Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Copyright © 1967 by Tom Stoppard
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Act One |
Note (Hals):
A bit of explanation: The play opens with Guildenstern flipping coins; Rosencrantz studies each, announces the result (Heads consistently), and keeps the coin.
end note
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Rosencrantz: Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads.
Guildenstern: There is an art to the building up of suspense.
Rosencrantz: Heads.
Guildenstern: Though it can be done by luck alone.
Rosencrantz: Heads.
Guildenstern: If thats the word Im after.
Rosencrantz: Seventy-sixlove. Heads.
Guildenstern: A weaker man might be moved to re-examine his faith, if in nothing else at least in the law of probability.
Rosencrantz: Heads.
Guildenstern, examining the confines of the stage, flips over two more coins as he does so, one by one of course. Rosencrantz announces each of them as heads.
Guildenstern: The law of probability, it has been oddly asserted, is something to do with the proposition that if six monkeys . . if six monkeys were . . .
Rosencrantz: Game?
Guildenstern: Were they?
Rosencrantz: Are you?
Guildenstern: Game. The law of averages, if I have got this right, means that if six monkeys were thrown up in the air for long enough they would land on their tails about as often as they would land on their
Rosencrantz: Heads.
Guildenstern: Which even at first glance does not strike one as a particularly rewarding speculation, in either sense, even without the monkeys. I mean you wouldnt bet on it. I mean I would, but you wouldnt. . . .
Rosencrantz: Heads.
Guildenstern: Would you?
Rosencrantz: Heads.
Heads. Getting a bit of a bore, isnt it?
Guildenstern: A bore?
Rosencrantz: Well . . .
Guildenstern: What about the suspense?
Rosencrantz: What suspense?
| Topic: Random Monkeys
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Guildenstern: [...] Syllogism the second: One, probability is a factor which operates within natural forces. Two, probability is not operating as a factor. Three, we are now within un-, sub- or supernatural forces. Discuss. Not too heatedly.
Rosencrantz: Im sorry IWhats the matter with you?
Guildenstern: The scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear. Keep tight hold and continue while theres time. Nowcounter to the previous syllogism: tricky one, follow me carefully, it may prove a comfort. If we postulate, and we just have, that within un-, sub- or supernatural forces the probability is that the law of probability will not operate as a factor, then we must accept that the probability of the first part will not operate as a factor, in which case the law of probability will operate as a factor within un-, sub- or supernatural forces. And since it obviously hasnt been doing so, we can take it that we are not held within un-, sub- or supernatural forces after all; in all probability, that is. Which is a great relief to me personally. Which is all very well, except that
We have been spinning coins together since I dont know when, and in all that time (if it is all that time) I dont suppose either of us was more than a couple of gold pieces up or down. I hope that doesnt sound surprising because its very unsurprisingness is something I am trying to keep hold of. The equanimity of your average tosser of coins depends upon a law, or rather a tendency, or let us say a probability, or at any rate a mathematically calculable chance, which ensures that he will not upset himself by losing too much nor upset his opponent by winning too often. This made for a kind of harmony and a kind of confidence. It related the fortuitous and the ordained into a reassuring union which we recognized as nature. The sun came up about as often as it went down, in the long run, and a coin showed heads about as often as it showed tails.
| Topics: Science
Logic (examples)
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Rosencrantz: I can hearI thought I heardmusic.
Guildenstern: Yes?
Rosencrantz: Like a band. It sounded likea band. Drums.
Guildenstern: Yes.
Rosencrantz: It couldnt have been real.
Guildenstern: The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybodydemolish.
Rosencrantz: It must have been thunder. Like drums.
Guildenstern: A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; untilMy God, says a second man, I must be dreaming. I thought I saw a unicorn. At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience. . . . Look, look! recites the crowd. A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.
Rosencrantz: I knew all along it was a band.
Guildenstern: He knew all along it was a band.
Rosencrantz: Here they come!
Guildenstern: Im sorry it wasnt a unicorn. It would have been nice to have unicorns.
| Topic: Unicorns
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Rosencrantz: My name is Guildenstern, and this is Rosencrantz.
Im sorryhis names Guildenstern, and Im Rosencrantz.
Player: A pleasure. Weve played to bigger, of course, but quality counts for something. I recognized you at once
Rosencrantz: And who are we?
Player: as fellow artists.
Rosencrantz: I thought we were gentlemen.
Player: For some of us it is performance, for others, patronage. They are two sides of the same coin, or, let us say, being as there are so many of us, the same side of two coins. Dont clap too loudlyits a very old world.
| Topic: Artists
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Guildenstern: It was chance, then?
Player: Chance?
Guildenstern: You found us.
Player: Oh yes.
Guildenstern: You were looking?
Player: Oh no.
Guildenstern: Chance, then.
Player: Or fate.
Guildenstern: Yours or ours?
Player: It could hardly be one without the other.
| Topic: Fate
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Guildenstern: It could have beenit didnt have to be obscene. . . . It could have beena bird out of season, dropping bright-feathered on my shoulder. . . . It could have been a tongueless dwarf standing by the road to point the way. . . . I was prepared. But its this, is it? No enigma, no dignity, nothing classical, portentous, only thisa comic pornographer and a rabble of prostitutes. . . .
Player: You should have caught us in better times. We were purists then.
| Topic: Pornography
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Player: We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.
| Topics: Theater
Integrity
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Guildenstern: I thought you said you were actors.
