Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
What's it like to be dead in a box?

The sight is dismal
 And our affairs from England come too late.
 The ears are senseless that should give us hearing,
 To tell him his commandment is fulfilled,
 That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

A 1966 play by Tom Stoppard. A Perspective Flip of Hamlet, heavily inspired by Waiting for Godot. The excellent 1990 film version (also directed by Stoppard) is best known. It stars Gary Oldman as Rosencrantz, Tim Roth as Guildenstern, and Richard Dreyfuss as the Player.

The leads are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who were only minor characters in the Shakespearean Hamlet. Their dilemma: being minor characters, they were never granted much of a backstory, and as a result they have no memory of their lives. Including which of them is supposed to be which. They're utterly, hopelessly stuck in a World Limited to the Plot: all they know, instinctively, are the lines they're meant to say to Hamlet and the rest of the cast. They're appropriately freaked out by this.

As in Hamlet, they're called to visit their college friend Prince Hamlet, and they don't dare refuse because King Claudius did the asking. The whole play is about their lack of control of events, and their failures to know and remember things they ought to know. But just like King Claudius summoned them to talk to Hamlet, Hamlet has summoned a troupe of actors to influence King Claudius. The leader of that troupe (the Player) takes it upon himself to address Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in all their existential confusion, almost pushing them into awareness of the fourth wall -- but never quite beyond it.

Real sections of Hamlet are inserted where appropriate.

There is much literate and absurdist humor in this play, angling into philosophy. The play has become highly influential and helped cement the Those Two Guys trope in modern literature. The perspective flip has also left a mark on culture: whereas the 1948 Laurence Olivier film of Hamlet omitted Rosencrantz and Guildenstern because, well, they were minor characters, modern productions now treat the characters as integral to the plot and often briefly reference Stoppard.

Tropes used in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead include:

The Player: The old man thinks he's in love with his daughter.
Rosencrantz: Good God. We're out of our depths here.
The Player: No, no, no! He hasn't got a daughter! The old man thinks he's in love with his daughter.
Rosencrantz: The old man is?
The Player: Hamlet... in love... with the old man's daughter... the old man... thinks.
Rosencrantz: Ah.

Guildenstern: "...stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover, and appearing hatless in public..."

We can show you rapiers!" Cue a man and woman fencing "Or rape!" Cue the woman jumping on the man's crotch. "Or both!" Cue the woman raping the man while fencing another man.

