Are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Dead?
Comedy and Freedom in Stoppard's play
Happy last day of classes—for me anyway.
This semester I decided to conclude our first-year great books program, The Aquinas Program, with Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. This term the students have read Descartes, Montaigne, Pascal, Hamlet, among other things, so I thought R&G would be a good way to reflect not only on ideas about death, certainty, the self, but also on what it means to live with and in old books, books. Often it can feel as though the end of a great books survey is a kind of crisis—the weight of too much history, too much Tradition and the sense that things are somehow gone irrevocably wrong. Hamlet is, on my reading, a sort of “crisis of modernity” play, but Stoppard’s play pulls a comedy out of it. It’s both a model for reading old books—trying to live inside of them and make them your own, to play by their own rules without capitulating, necessarily, to their view of things—and I think it’s a hopeful view of modern life.
In his Author’s Note to the 2015 edition of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard addresses what he takes to be a surprising misreading of the play:
Finally, I’d like to permit myself a general observation. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, whatever else it is, is a comedy. My intention was comic, and if the play had not turned out funny, I would have considered that I had failed. Quite a lot of solemn and scholarly stuff has been written about it, which is fine and flattering, but it is worth bearing in mind that among the productions staged all over the world, two werecomparative failures, and both of these took the play very seriously indeed.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a comedy, should play as funny, and attempts, scholarly and theatrical, to force the play into high seriousness will fail because they go against the grain, struggling against the will of its creator. As the Player remarks: “There’s a design at work in all art…Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral, and logical conclusion.” Stoppard confirms that, whatever its complexities, this is the rubric we should use in evaluating R&G. In other words, R&G is not simply an absurd attempt to stuff Waiting for Godot into Hamlet. Whereas Beckett famously describes Godot as a “tragicomedy,” Stoppard does not think there is anything tragic about R&G. (And, anyway, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s “Godots” arrive repeatedly, to their consternation).
Perhaps the ambiguity around R&G’s genre arises because it is a comedy about tragedy. Indeed, a plurality of its characters are tragedians, the Player King expounds on the topic to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the play occurs within The Tragedy of Hamlet. The key, I think, is the way that R&G reads Hamlet. Hamlet is a tragedy, depicts a tragedy, and meditates on the philosophical and political preconditions of the tragic view of life.
One way to read Hamlet is as an articulation of why, at the cusp of modernity, tragedy might be our permanent condition: modern insights like our inability to achieve stable knowledge about nature, the inscrutability of divine providence, and the viciousness of human beings leave us permanently stuck between classical virtue and Christian redemption. The theoretical and political emphases of modernity meanwhile threaten to cut us off from truly meaningful alternatives. Stoppard’s response to Hamlet is not simply his animation of two minor characters; rather, he traps these characters in its tragic cosmos and finds comedy within it. They respond to their alienating circumstances differently than Hamlet, in ways that, taken together, suggest characteristics the Dane lacks: care, play, and appropriate confidence in reason. Although R&G seem to meet their end—we are all, ultimately, in the same boat, the play reminds us—this bare fact does not mean their story is tragedy. Instead, it suggests that comic freedom remains a possibility in the modern world, in part through Stoppard’s very art.
As is often remarked, Hamlet is set on the verge of mode
rnity. He is caught between classical antiquity and Christianity, He is skeptical of his chum Horatio’s placid Stoic skepticism, but also harbours doubts about his own Christian faith. He is caught between eternities. Hamlet is, moreover, cosmopolitan. He has seen enough of the world to understand that Denmark is a backwater—a “prison”—but also knows that he cannot precisely crown himself “king of infinite space,” and doubts whether its troubles are in principle different from generic human rottenness.
Hamlet was a student at the University of Wittenberg, an institution known for its early embrace of the new natural science and its strict Protestantism. These twin forces of revolution in understanding and reformation of Christianity re-open questions about the trustworthiness of prior accounts of reason and revelation. Notably, both Protestantism and the new science turn human beings back in upon themselves, on their own senses and in their personal relationships with God. Both, moreover, raise questions about our ability to understand nature through unaided reason and, importantly, whether we can know the best way to live through reason alone. As a skeptical Wittenbergian, Hamlet is slightly ahead of his time, living through intellectual movements which would go on to transform Shakespeare’s England, and, of course, our modern world. In Hamlet, then, Shakespeare provides a tragic hero who is, in important ways, like us.
