Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Hamlet Doesn't Look Too Good

Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead belongs to a genre of drama that challenges the notion of traditional realistic and instructive theater by presenting a universe that is absurd, stripped of all pretensions of order and purpose. Stoppard's play presents a universe that understands that Hamlet's melodramatic play-within-a-play The Mousetrap can no more hold the answer to the psychological secrets of Claudius than Shakespeare's play Hamlet itself can hold the answer to the psychological secrets of any of its readers. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead rejects the idea that a meaningful psychoanalytical realism can be constructed from the fictive world of Hamlet by reducing the so-called greatest play ever written to an absurdist histrionic melodrama high in blood but low in comprehensible rhetoric that allows for much profound relevance.

Hamlet has become at least as famous for its parts as it is for its whole, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead utilizes the play's contemporary fame as a collection of instantly recognizable but disconnected series of words and images to demonstrate how this disconnection helps to undermine the play's pretensions toward functional comprehensibility. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead as an absurdist play in itself relies upon the effect of disconnection to engender its view of incomprehen-sibility. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's conversational patterns are constructed so elliptically that they are sometimes unnerving and very often downright unintelligible. Hamlet is presented in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in much the same way so that the events are not only disconnected, but stripped of motivation and context. Ophelia twice runs on and offstage in terror, pursued by a Hamlet acting like a madman. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are melodramatically offered a king's remembrance simply to visit with Hamlet and find out why he's acting depressed. Hamlet kills Polonius for no apparent reason and then later is seen dragging Polonius' body across the stage. Bereft of the guiding hand attributed to Shakespeare's literary brilliance, the problems of Hamlet that have produced millions of published words of analysis is succinctly pared down by Guildenstern to the bare essentials: "It really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother…riddles, quibbles and evasions…stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover and appearing hatless in public".

The deep, mythic mystery of Hamlet is made up of disconnected symptoms that are expressed in increasingly melodramatic ways that end in a slaughterhouse, with eight corpses all told. The primary difference between Shakespeare's Hamlet and Stoppard's version is the significance of the poetry of the original that effectively communicates and connects all the nuances and motivations required to deflect the story away from its histrionic roots.

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the majestic beauty of Hamlet's poetry is deflated into mere theatrical magniloquence that underscores the fact that it is unreal and provides limited opportunity for psychological insight for dealing with the real world. The lofty blank verse into which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern smoothly transition once they enter the world of Hamlet becomes even more jarringly unrealistic and histrionic than usual. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's replies to Claudius become more noticeable for their exacting symmetry in lines and syllables within lines than for any actual content. The brilliantly modulated language that is acceptably realistic by itself in Shakespeare's play comes across as alien and distracting compared to the contemporary language that introduced it, language that is itself often distracting because of its theatricality. Even Rosencrantz himself is left unsure by just exactly what it was that was supposed to have been communicated by Claudius. Guildenstern warns him: "Don't let them confuse you". Yet Guildenstern eventually proves to be just as confused: "As soon as we make a move, they'll come pouring in from every side, shouting obscure instructions, confusing us with ridiculous remarks". Shakespeare's poetry as well as Stoppard's modern prose both prove to be perfect examples of what the character of the Player means when he says "we are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style". More specifically, language in both plays is patently theatrical, purposefully divorced from reality, and ultimately the language collapses as a means of communicating any kind of universal "truth" to the spectator. As Hamlet recognizes of the players in The Mousetrap, "they do but jest, poison in jest-no offense i' th' world", once it is fully comprehended that the characters in Hamlet are merely jesting, and once the distraction of the language is penetrated, it becomes obvious that the psychology of the reader should no more be affected by Hamlet than by any other play of the "blood, love and rhetoric school" to which Shakespeare's best known play belongs.

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the penetrating genius ascribed to Hamlet has been reduced to the Player's worst nightmare. The characters are "demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets". By showcasing some of the more histrionic moments of Hamlet out of context, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead calls into the question the psychoanalytic realism traditionally attributed to the text and leaves one wondering if perhaps Hamlet really is the greatest play ever written. Or even the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare.

Personally, I prefer Henry IV, Part I.