  • But Thou Must!: A dramatic version. Whenever Hamlet kicks in, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern find themselves speaking the "right" lines, only to go back to being lost immediately afterwards.
  • Cessation of Existence: The ending of the play. Guildenstern also frequently insists upon it when the Players discuss staging death.
    • Though Guildenstern's final line arguably puts it in a different context. He wants to know what he could have done to change the course of events, when he could have said "no". You are, of course, free to watch the play or movie all you like. He'll never say anything to change the events even if he lives the story a thousand times.
  • Comic Role Play
  • Completely Missing the Point: In an in-story example which also counts as a Crowning Moment of Funny: "I've frequently not been on boats."
  • The Cuckoolander Was Right: Rosencrantz, frequently. Guildenstern is the smarter of the two in terms of raw cognitive power, but has a tendency to think in circles. Rosencrantz comes closer to actual brilliance, but falls short of the mark trying to vocalize or demonstrate his thoughts to Guildenstern.
  • Critical Existence Failure
  • Deadpan Snarker: Guildenstern.
  • Deconstruction: Not just of Hamlet but of theater conventions in general.
  • Downer Ending: It's in the title, so you know exactly how it's going to end.
  • Escort Mission
  • Fan Fiction: In a manner of speaking
  • Follow the Plotted Line: Stoppard has great fun constructing his plot this way: however far off topic they seem to get, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern always find themselves slotted back into Hamlet.
  • Foregone Conclusion: Believe it or not, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern die.
    • Or maybe they don't and are in a time loop. Or maybe not.
      • And in any case, they're only stage deaths... aren't they?
  • Gainax Ending: Death? A time loop based on the play being played multiple times? Simply leaving the focus of the play? "Well, we'll know better next time. Now you see me, now you" *disappears*
  • Groundhog Day Loop: Explicitly invoked at the end. Even though Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, they'll return as soon as the messenger calls. Unfortunately, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern both suffer from Laser-Guided Amnesia; only the Player has Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory.
  • Genius Ditz: Rosencrantz
  • Heads or Tails: They periodically flip a coin to make a decision, but it is established early on that the coin always lands heads up, as a symptom of You Can't Fight Fate. Until the one time it's tails.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Guildenstern
  • Lampshading
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia
  • Late Arrival Spoiler: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern die in Hamlet.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Shading into...
  • Lower Deck Episode: The entire play.
    • At least one production was presented back to back with 'Hamlet' - Hamlet ran for a few weeks first with R&C being the next play at the theatre. With the same cast. In the same roles. With the 'Shakespeare' scenes staged exactly the same way.
      • Sometimes in the late 80s, the Stratford, Ontario Shakespeare Festival ran Hamlet and R&C on alternate nights with the same cast. R&G's entrance in Hamlet had them flipping a coin.
  • Medium Awareness: Kind of, almost. They know something funny is going on ("Heads... Heads... Heads...."), and one of them has a sneaking suspicion that it could be something like "We're just two minor characters in someone else's story."
    • More attention called to this in stage productions. The characters spend the entire time on the stage while the rest of the play sweeps in and out, and their private musings between the two are often spent looking out across the audience or 'into the camera' as it were. In some versions one of them even spits into the audience.
  • Nuclear Candle: The second act opens in near-darkness. Then Hamlet lights a single oil-lamp, and the stagelights all come on. The stage directions even note that this is highly unrealistic.
  • Oh, and X Dies: Obviously.
  • Ontological Mystery: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's attempts at understanding the nature of their own existence.
  • Perspective Flip
  • Pinball Protagonists: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
  • Playing Against Type: Gary Oldman and Tim Roth spent much of the 1990's playing hammy villains, so it was a shock for some audience back then to see them in such a comedy.
  • Popcultural Osmosis: Even people who haven't seen the play and know nothing of its contents are aware of it - and its leads
  • Post Modernism: Yeah. Much of the play is a roundabout method of deconstructing the suspension of disbelief.
  • Random Number God: At the beginning of the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern flip a coin almost 90 times and it comes up heads each time. One of Guildenstern's proposed explanations is "divine intervention" God wants Rosencrantz (betting on heads) to win, or Guildenstern to lose. The subtext is that he's right, it is divine intervention: the author of the play wants the coins to come up heads over and over again.
  • Requisite Royal Regalia: A rare case where we see the regalia come off after the king and queen are done having an audience.
  • Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: The Player, who knows perfectly well that he's been here before.
  • Shout-Out: The Player's definition of tragedy is a misquote of Oscar Wilde's definition of fiction in The Importance of Being Earnest.
  • Show Within a Show: The Murder of Gonzago. The movie adaptation gets even worse about it -- we have the court watching The Murder of Gonzago as the characters of Gonzago are watching a puppet show for the same reason Hamlet staged all this in the first place. It's basically Hamlet Within Hamlet Within Hamlet. Within Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
    • There's also that scene in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern come on the Players performing Hamlet for a group of peasants. One of the show's hallmarks is that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern keep coming into contact with the story of Hamlet and don't recognize it as their life.
      • Oh, it's worse than that. The silent play they see is actually in Hamlet as well where it serves as a prelude to The Murder of Gonzago. Virtually all directors just leave it out because it's such a nonsensical bit of writing (even Branaugh had it done in less than thirty seconds).
  • Supporting Protagonist
  • Those Two Guys and/or Those Two Bad Guys: Much of the play is a deconstruction of these.
  • Title Drop: The film's final line
  • Theatrics of Pain: Demonstrated when Guildenstern seizes the Player's dagger and tries to stab him to death. Guildenstern thinks the Player has been Killed Off for Real, when the Tragedians start applauding and congratulating the Player on a death scene well played. (He considers his own performance "merely competent.")
  • Tragedy: Deconstructed
  • World Limited to the Plot: It's pretty much the entire point of the play.
  • Your Princess Is in Another Castle: The death of The Player.
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