Next Stage Resource Guide

Rosencrantz &
Guildenstern
are Dead
by Tom Stoppard
Directed by Irene Lewis
February 1–March 9, 2008

The Head Theater

 Contents
Setting the Stage 3
Cast 4
Caution: Intellect at Play 4
Two Clever by Half Wit 7
“Hey, That’s From Hamlet!” 10
Yep, All the World’s a Stage 12
Glossary 14

Rosencrantz &
Guildenstern are Dead
by Tom Stoppard

Irene Lewis Director

Paul Steinberg Scenic Designer
Candice Donnelly Costume Designer
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 Set ting the STage
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead

by Shannon M. Davis, New Media Manager

Characters:
Our Heroes
Rosencrantz, the shy-but-thoughtful one
Guildenstern, the talkative-and-cynical one
The Player and His Troupe
The Player, a jaded old performer
The Tragedians, his worn-out gang of itinerant actors
Alfred, the youngest and most maligned member of the company
Stars in Hamlet (Bit Players Here)
Hamlet, melancholy Prince of Denmark, who’s been acting strange lately
Claudius, killed his brother (Hamlet’s father) to become King; hires Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to figure
out if Hamlet’s gone crazy or not
Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, Queen of Denmark; married Claudius after a very brief period of mourning
Polonius, Claudius’ advisor and Ophelia’s father
Ophelia, in love with Hamlet; extremely overwrought by his sudden rejection
Horatio, Hamlet’s best friend (Spoiler Alert: Only surviving member of the court)

“My name is Guildenstern, and this is Rosencrantz,” says a character early in Tom
Stoppard’s first full-length play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Then a characteristic contradiction
soon follows: “I’m sorry—his name’s Guildenstern, and I’m Rosencrantz.” Such confusion kickstarts this classic
comedy, a play that upends theatrical convention as its protagonists—players on the periphery of one of
theater’s greatest tragedies—are transformed from bit players to stars. Yet as Hamlet himself reminds us, the
play’s the thing—and when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern take center stage, they find themselves navigating
the shark-infested waters of the royal court.

When it premiered in 1967—after trying out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, a time-honored testing ground
for the rare, quirky, and mischievous—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was a smash hit. Stoppard’s
breakneck pace and whiplash turns of phrase caught delighted audiences off-guard, and his inventive take on
classic Shakespeare opened the public’s eyes to a new way of experiencing theater. Yet instead of butchering
Hamlet on the altar of ingenuity, Stoppard gently flipped it upside-down. Hamlet is a drama of the upper
class, but what about the other side of the coin? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are commoners like most of
us, surrounded by privilege but not of it, trying to be useful without getting stepped on. For the first time,
Hamlet’s machinations take a back seat as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wonder out loud not only what to
do with him, but why and how. During their copious downtime, Guildenstern voices his frustration: “As soon
as we make a move they’ll come pouring in from every side, shouting obscure instructions, confusing us with
ridiculous remarks, messing us about from here to breakfast and getting our names wrong.” Who can work
under such conditions, especially when the job is spying on a prince? No wonder they flip coins and play word
games to pass the time trying to keep their wits about them.

Join Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in their perplexed isolation as they try to make sense of Hamlet (and really,
who hasn’t?), but also to make sense of their lives. Stepping back from a situation, or a work of art, sometimes
helps us see it more clearly, but sometimes it just muddles things. If you’ve ever stood in front of a great work
of art and thought, “I don’t get it,” come hang with these guys. They don’t get it either, but they’ll be glad for
the company. •

Next Stage: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead | 

The Cast Dramaturgy written
and compiled by
(in alphabetical order) Catherine Sheehy,
Production Dramaturg