Hamlet’s problem is therefore that he cannot commit to any one understanding of what makes a good human life, which exacerbates his ability to address his admittedly vexing circumstances. The sticking point for Hamlet is the meaning of death: does its finality mean that everything is meaningless and everything is permitted or that everything is meaningful and so nothing is? Or is it some combination of the two, as when Hamlet is unable to kill Claudius because he wants a guarantee that Claudius’ torment will be eternal? Such a calculation assumes an odd theological universe in which Claudius’ eternal happiness matters more than Hamlet’s. Even despite the complication of the ghost—whose provenance he appropriately cannot fully determine—Hamlet’s confusion here is telling: he cannot commit to being a fully pagan avenger nor a consistently Christian prince.
Hamlet is indeed admirable in many ways: he is smart and sensitive, and yet it is precisely his intelligence and philosophical inclination that torments him with the problem of his own existence. He is cosmopolitan; aware of Denmark as a relative backwater, but, correspondingly, unable to rule out any possibilities because of the very largeness of his world. He sees, to his credit, that this means he cannot know with the certainty required of decisive action. Hamlet fundamentally vacillates between the notion that he is “subject to his birth”—that his actions are guided by fate or Providence—or whether death consigns it all to meaningless one way or the other. He occasionally flirts with the sort of nihilism that views the world as it should be as impossible, the world as it is unacceptable. He wonders whether the “deed is all” or if indeed “thinking makes it so.” Hamlet is the tragedy of enlightenment, and therefore of certain currents in modernity. Whatever freedom is gained from revolution and Reformation may be quixotic.
The play itself, moreover, exceeds its own bounds and makes us question whether we know enough to reach an authoritative account of its meaning. Hamlet’s beautiful and winsome soliloquies give us privileged access to his perspective, but the motivations of some of the other major characters—most notably Gertrude, who is a cypher—remain obscure. Important parts of the action happen off-stage, and the play is evasive, creating uncertainty about some of its most basic elements. It is, as my friend and colleague Andrew Moore likes to say, a hall of mirrors, redirecting attempts at nailing it down. There’s no way out, and no easy solace to be had in Hamlet.
Hamlet is a tragedy that suggests that the intellectual and historical forces shaping the modern world might themselves continually create the conditions of Hamlet-like tragedies. It is, moreover, constructed in such a way as to make audiences and readers complicit in Hamlet’s situation, to make us look for solutions that are not to be found. Hamlet makes us feel like we are trapped in Hamlet because we very may well be. R&G, interestingly enough, takes the idea of being stuck inside Hamlet as its organizing conceit.
It is not true that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are, as some critics suggest, “non-characters.” In Hamlet Rosencrantz does almost all of the talking; in R&G, Guildenstern does. This is the first of several interesting inversions. In the opening scene, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are playing an unnerving coin spinning game in which there has been an “impossible” run of heads in a row. In this context Stoppard provides sparse “character notes” for his protagonists, Rosencrantz is, above all else, a good friend (he is “nice enough to feel a little embarrassed” at winning the coin flip game against Guildenstern so many times); Guildenstern is worried by the implications of this unlikely situation; “aware but not going to panic about it.” R&G are consequently distinguished from Hamlet in three ways. First, they are not lonely like Hamlet is. They have each other. They are on stage together for the entire play, and they are friends. Second, Rosencrantz is a good friend. Hamlet, plainly, is neither a good friend nor a good lover. Third, Guildenstern is capable of understanding the significance of the laws of probability being perhaps in abeyance, but not prone to panic. It is as if Stoppard has generated these characters as a precise and pointed counterpoint to Hamlet’s more prominent faults.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not understand where they are or what they are doing. They simply know “they were sent for” which is “why they’re here.” Are they Dasein? Despite this situation, they maintain a relatively even keel throughout the play, and do their best to discern what, given their inability to remember much about themselves or what is going on in Elsinore, they ought to do. They do not often need to act on their own initiative; every time they resolve to do so, the action of Hamlet reenters their world, and they learn a little bit more about what is going on, and what they ought to do.
