Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead example essay topic

Tom Stoppard Tom Stoppard: A Critic of The Modern Age Tom Stoppard is one of the twentieth century's most interesting and creative playwrights. He uses his art form to criticize society's inability to handle the thought that we are governed by chaos. The modern world has created fate as an excuse for not doing anything to shape or change our outcome. Stoppard uses his plays as a mirror held up to society, showing his audience the ridiculousness of leaving everything up to fate.

Tom Stoppard is a contemporary playwright living in Great Britain. Stoppard created modern characters to reflect modern attitudes, and most specifically, modern flaws. In each case he shows that the characters representing modern men will readily believe that their future cannot be changed and that they are not responsible for their own acts. He uses different characters in vastly different circumstances to make and criticize this same point. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard cleverly removes the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from the play of Hamlet, extends Shakespeare's caricatures of them and makes them modern.

The play is now about how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern present the viewer with an image of modern attitudes. They never perceive any kind of order in the universe. To them everything is completely random. On the other hand, the Player represents the epitome of a person in denial of chaos. To him everything is set in stone, even death. Throughout the course of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard mixes three different sets of characters that are crucial to Shakespeare's Hamlet.

These groups are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the troupe of players called the Tragedians and the main cast of Hamlet. The cast of Hamlet only speak in Shakespearean language and all of their lines are taken from the text of Hamlet. These characters voice Stoppard's opinion on how people should be. They have a purpose. Although Hamlet's purpose may be to avenge his father's death, it still gives a purpose to his life. Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and the Tragedians speak in modern English and represent Stoppard's comical opinion of current attitudes and beliefs.

The troupe of players is the same troupe that perform the play written by Hamlet as a mime of the events that transpired at the court leading to Claudius's rise to the throne. They also periodically act out mimes for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, such as the duel scene at the end of the play, as a way of showing what is happening in Shakespeare's play simultaneously with Stoppard's. Both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are shallow characters who are bored and cannot seem to make their lives meaningful. They look to others to give their lives meaning, Rosencrantz turns to Guildenstern, and Guildenstern usually turns to whomever he meets on the street. To Rosencrantz, life is all about luck, or chaos. He never perceives any kind of order nor does he care about probability.

It doesn't matter whether what happens to him is good or bad, just so long as it is something to comment upon. From the opening scene of the play, Stoppard is holding a mirror up to modern society through the lack of purpose for his two main characters. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's question game was much less of a conversation than it was a way for Stoppard to point out the existence of chaos in that everything is questionable. An example of this is while they are waiting for Hamlet, Guildenstern asks Rosencrantz, 'Are you deaf?' Ros: 'Am I dead?' Guil: 'Yes or no?' Ros 'Is there a choice?' Guil: ' Is there a God?' Ros: 'Foul!

No non sequitur's... ' (Act I, pg. 33). To Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, there are no certainties, just random occurrences of which they take no notice and just shrug off as 'normal. ' These two hit on important topics - death, choice, God - but not with the intent of actually discussing these topics, only as a way to pass the time until Hamlet appears so that they can fulfill their duty to the king. These questions are not questions that would be asked by a character like the Player. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ask these questions because of their pure, blind acceptance of chaos.

The fact that these two characters keep track of the score, as though it were a tennis match, for at least three pages, only adds to the pitiful portrayal of modern attitudes that is characteristic of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The Lead Player is the third main character. He is the opposite to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The Player believes in pre determinism and, instead of believing in chaos, he has thrown the entire theory of chaos out of the window and has decided that everything has been pre written by, of course, the writer who has cast us all in his worldwide play. That ultimate play is completely finite and unchangeable. Everything has been written, even death.

In fact, the Player's favorite thing to act is a death. He is a firm believer that death is an integral part of the play and that a play is meant to span an entire life, therefore it is not over until all those marked for death are dead. The Player's certainty that everything is predetermined leads Guildenstern to realize that he and Rosencrantz's total acceptance of chaos has led them to a disastrous end. He says to the Player in a heated argument, 'I'm talking about death - and you " ve never experienced that. And you cannot act it...

But no one gets up after death- there is no applause- there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's - Death-' (Act, pg. 96). The Player's naivety to the fact that he is in reality (or at least the reality that exists on the stage in Stoppard's play) and not in his little play of life leads him to, in fact, be much happier in his false knowledge that there is no chaos and that everything is pre-set. The knowledge that there is chaos is the root of Guildenstern's unhappiness and therefore, in Stoppard's opinion, the root of society's problem with dealing with the chaos. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Stoppard shows two ways that modern society has reacted to the knowledge that we live in constant chaos. One is to completely accept it and disregard all of the laws of probability and the other is to completely deny chaos and believe in pre determinism to it's fullest. Stoppard feels that as time has progressed, the very nature of people has changed.

People used to take action because they were determined to control their lives and they were either able to see the patterns in the chaos or they were convinced that there were patterns. People now talk about taking action, but they rarely do it. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Hamlet is a man of action, as is Claudius because he killed the previous king to get the throne. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, on the other hand, represent modern people.

They are all talk and very little action. They lack purpose and therefore sit around flipping coins all day. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is a play full of low comedy and jokes concerning differing opinions on death. The characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are so similar that neither the on stage characters nor the audience can really tell them apart.

Even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves can not tell who is who. They are Stoppard's bumbling modern idiots who fail to see order in the chaos. The remainder of the low comedy of this play comes from interactions with the Lead Player. Unlike Guildenstern, he views death as a vital part of the play, not as the finalist ic end of everything. Stoppard is showing the audience the two extremes of modern society, those who, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, completely accept chaos and are willing to throw everything else out the window, and those who, like the Player, are in denial of the existence of chaos. Neither decides to deal with the chaos.

Those who completely accepted it became bumbling idiots and those who denied it were living is a fantasy world that was very apparent to the audience.