Joe Brady*
Tragedian
Ralph Cosham*
Polonius/Ambassador
Michael Jean Dozier*
Caution:
Rosencrantz
Karen Hansen Intellect
at Play
Tragedian/Musician
Daniel Kennedy
Alfred/Horatio
Reese Madigan*
Hamlet
Laurence O’Dwyer*
The Player
Howard W. Overshown*
Guildenstern
Andy Paterson*
Tragedian/Musician
Rich Potter
Tragedian
Jake Riggs
Soldier
The Works and Words, Words, Words
Kristen Sieh*
of Tom Stoppard
Ophelia In the throes of anguished frustration, one of the most notorious heroes of
20th-century literature, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, laments: “Oh my Lolita, I
Chandler Vinton* have only words to play with.” If only Humbert Humbert had been a man of Tom
Gertrude Stoppard’s disposition. Tom Stoppard loves words; he loves them to distraction.
In fact, he often loves them to abstraction. He loves them for themselves—their
Mark Elliot Wilson*
bald or nuanced, obsolescing or evolving, expanding or narrowing meanings. And
Claudius
he loves them in aggregate, as they congregate, accommodating themselves to
his wit and will.

Mike Schleifer* Probably the most direct declaration of this logophilia comes in his 1982 play, The
Stage Manager Real Thing. Cyrano-like, he pours out his affection through his surrogate, Henry.

Ellen Houseknecht*
Assistant Stage Manager
*Member of Actors’ Equity Association
...Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral,
precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you
look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos....
I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you
get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or
make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

Stoppard’s way with words is all the more remarkable when we consider that
There will be two
he might never have spoken English at all. Sir Tom Stoppard, the quintessentially
10-minute intermissions.
British playwright of his generation, was born Tomás Straüssler in Zlín,
Czechoslovakia, on July 3, 1937. His family escaped with other Jewish émigrés to
Singapore just a few steps ahead of looming Nazi persecution. When Singapore
became too dangerous, as the Pacific Theater of World War II erupted, his mother

Next Stage: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead | 

removed the family to India; his father stayed behind to fight and
was captured, dying in a Japanese concentration camp shortly
thereafter. In India his mother met and married a British Army
officer, Kenneth Stoppard; and in 1946, his stepfather took his
family back with him to England. So though not a bred-in-the-bone
Briton, Tom Stoppard—moving as he did through schools in the
outposts of the Empire before settling finally in Derbyshire and
Yorkshire—did receive a standard colonial education. He set out at
once to profit from its rigor, forgoing university to launch his career
in wordsmithing.

At 17 he became a journalist, working first for the Western Daily

Press and later for the Bristol Evening World. In the early 1960s he
even—and improbably, given his professed view of the species—
worked as a theater critic for a season at Scene magazine in London.
In this capacity, he saw more than 130 plays. For a young artist as
aesthetically impressionable as Stoppard seems to have been, this
was invaluable saturation and maceration time. After that, although
he turned out the occasional short story and one novel, he devoted
himself almost exclusively to dramatic writing. The next season he
wrote an unproduced one-act called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Meet King Lear. Tom Stoppard was halfway to a career-changing work.

Though he had some early success writing radio plays, a genre

of entertainment for which the British have an insatiable appetite,
his big break came at the 1966 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It was
there that his idea to write a piece centered on the two hapless
functionaries in Hamlet burst upon the scene. The next season
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead was produced at the National
w
n arro
in London and in New York on Broadway, where it garnered its
young author a Tony Award. u gh a
“Tho
The metatheatrical bravura of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern was is always approaching
followed by the flat-out fun of The Real Inspector Hound, a one-
, it never
act spoof of murder mysteries that, like its predecessor, draws its target
two unwitting characters into a theatrical intrigue with very real
consequences. Then came the linguistic and literal gymnastics of
Jumpers, which features an aging professor of moral philosophy, his
e , and
r
mentally and morally wandering wife, a moonscape, and a troupe of
ts the
acrobats. The play is complex and dense. It demands an audience’s e
strict attention and rewards that attention with respect and u i te g
q
”
t.
entertainment—even if that entertainment means riding a gaudily
painted pony on a macabre merry-go-round. h
rig
Take for example one of Jumpers’ typical jokes based on f
f
that laugh riot, the classical conundrum known as Zeno’s o
d
Paradox. To illustrate the effete uselessness of academic
ie
exercise (or is it to show off his dexterity in such an d
enterprise?), Stoppard has his hero assert that, because a n
every distance can be measured as a length which can be s ti
a
halved, an arrow flying along will continually make up half
eb
the distance to its target, even as those halves become S
t
infinitesimally small. Therefore, because it can keep cutting in
the distance in half, it will never reach its target. “The Sa
result,” our hero says, “was, as I will now demonstrate, that
though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never
quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.”