Throughout, R&G are game and funny. With Rosencrantz’ characteristic good humour and Guildenstern’s relentless speculation, they truly make the most of their situation. Playing on the canonical Hamlet confusion of the two by Gertrude and Claudius, R&G are repeatedly taken one for the other, but the confusion comes out of their desire not to embarrass anyone, and to attempt to adjust for the presumed confusion of others. It’s not an identity crisis; it’s just good manners. We might also consider Guildenstern’s hypothesis about their unlikely run of heads at the top of the play:
The scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear…If we postulate that within un-, sub-, or supernatural forces the probability is that the law of probability will not operate as a factor, then we must accept that the probability of the first part will not operate as a factor, in which case the law of probability will operate as a factor within un-, sub-, or supernatural forces. And since it obviously hasn’t been doing so, we can take it that we are not held within un-, sub, or supernatural forces after all; in all probability, that is. Which is a great relief to me personally.”
Or take Rosencrantz’ questioning of Guildenstern-as-Hamlet, to attempt to discern what might actually be wrong with him:
R: Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father
dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king.
G: Yes
R: Unorthodox
G: Undid me.
In spite of their limited information, they ask the right questions: a quality not shared by the evidently terminally incurious other residents of Hamlet’s Denmark. Throughout the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are witty and winsome. Their situation is difficult, but they’re still fun and funny. Despite the myriad, often ridiculous, setbacks, then, R&G do not give up trying to understand what is going on, as Guildenstern observes: “There were always questions. To exchange one set for another is no great matter.” While they do so, Hamlet moves apace, driving towards its seemingly inevitable conclusion. But does not this conclusion, and their deaths, not cast a pall over the proceedings?
Is it tragic that we know, from the title of the play, and, indeed have known for as long as there has been a Hamlet that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are, or soon will be, dead? The absurdist reading of the play lean heavily on the apparent cruelty of this fact, of the way that we grow in affection for R&G as they muddle through, just so they can die. The problem with this line is that both characters make comments along these lines about death: “The only beginning is birth and the only end is death—if you can’t count on that, what can you count on?” Moreover, the play culminates in an elaborate joke about the inevitability of death as, in the final analysis, everyone does indeed end up in the same boat.
R&G has a resident theorist-practitioner of tragedy in the Player, the leader of the group who stage the “mousetrap” in Hamlet. The Player is vaguely malevolent force, and as close as the play has to a villain. His speciality is tragedy: “Deaths and disclosures, universal and particular, denouements both unexpected and inexorable.” Guildenstern asks the Player if he might know something by “one of the Greeks” to which he replies “We’re more of the blood, love, and rhetoric school,” clarifying that, of these elements, “blood is compulsory.” When Guildenstern asks whether this is “what the people want,” he demurs: “it’s what we do.” (Perhaps this should be the unofficial motto of academics everywhere).
In a later return to the topic, the Player argues, echoing Hamlet’s comments on providence: “There’s a design at work in all art—surely you know that? Events must play out to aesthetic, moral, and logical conclusion…It never varies—we aim at the point where everyone who is marked for death dies….We’re tragedians, you see. We follow directions—there is no choice involved. The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.” The Player’s theory of tragedy is consistent with what we have seen in Hamlet: in modernity choice seems constrained by historical and intellectual forces beyond our control; more, our very freedom is constraining. Hamlet, moreover, corroborates the sense of an inexorable “aesthetic, moral, and logical conclusion,” in its implication of the audience and its refusal to soften its tragic elements.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern both push back against the Player’s account of tragedy. Rosencrantz rightly points out: “Well, really—I mean, people want to be entertained—they don’t come expecting sordid and gratuitous filth.” They Player responds: “You’re wrong—they do! Murder, seduction and incest—what do you want—jokes?” Rosencrantz, an Aristotelian, reveals: “I want a good story, with a beginning, middle, and end;” Guildenstern, unknowingly parroting Hamlet himself, contends: “I’d prefer art to mirror life, if it’s all the same to you.” A realistic account of life, modern life include, will include jokes, and we reach out for coherent plots with beginnings middles and ends in part because, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we still use reason to guide and give shape to our lives. Not long after this encounter, when R&G resolve to attempt to leave the stage, it is the Tragedians who quite literally “block their exit.” It is a little on the nose, but R&G, who are trapped in a tragic cosmos, are physically corralled by tragedians.
