Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Genre 1 key example

As an absurdist work, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead follows directly in the footsteps of Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot. Absurdist theater—which came to popularity after World War II—sought to present the messiness of human reality in more faithful terms. To this end, absurdist theater turned away from those classical narrative structures that prized unity and order above all. Rather than imitating life, absurdist works reckoned with human mortality by presenting it in its barest, sometimes illogical, terms. Rosencrantz simply disappears, followed by Guildenstern. Stoppard exploits gaps in the plot to showcase the strangeness of the human condition.

Characteristic of other absurdist works, the play couples tragedy with comedy to take life’s strangeness in stride. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—bumbling and oblivious—are equally humorous as they are tragic. They comment on the odds of coin tosses and role-play in a way that farcically acknowledges life’s randomness and unpredictability. Lines from the Player meanwhile possess a meta-awareness of the play’s own conceit. The play grapples with mortality and fate through lighthearted wordplay and self-consciousness.

In revisiting a literary classic, the play’s impulse towards adaptation is not new. Neither is its focus on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: somewhat coincidentally but unrelated to Stoppard’s work, the 19th-century English dramatist W.S. Gilbert published the satire Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in 1874. In reimagining this infamous duo, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead writes the pair into modern language and to fit modern times.