Regardless of how rarified his references become, Stoppard has

always asserted that he writes, as Henry Fielding once said, “To
please the town and bring full houses.” Academics and critics often
gleefully nitpick away at his plays, pulling this loose narrative thread,

Next Stage: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead | 

pouncing on that dangling fact. But Stoppard remains
staunch in his indifference. Let him be tasked with being
too cerebral, with being too facile, with being apolitical,
with being too conservative. He does not mind in the least,
and makes no apologies for his fascinations. When an idea
grips his imagination, he must write about it.
In his next major play, Travesties, Stoppard seized upon
historical coincidence as his inspiration. He read that an
unlikely trio—James Joyce, the Dada poet Tristan Tzara,
and Vladimir Lenin—had all been in Zurich at the same
time…or very nearly at the same time. This made him think,
as he told New York Times critic Mel Gussow in 1972, “it
might be nice to do a two-act thing, with one act a Dadaist
play on communist ideology, and the other an ideological
functional drama about Dadaists.” The result was a tour
de farce, a literal travesty about the nature of art and
performance, which opened in 1975 at the Royal Court and
on Broadway and landed Stoppard another Tony Award.
Travesties shared with its older siblings an exuberant
and unapologetic reliance upon theatrical pyrotechnics.
It offered its director, actors, and designers plenty of
opportunities to prove their virtuosic skill and gave its
audiences as much to watch as to think about. But whether
sustaining these flights of fancy became too exhausting or
too easy, or whether he was simply interested in doing
a different kind of play altogether, Stoppard’s career
took a turn at that point. He began to explore
a more conservative structure, with more
conventionally developed and presented “the element
characters, and critics and scholars found which I find most
outlets and opportunities to speak of valuable is the one
the differences they perceived in the that other people
new plays from those of the
are put off by”
“early Stoppard.”
—Tom Stoppard
In this next phase of his work came some
brilliant and very accessible adaptations, from
Arthur Schnitzler’s brooding Undiscovered Country
(1979) to the sheer delight of 1981’s On the Razzle, taken
from the same Johann Nestroy play that had provided
Thornton Wilder with the inspiration for The Matchmaker.
Later in 1984 he completely reimagined the Ferenc Molnár
classic The Play’s the Thing, set it on a ship, and called it
Rough Crossing. Writing as an adaptor, in service of the
straightforward dramaturgy of these older plays, seems to
have influenced the original work Stoppard explored in this
period, particularly Night and Day (1978) and The Real Thing
(1982). This last was his biggest commercial success to
date—having had a successful production in London’s West
End with Roger Rees and Felicity Kendal and an even greater
smash in New York in a Mike Nichols production with a cast
led by Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, and Christine Baranski. In
The Real Thing, Stoppard finally found a way to yank on the
bit of his gaudy wit and write with human scale about that
most human of emotions: love.
Something of both the impossibly lithe intellectual yoga of
the early work and the sounded depths of these last plays
comes together in the work the playwright has been doing
since the 1990s. Stoppard has created a kind of theater
completely
his own in
plays as different as
Arcadia (1993), which
juxtaposes theories of
thermal dynamics and the
combustibility of the human
heart; The Invention of Love
(1997), which through the
aching longing of poet A.E.
Housman considers the unstable
element of the title; and his 2002
epic, The Coast of Utopia, a three-part masterwork on
(2005). Photo by T. Charles Erickson
Company’s production of The Real Thing
Rufus Collins in the Huntington Theatre
revolution, idealism, and, yes, love. And this doesn’t even
count perhaps his most popular work as co-writer of the
Academy Award-winning screenplay for Shakespeare
in Love.
This prolific body of recognizable work
has earned its author adjectival status. But
“Stoppardian” more clearly describes an
audience’s experience of one of his
plays than any thematic obsession
on the writer’s part. He and his plays
continue to resist most efforts to type
him categorically or to associate them with
a single genre. In fact, he makes no claim to
belonging to any particular school. Tom Stoppard
is a writer who, like fellow word-lover George Bernard
Shaw, is fascinated by all facets of an argument. Shaw
once asserted that he could make an audience believe that
whoever spoke last was right. Similarly, in a 1974 interview
in Theatre Quarterly, Stoppard said:
…I must make clear that, insofar as it’s possible for
me to look at my own work objectively at all, the
element which I find most valuable is the one that
other people are put off by—that is, that there is very
often no single, clear statement in my plays. What
there is, is a series of conflicting statements made
by conflicting characters, and they tend to play a
sort of infinite leap-frog. You know, an argument, a
refutation, then a rebuttal of the refutation, then a
counter-rebuttal, so that there is never any point in
this intellectual leap-frog at which I feel that is the
speech to stop it on, that is the last word.
Tom Stoppard doesn’t believe in the last word, because he
knows there will always be another word—or bunches of
words—to come along after it.
Next Stage: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead | 
 Two Clever by Half Wit:
Wisdom in the Word Play of the Top Banana and Second Fiddle
T
he straight man and his comic
foil have been a staple of popular
entertainment all the way back
to the 5th Century BCE, when
Aristophanes created hapless but
lippy servants who bore the brunt
of their masters’ frustrations. The
Italian commedia dell’arte further refined
the interplay, giving us that literal weapon of mirth,
The Granddaddy
of slapstick: the slapstick. But in English the art of the comic
Aristophanes
duet reached its zenith in vaudeville and the British
music halls from the mid-19th to the early-20th
Centuries. The great double acts like Gallagher and
Shean or Weber and Fields turned words into their
cudgels of choice—though they were never above
offering a genuine cuff into the bargain.
In 1953, when Samuel Beckett created his two
tramps cooling their heels on a desolate road
in Waiting for Godot, he raised the stakes of the
banter, but kept its popular rhythm. Beckett
Abbott & Costello
knew his vaudeville: Didi and Gogo dress like
Chaplin, tussle like Laurel and Hardy, and talk
past and around one another like Abbott and
Costello. Beckett’s genius was to import existential
consequences to his characters’ hopeless
non sequiturs, desperate puns, and tragicomic
misunderstandings.
When Tom Stoppard framed a whole play
around Hamlet’s two nearly interchangeable plot
devices with the funny names, he often seemed
to be channeling Beckett—who was echoing
vaudevillians and music hall veterans going back
a century before, in order to make his theater
relevant to a disturbing present. These echoes
and homages are now part of Stoppard’s Möbius
strip of a universe, where there is no such thing
as progress, only the inexorable journey forward
to the beginning again. It’s funny when you think
about it—until it breaks your heart. >>>
Next Stage: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead | 

