantz and Guidenstern Are Dead at a second-hand bookstore in school. It is a play that takes place in Shakespeare’s world, particularly Hamlet’s, with special appearances by major Hamlet characters such as King Claudius, Gertrude, Polonious, and Ophelia. Here, the major characters in Hamlet are cast in minor roles, and the “extras,” so to speak, are thrust into the limelight. If anything, the play affirms that even the seemingly insignificant of characters have their own stories to tell. That even minor characters can become big stars also.
The play, among other things, talks about fate and the certainty of death; thus:
Player: …There’s a design at work in all art—surely, you know that? Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion.
Guildenstern: And what’s that, in this case?
Player: It never varies—we aim at the point where everyone who is marked for death dies….
Guildenstern: Who decides?
Player (switching of his smile): Decides? It is written….
Rosencrantz and Guidenstern Are Dead is, in a sense, a retelling of Hamlet. But even retellings have their limits. Retellings cannot completely break free from the clutches of that which was “originally told”. Everyone who is marked for death dies. It is written. In Hamlet, they are all marked for death. It can no longer be undone.
And true enough, in Rosencrantz and Guidenstern Are Dead, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. This is the aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion.
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