Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - Cherokee County Schools

emember ever having seen those letters in that order before...?" All of us have probably had this quirky
experience of uncertainty and Stoppard's evocation of it helps the audience identify with his beleaguered
heroes. Rosencrantz says, nostalgically, "I remember when there were no questions" and Guildenstern
responds with, "There were always questions. To exchange one set for another is no great matter." And
Rosencrantz perhaps responds for a twentieth-century audience when he concludes, "Answers, yes. There
were answers to everything." The concept of God was once the answer to everything, but with that concept in
question in the modern world, nothing, not even science or technology, has come to take its place.
Guildenstern responds to his friend's nostalgic memories of certitude by pointing out that all of the answers
now are "plausible, without being instinctive." In other words, in the modern world (the world of Stoppard's
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) probability replaces certitude as the ontological coin of the realm—what human
beings can count on as being true. Guildenstern goes on to say that "all your life you live so close to truth, it
becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye," which recalls his "unicorn" speech and the notion that
what we regard as "real" is simply what's familiar—"reality, the name we give to the common experience.''
After their first meeting with Claudius and the Danish court, the certainty that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
feel is very minimal—"that much is certain—we came." Ironically, however, Guildenstern's continued attempt
to reassure his friend in this pivotal scene leads him to stumble across the only certainty that is available to all
human beings—the certainty of one's own mortality. Guildenstern says, reassuringly, "The only beginning is
birth and the only end is death—if you can't count on that, what can you count on?" Thus Stoppard brings his
investigation of uncertainty home to his audience. On the practical level in the lives of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern the questions without answers are questions like "why were we sent for, what are we supposed
to do, where's Hamlet, what should we say to him, what's his problem, and where are we going now?'' As
these fictional characters struggle comically with an uncertainty that seems to govern in small matters, they
are gradually being drawn to their deaths and it is in their deaths that the audience can fully share their
concern for uncertainty. Few of us will engage in and experience the uncertainties of power politics, but all of
us will face, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the uncertainties we feel about our own mortality.
All of this concern for certainty and uncertainty is clear from the beginning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Are Dead when, in one of the play's most striking and important images the coin tossing game defies the laws
of probability. When over 100 coin tosses turn up a consecutive run of "heads" rather than the customary
mixture of "heads" and "tails,'' Guildenstern is disturbed because the run is not "normal" or what humans are
accustomed to. He has been thrust into a world he does not feel certain about. Ironically, the run of "heads"
has produced a kind of certainty ("heads" turns up every time) but Guildenstern can't trust this certainty
because it defies what he is familiar with. As he recalls their previous coin-tossing, he recalls that the familiar
uncertainty in their game, the "luck'' or randomness of the "heads" and "tails," came out to a roughly 50/50
percentage that created a new kind of certainty. Just as "the sun came up about as often as it went down, in the
long run, ... a coin showed heads about as often as it showed tails."
After the coin-tossing game introduces the issue of uncertainty, the addition of the tragedians and especially
the Player reinforces the theme and makes it much more explicit. To some extent out of necessity, the
tragedians live more easily with uncertainty . They are out of fashion theatrically and must be ready to
perform whatever an audience will pay to see. They also make their livelihood improvising and blurring the
distinction between illusion and reality, so they have more toleration for uncertainty about reality. When
Guildenstern complains about their uncertainty in Act II, the Player says, "Uncertainty is the normal state.
You're nobody special." His advice is to "Relax. Respond ... Act natural ... 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."
The tragedians also serve to connect the issue of uncertainty to the question of mortality. Their expertise is in
portraying death and they are relatively more comfortable with the certainty of mortality. They even felt
casual enough with it to attempt using the actual execution of one of their actors on stage when the action in
Stoppard's Themes of Uncertainty and Confusion 13