Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Foil 3 key examples

What he lacks in dialogue he compensates for with decisiveness and action. While Rosencrantz and Guildenstern idly speculate about the nature of death and the wheels “set in motion,” Hamlet schemes, kills Polonius, and consults Fortinbras. Most crucially, he switches the letter while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sleep and singlehandedly alters the course of their fate. Hamlet—who organizes the dumbshow, outwits his childhood companions, and escapes from the ship—is in command for the entirety of the play. Rosencrantz is not.

The play nonetheless draws equivalences in the midst of this contrast. Like Hamlet, Rosencrantz contemplates extensively about death. Rosencrantz imagines death to be like “being alive in a box” in almost the same way that Hamlet famously likens the afterlife to an “undiscovered country.” Their intuition of mortality—the knowledge that “you don’t go on forever”—points to a deeper resemblance than a first read might suggest.

In an unlikely twist, Rosencrantz and Hamlet end up rivaling for the play’s attention. The work foregrounds Rosencrantz during Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy, shifting the limelight from literature’s classic tragic hero to the lesser known one. The play cuts a sharp, humorous contrast in the process. While Hamlet contemplates the burdens and uncertainties of mortal life, his childhood friend wonders whether to “accost him” or approach him “straight from the shoulder.” In dubbing Hamlet’s soliloquy over with Rosencrantz’s scrambled thoughts, Stoppard emphasizes the unexpected parallels between both characters and transfers a tortured, existential narrative from one set of hands to the other.

The two protagonists supplement each other’s shortcomings. Rosencrantz is cluelessly complaisant, at various points forgetful of his own name and lines. Guildenstern has more of his wits about him, and yet his reliance on rationality—the insistence that “reason will prevail”—takes him no further than his partner. He tries—and fails—to make sense of the coin-flipping improbability and establish the direction of the wind. Guildenstern relies on Rosencrantz to while away the time as much as Rosencrantz needs Guildenstern. Collectively, the two embody humanity’s general helplessness.

The work’s protagonists advance different attitudes towards life. Stoppard casts Rosencrantz as happy-go-lucky while Guildenstern broods over an eternity “without reprieve or hope of explanation.” Rosencrantz tosses coins and asks for shoe-lickings; Guildenstern rails about theater’s failure to do justice to death. “If you’re not even happy what’s so good about surviving?” Rosencrantz reminds his partner upon hearing their duty to transport Hamlet. Their differences show, even up to the point of their deaths: Rosencrantz accepts his fate after opening the execution notice while Guildenstern frantically searches for all the ways they could have evaded it.

Both are performers extraordinaire: in Shakespeare’s original text, the protagonist spends nearly all of the play feigning madness. Hamlet continues to do so within the play, greeting his childhood companions in “this garb” of mourning and briefly admitting that “I am but mad north-west.” “Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn’t mean anything at all,” Rosencrantz observes.

Shakespeare’s prince gets mirrored by Stoppard’s Player, who has made a living from acting before an audience. “We pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade, that someone would be watching,” the Player sputters as he accuses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of abandoning the Tragedians. Like Hamlet, Stoppard’s Player has cynically internalized the emptiness of performance. He explains to Guildenstern the patent artifice of acting and living:

Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honored. One acts on assumptions.

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Just as Hamlet expresses occasional doubts about an afterlife, the Player betrays a similar cynicism. Death is a cheap theatrical tactic and a logical inevitability, a matter of mere “worms” and “dust” that the Player’s performance assigns a “significance which it does not in fact contain.” Through his glib sayings and gaudy attire, the Player dresses up the meaninglessness of life and the nothingness of death.

By emphasizing their similarities, Stoppard’s play creates a bond between these two characters. As if trading cues with Hamlet offstage, the Player picks up perfectly the prior discussion of wind directions—“I know which way the wind is blowing,” he announces. The two ultimately conspire against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Hamlet dupes the hapless pair as badly as the Player’s fakery of death does. Player and prince toy with Rosencrantz’s obliviousness and Guildenstern’s muddled frustration. They prey on the protagonists’ ignorance and idealism, living comfortably in the gaps between outward appearance and reality themselves.

But the resemblance between these two characters only accentuates the divergence of their narrative fates. Hamlet briefly outwits death but cannot evade it—like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ends with stage directions that show the Danish prince predictably dead. By contrast, the Player disappears. The Player effectively survives, crowing about the narrative inevitability of death instead: “Deaths for all ages and occasions! Deaths by suspension, convulsion, consumption, incision, execution, asphyxiation and malnutrition—!” This announcement eerily precedes the play’s very last scene, which finds all of the Danish family’s corpses strewn across the stage. Stoppard’s Player not only triumphs over death—he seemingly dictates it.

In this way, Stoppard sizes up the Danish prince against the Player and gives the ringmaster the last laugh. He fashions the Player as the only character who exists outside and beyond the work itself. The Player knows the “precedent” and the rules of the performance, the way of the stage. The Play crowns the Player as the ultimate director, in control of the narrative from beginning to end.