#memory jogger for the literature exam

[reginasrandomthoughts]

Okay, so I just finished reading Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and... it’s not like i don’t get it. I think I do. (Beneath the cut; semi-incoherent bc I am very tired) 

As far as my tired mind can decipher it, it is about how these two characters do not matter. They are just interchangeable pieces in Hamlet, they could be replaced by anyone. Even the other characters mix them up all the time. They have so little screen time and so little significance that they only exist in the dead space between scenes. We know nothing about them: they are supposed to be Hamlet’s best friends yet Hamlet does not trust them and they don’t have any insight into his mind to offer. And furthermore, they agree to spy on him so easily. Their one defining feature, the reason why they enter into the play and it simply doesn’t hold up to be true. 

Beyond that they are nothing. So they are kinda the perfect characters to pick for this sorta metaphor. On p92 (of my edition) Guil says that death is the absence of presence and if we accept that as the truth than Guil and Ros were always dead bc they either were not on stage so NOT present or they were so insignificant that their presence had no meaning. They were so insignificant, that even their death was off stage. They are sort of like ghosts, they cannot really interact with people on their own accord, only when the plot calls for it, except for the Tragedians, the only characters that are sorta in the same boat.(HA! that’s a joke referencing the ending)

And this insignificance, this non-life is what makes them perfect to wonder about their own limited existence. Everyone else has better things to worry about, but not them. So they wonder: they notice how their life seems to begin at the beginning of the play, how they have no memories of times before, how things don’t happen as they should (the coin flip, an 85 (?) long row of “heads” is highly improbable) and that they know nothing but what they are told, and they are told very little. They notice their insignificance as they always have to wait around for the bigger players to come to them so they can step into the scenes and they also show awareness of the fact that they are in a play, though not much. 

The Player says that actors are the opposite of people and in his complaint of being left alone he all but claims that being an actor is meaningless if there is no audience, so here to it connects to the original point: Guil and Ros are dead because they are actors with no audience. 

There is a lot of talk about death. The fact that the title itself and of course our knowledge of Hamlet tells us what will happen to the protagonists allows us to have constant references to their eventual fate, but our awareness that what we are looking at is make believe also allows for a discussion on the nature of their demise. The Player talks about the many ways actors can die and how that can seem more real than a real death because that’s what the audience expects. He says that in a tragedy the good has to end unluckily and the bad unhappily, that is nature of tragedy (p59). Ros’ and Guil’s death is as meaningless as their lives and we can suspect that it happens only to fulfill that criteria, the audience expectation.

“It is written” “We follow directions there is no choice involved” (p59, Player). Free will and predestination is also involved in the discussion. We know that this is a play, just like Hamlet is a play, so we all know that it is literally written. All of it. Even when they wonder whether they have choice or not they only do so because someone else decided that they have to think about it. Nothing, no action and no word is their own choice if we think about it from an outsider, meta perspective and it is reflected in the play as well: whenever they try to do something that might differ from what they might have done in Hamlet they stop themselves. They literally cannot go up to talk to anyone when they are not supposed to talk and they are confined to wait for other people to come to them for interactions. 

This inability to make choices is a reflection of our anxiety about the possibility that there is a higher power out there (they often use a line from Pater Noster “Give us this day our daily .... but they always add something different behind, as if they are praying to their God, the writer) who has written our fate and everything we are is meaningless bc every single choice we think we made we made bc we were always meant to make them.  

The same thing can be said about death, but in two ways. First, their insignificance, the “might as we dead” aspect is a fear we also have: does my life have meaning? would my death make a difference? But it is also our inability to come to terms with it. The Player talks about the many ways the actors pretend to die, the Tragedians mimic death, we can see mimed scenes of Hamlet where there is death, but they seem unreal. Even when Guil stabs the Player and we think he dies it turns out that it was all an act. Death is not truly real, not to them, the actors and not to us, who accept the form of death that we expect. 

This is why Guil’s last speaking part is so important: “ Our names shouted in a certain dawn... a message... a summons... there must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said no. But somehow we missed it. Rosen-? Guil-? Well, we’ll know better next time. Now you see me, now you - “

 This idea that they had a choice to begin with, the choice to not die, that if they did one thing different everything would be fine, that they would have the chance to do that, to try if it works reflects his, and our own, inability to come to term with the inevitability and finality of death. 

And the play adheres to our expectation to the very end, separating the actor’s death of from our own by having with Horatio saying that he will tell the whole story, implying that the play will just start all over again from the very beginning.