Abbott and Costello
Abbott: Who’s on first, What’s on
second, I Don’t Know is on third...
Costello: That’s what I want to find
out.
Abbott: I say Who’s on first, What’s
on second, I Don’t Know’s on
third.
Costello: Are you the manager?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: You gonna be the coach too?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: And you don’t know the
fellows’ names?
Abbott: Well I should.
Costello: Well then who’s on first?
Abbott: Yes.
Waiting for Godot
Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy in Waiting
for Godot at the Gate Theatre in Dublin (2003).
Vladimir: When you seek you hear.
Estragon: You do.
Vladimir: That prevents you from
finding.
Estragon: It does.
Vladimir: That prevents you from
thinking.
Estragon: You think all the same.
Vladimir: No, no, impossible.
Estragon: That’s the idea, let’s
contradict each other.
Vladimir: Impossible.
Estragon: You think so?
Two Clever by Half Wit— continued
Costello: I mean the fellow’s name. Abbott: Every dollar of it.
Abbott: Who. Costello: All I’m trying to find out is
Costello: The guy on first. the fellow’s name on first base.
Abbott: Who. Abbott: Who.
Costello: The first baseman. Costello: The guy that gets...
Abbott: Who. Abbott: That’s it.
Costello: The guy playing... Costello: Who gets the money...
Abbott: Who is on first! Abbott: He does, every dollar.
Sometimes his wife comes
Costello: I’m asking YOU who’s down and collects it.
on first.
Costello: Whose wife?
Abbott: That’s the man’s name.
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: That’s who’s name?
Pause
Abbott: Yes.
Abbott: What’s wrong with that?
Costello: Well go ahead and tell me.
Costello: Look, all I wanna know
Abbott: That’s it. is when you sign up the first
Costello: That’s who? baseman, how does he sign
his name?
Abbott: Yes.
Abbott: Who.
Pause
Costello: The guy.
Costello: Look, you gotta
first baseman? Abbott: Who.
Abbott: Certainly. Costello: How does he sign...
Costello: Who’s playing first? Abbott: That’s how he signs it.
Abbott: That’s right. Costello: Who?
Costello: When you pay off the Abbott: Yes.
first baseman every month,
who gets the money?
Vladimir: We’re in no danger of ever Vladimir: But we could have done
thinking any more. without it.
Estragon: Then what are we Estragon: Que voulez-vous?
complaining about? Vladimir: I beg your pardon.
Vladimir: Thinking is not the worst. Estragon: Que voulez-vous?
Estragon: Perhaps not. But at least Vladimir: Ah! Que voulez-vous. Exactly.
there’s that.
Silence
Vladimir: That what?
Estragon: That wasn’t such a bad
Estragon: That’s the idea, let’s ask little canter.
each other questions.
Vladimir: Yes, but now we’ll have to
Vladimir: What do you mean, at least find something else.
there’s that?
Estragon: Let me see.
Estragon: That much less misery.

