Word: rosencrantzes
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...surface, Stoppard has devised an astoundingly clever theatrical trick. We see only the few scraps of Hamlet that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern see. Since they see so little, Hamlet, Claudius, Ophelia and the rest become merely bit parts in Stoppard's play. We see a mammoth tragedy from the worst possible vantage point, and what little of Shakespeare remains in the play seems ridiculous and funny in this context...
Underneath this droll gimmick, however, is much more. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are at the center of Stoppard's work, and they become its tragic heroes. Like Didi and Gogo, who bide their time with games of the spirit while waiting for the never-to-appear Godot, Stoppard's heroes devise their own games to endure the waiting for their Godot...
...have stopped and logic is dead. A flipped coin comes up heads 85 times in a row. The landscape seems blank and irrelevant to life. Meanwhile, they must watch all of Shakespeare's characters as they walk in and out, moaning and pontificating on subjects that escape them. As Rosencrantz cries in the last act, "Incidents! All we get is incidents! Dear God, is it too much to expect a little sustained action...
WORST OF ALL, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern find even their own identities in doubt. Not only do Shakespeare's characters find it difficult to distinguish between the two, but the title characters themselves have difficulty determining which of them is which...
...calmly, hopefully. ("Well, we'll know better next time.") In this hint of optimism, there is perhaps hope for surviving in a world in which "we drift through time, clutching at straws." And, when Stoppard shows us part of Hamlet's final scene, the English Ambassador's pronouncement "that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead" elicits the audience realization that death may be the only event it can count on in an insane universe...