Jan

21

Book ‘Em: To Be Or…

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

January 21, 2008 |

“We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”-Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead

The richness of Shakespeare’s language and the depth of his characters has created an interesting phenomenon. We sometimes talk about them as though they’re real people. Tom Stoppard took this one step further with his breakthrough play Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, which considers what happened to these two minor characters from Hamlet outside the frame of the original play. Absurdist, even nihilistic, Stoppard’s play zeroes in on the fact that, written more than four hundred years ago, Hamlet was a masterwork of existential thought and absurdism. Hamlet dithers, talks to himself, and even goes loony wandering around a big empty stage, knowing that he has to avenge his father’s death by killing his uncle, but also, tragically, knowing that his own fate is sealed as well.

While Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead is absurdist, Stoppard’s play has more life, more energy, and more emotion than just about anything by Beckett, or even Artaud. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wander around without a purpose, unsure why they’re in Elsinore, or, for that matter, unsure even of their own identities, with only a vague memory of the previous day, but there are seriously haunting moments, such as when Rosencrantz speculates on mortality, saying,

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering–stamped into one’s memory. And yet I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. What does one make of that? We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before the know the words for it, before we know that there are words, out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Rosencrantz realizes that Hamlet has it wrong. “To be or not to be” is not the question; to be and not to be is the only answer. And yet at the end Guildenstern insists, “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, when we could have said–no. But somehow we missed it.”

A film adaptation was directed by Stoppard and released in 1990, starting Tim Roth, the protean Gary Oldman, and Richard Dreyfus. Check out Stark Raving Sane, a tribute web site for the film.

I first read the play as a senior in high school, and there was, for me, a final, strange twist on my own encounter with it. A year after graduating I dropped in at my old high school and paid a visit to my English teacher. I told her that a film version of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead had been made. She had no memory of ever assigning the play to a class, or of even having had me as a student. English was the only subject I consistently aced in high school, and I realized in her class I could probably have done it even without reading the play–or anything else. Somewhere, at the beginning, I could have said no.


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  1. Media Districts Entertainment Blog » Book ‘Em: To Be Or… on January 21, 2008 1:09 am

    […] Just Write added an interesting post today on Book ‘Em: To Be Or…Here’s a small reading […]

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