Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - Cherokee County Schools

standard of art and genius. However, the duration and accomplishments of Stoppard's career has finally
affirmed his status as a major playwright. By the time Stoppard had written Jumpers and Travesties, Jack
Richardson, writing in Commentary in 1974, had to admit Stoppard's pre-eminence: "since Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, a play I admired but found a little too coy and dramatically forced in its darker moments,
Stoppard has come closer and closer to a successful wedding of theatrical artistry and intelligence. He is
already the best playwright around today, the only writer I feel who is capable of making the theatre a truly
formidable and civilized experience again."
In the context of a brilliant career, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead continues to be a formidable
achievement. Even by 1973, Normand Berlin, writing in Modern Drama, could assert that Stoppard's first
major play had "acquired a surprisingly high reputation as a modern classic." And within a decade of its first
appearance, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead had enjoyed over 250 productions in twenty different
languages. Though a number of critics now feel that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is perhaps not
Stoppard's best play—that some of his later work have been more complex, polished, and mature—Stoppard's
first major play remains his most popular and his most widely performed.
Character Analysis
Guildenstern
In Stoppard's play, Guildenstern is the more philosophical and intellectual of the two courtiers who double as
minor characters in Shakespeare's play and major characters in Stoppard's. The opening sequence of coin
tossing vexes Guildenstern because he craves order and predictability in the universe. The apparent violation
of probability in coin tossing drives him to seek an explanation but he attempts to remain calm when no
satisfactory answers arise. He has a wry sense of humor, can be quite sarcastic, and is resilient, though he is
also quick to anger and subject to panic or despondency when he finally feels overwhelmed. Guildenstern
likes to hear himself talk and often rambles at length, sometimes without making a lot of sense. He frequently
uses parables and analogies to attempt to understand the mysteries that confront him and he likes verbal
games as a way of working things out. Wary and nervous, he likes to stay in control and questions more than
his friend, Rosencrantz, whom he often badgers but ultimately is trying to protect and support with optimism
whenever possible.
Rosencrantz
Rosencrantz is a minor character in Shakespeare' s Hamlet and one of the two major characters in Stoppard's
unusual version of Shakespeare's story. In Shakespeare's play, Rosencrantz is one of Hamlet's university
friends from Wittenberg. With Guildenstern, he is summoned by King Claudius to come to Denmark because
Hamlet, after returning to Denmark for his father's funeral and his mother's wedding, began acting quite
strangely. Rosencrantz helps Guildenstern spy on Hamlet for Claudius and then is assigned with his friend to
take Hamlet to England after Hamlet kills Polonius. When Hamlet returns to England, he reports to his friend
Horatio that on the ship to England he discovered Claudius' s letter ordering his death. He substituted a letter
ordering the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and escaped the ship when pirates attacked it. In Hamlet,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are such nondescript characters that Claudius and his queen Gertrude can't
distinguish between them.
In Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz is the more timid of the two courtiers and considerably less reflective and
philosophical than his friend, Guildenstern. At the beginning of the play Rosencrantz is winning on every toss
of the "heads or tails" game and is embarrassed to be taking so much money from his friend but is either
oblivious or unconcerned about how unusual this streak of "heads" might be. He is relatively unreflective,
Character Analysis 10