The tragedians’ emphasis on dead bodies, and on the tragic necessity of death is not unsatisfying because it is too materialistic or reductionist, but because it is too abstract. It is abstract to the point of meaninglessness to suggest we can know too much about the meaning of human life from the bare fact of death. As Guildenstern equably observes when, in Act 3, Hamlet’s plot to have them killed in England is discovered: “As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don’t know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.”
Throughout the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have made their audience laugh repeatedly—entertained them—but they have also had fun themselves. They play three games throughout the play, one in each act: the improbable coin flip game, questions, and then a simple game in which Rosencrantz hides a coin in his hands and Guildenstern guesses which hand conceals the coin. The first one borders on absurdity because it is so thoroughly out of their control; the second turns conversations into a competition where nothing can be learned without losing (Hamlet, of course, excels in a section of the text of Hamlet that is not depicted on stage in R&G: “he murdered us,” Rosencrantz significantly summarizes); but in the last one, Rosencrantz claims agency. He first conceals no coin so he can win; later he puts a coin in each hand because, touchingly, he “wanted to make [Guildenstern] happy.” Whatever alienation we suffer from modernity, it is still possible to laugh; the horizon of death has, since Herodotus, been known as a potential roadblock to happiness which has, nevertheless, not succeeded in making happiness impossible.
Stoppard seems to suggest that the abstract focus on death, or abstracting oneself to death in the manner of Hamlet, cannot undo laughter, which means giving up some control and interrupting your thinking; it cannot make games cease to be fun. Stoppard creates an entire comedic world within the tragic one: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, it is suggested in Hamlet itself, are unremarkable, indeed, interchangeable, and yet within these constraints, without precisely volatilizing the original, Stoppard creates two fully-formed, consistent, interesting, and sympathetic characters. We care for them when they are under threat of death, because we recognize our similarity to them, and because they represent something true about human life. But Stoppard, moreover, working within the relentless tragedy of Hamlet, creates a comic art that shows the freedom available within the most rigid constraints.
In the end, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern survive the pirates and the tragedians both, while everyone is in the boat to England. They do not die. Or, at least, in R&G as in Hamlet, if they die, they die offstage. The play picks up with the ending of Hamlet, where, the bodies piled high enough to appease the Player, the English Ambassador delivers the news about the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
The last speech is given to Horatio, but Stoppard does not allow Hamlet to draw to a close. If part of what makes Hamlet such a complete tragedy is its ending, Stoppard stops that ending short. All along, he has used scenes while also showing what the Player calls “a kind of integrity” in focusing on what happens off-stage with R&G. R&G are saved from death by being offstage at the ending of Hamlet. They have finally escaped the play, as they had been attempting to do throughout. Hamlet suggests that the condition of modernity is to leave us always teetering on the edge of tragedy. This may be so. Stoppard shows that art, at least, will not be constricted in this way. His miraculous insertion of a comedy into a tragedy, and a comedy which defends comedy against tragedy, is itself an act of freedom.
If the ending of Hamlet is appropriate to its thematic contents, and if its composition is a hall mirrors meant to trap us, the ambiguity and uncertainty of the ending of R&G perform the same function. Stoppard’s comedy points to the same uncertainty, the ruptures in the structures of belonging, that lead to Hamlet’s situation, and suggests a series of characteristics, or virtues, in R&G which can help us live in such a world. The ambiguities of modern life are as open to laughter as they are to tears. Stoppard’s capacity to open up the most tightly constructed play and find in it a comedy, is itself an act of comic freedom.
Long live Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!