Player: Oh. Oh well, we are. We are. But there hasnt been much call
Guildenstern: You lost. Well thenone of the Greeks, perhaps? Youre familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics? Matri, patri, fratri, sorrori, uxori and it goes without saying
Rosencrantz: Saucy
Guildenstern: Suicidalhm? Maidens aspiring to godheads
Rosencrantz: And vice versa
Guildenstern: Your kind of thing, is it?
Player: Well, no, I cant say it is, really. Were more of the blood, love and rhetoric school.
Guildenstern: Well, Ill leave the choice to you, if there is anything to choose between them.
Player: Theyre hardly divisible, sirewell, I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I cant do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsorytheyre all blood, you see.
Guildenstern: Is that what people want?
Player: Its what we do.
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OPHELIA has been sewing and she holds the garment. They are both mute. HAMLET, with his doublet all unbraced, no hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, ungartered and downgyved to his ankle, pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other . . . and with a look so piteous, he takes her by the wrist and holds her hard, then he goes to the length of his arm, and with his other hand over his brow, falls to such perusal of her face as he would draw it . . . At last, with a little shaking of his arm, and thrice his head waving up and down, he raises a sigh so piteous and profound that it does seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being. That done he lets her go, and with his head over his shoulder turned, he goes out backwards without taking his eyes off her . . . she runs off in the opposite direction.
Note (Hals):
Well, I find the notion of using Shakespeares dialogue as stage directions amusing!
But this incident should be either acted or recounted, not both. Zeffirellis inclusion of the scene, in his Hamlet starring Mel Gibson, didnt work very well.
end note
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Rosencrantz: I remember when there were no questions.
Guildenstern: There were always questions. To exchange one set for another is no great matter.
Rosencrantz: Answers, yes. There were answers to everything.
Guildenstern: Youve forgotten.
Rosencrantz: I havent forgottenhow I used to remember my own nameand yours, oh yes! There were answers everywhere you looked. There was no question about itpeople knew who I was and if they didnt they asked and I told them.
Guildenstern: You did, the trouble is, each of them is . . . plausible, without being instinctive. All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
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Rosencrantz: Shouldnt we be doing somethingconstructive?
Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? . . . A short, blunt human pyramid . . . ?
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Act Two |
Guildenstern: Im trying to establish the direction of the wind.
Rosencrantz: There isnt any wind. Draught, yes.
Guildenstern: In that case, the origin. Trace it to its source and it might give us a rough idea of the way we came inwhich might give us a rough idea of south, for further reference.
Rosencrantz: Its coming up through the floor. That cant be south, can it?
Guildenstern: Thats not a direction. Lick your toe and wave it around a bit.
Rosencrantz: No, I think youd have to lick it for me.
Pause.
Guildenstern: Im prepared to let the whole matter drop.
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Guildenstern: Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are . . . condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous onethat is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary itll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, wed know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the Tang Dynastyand, by which definition, a philosopherdreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
| Topics: Philosophy
Dreams Butterflies
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Player: We cant look each other in the face! You dont understand the humiliation of itto be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viablethat somebody is watching. . . . The plot was two corpses gone before we caught sight of ourselves, stripped naked in the middle of nowhere and pouring ourselves down a bottomless well.
Rosencrantz: Is that thirty-eight?
Player: There we weredemented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeanceand every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Dont you see?! Were actorswere the opposite of people! Think, in your head, now, think of the most . . . private . . . secret . . . intimate thing you have ever done secure in the knowledge of its privacy. . . . Are you thinking of it? Well, I saw you do it!
| Topic: Privacy
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Guildenstern: We only know what were told, and thats little enough. And for all we know it isnt even true.
Player: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. Its the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesnt make any difference so long as it is honoured.
| Topic: Truth
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Rosencrantz: He talks to himself, which might be madness.
Guildenstern: If he didnt talk sense, which he does.
Rosencrantz: Which suggests the opposite.
Player: Of what?
Guildenstern: I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself.
Rosencrantz: Or just as mad.
Guildenstern: Or just as mad.
Rosencrantz: And he does both.
Guildenstern: So there you are.
Rosencrantz: Stark raving sane.
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Rosencrantz: [...] 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 dont go on for ever. It must have been shatteringstamped into ones memory. And yet I cant 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 we 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, theres only one direction, and time is its only measure.
| Topic: Mortality
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Guildenstern: Wasnt that the end?
Player: Do you call that an ending?with practically everyone on his feet? My goodness noover your dead body.
Guildenstern: How am I supposed to take that?
Player: Lying down. Theres a design at work in all artsurely you know that? Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion.
Guildenstern: And whats that, in this case?
Player: It never varieswe aim at the point where everyone who is marked for death dies.
Guildenstern: Marked?
Player: Between just deserts and tragic irony we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get.
Guildenstern: Who decides?
Player: Decides? It is written.
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Guildenstern: Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isnt death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees, but it doesnt bring death home to anyoneit doesnt catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that saysOne day you are going to die. You die so many times; how can you expect them to believe in your death?
Player: On the contrary, its the only kind they do believe. Theyre conditioned to it. I had an actor once who was condemned to hang for stealing a sheepor a lamb, I forget whichso I got permission to have him hanged in the middle of a playhad to change the plot a bit but I thought it would be effective, you knowand you wouldnt believe it, he just wasnt convincing!
| Topic: Verisimilitude
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Act Three |
Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no . . . Death is . . . not. Death isnt. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You cant not-be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: Ive frequently not been on boats.
Guildenstern: No, no, nowhat youve been is not on boats.
| Topic: Death
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text checked (see note) Feb 2005; Apr 2007
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