Vladimir: True.
Vladimir: What was I saying, we could
Estragon: Well? If we gave thanks for go on from there.
our mercies?
Estragon: What were you saying
Vladimir: What is terrible is to have when?
thought.
Vladimir: At the very beginning.
Estragon: But did that ever happen
Estragon: The very beginning
to us?
of WHAT?

Vladimir: This evening…I was saying…
Vladimir: Oh it’s not the worst, I know. I was saying…
Estragon: What? Estragon: I’m not a historian!
Vladimir: To have thought.
Estragon: Obviously.
Next Stage: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead | 
 Rosencr antz and
Guildenstern
Are Dead
Tim Roth and Gary Oldman in Tom Stoppard’s film of
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990).
Guildenstern: What’s the first thing you remember?
Rosencrantz: Oh, let’s see. …The first thing that comes into
my head, you mean?
Guildenstern: No—the first thing you remember.
Rosencrantz: Ah. (Pause.) No, it’s no good, it’s gone.
It was a long time ago.
Guildenstern: You don’t get my meaning. What is the first
thing after all the things you’ve forgotten?
Rosencrantz: Oh I see. (Pause.) I’ve forgotten the question.
Guildenstern: Are you happy?
Rosencrantz: What?
Guildenstern: Content? At ease?
Rosencrantz: I suppose so.
Guildenstern: What are you going to do now?
Rosencrantz: I don’t know. What do you want to do?
Guildenstern: I have no desires. None. There was a
messenger…that’s right. We were sent for.

Rosencrantz: Another curious scientific phenomenon
is the fact that the fingernails grow after death,
as does the beard.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: Beard!
Guildenstern: But you’re not dead.
Rosencrantz: I didn’t say they started to grow after death!
The fingernails also grow before birth, though not
the beard.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: Beard! What’s the matter with you?
The toenails, on the other hand, never grow at all.
Guildenstern: The toenails on the other hand never
grow at all?
Rosencrantz: Do they? It’s a funny thing—I cut my
fingernails all the time, and every time I think to cut
them, they need cutting. Now, for instance. And yet,
I never, to the best of my knowledge, cut my toenails.
They ought to be curled under my feet by now, but
it doesn’t happen. I never think about them. Perhaps
I cut them absentmindedly, when I’m thinking of
something else.
Guildenstern: Do you remember the first thing that
happened today?
Rosencrantz: I woke up, I suppose. Oh—I’ve got it now—
that man, a foreigner, he woke us up—
Guildenstern: A messenger.
Rosencrantz: That’s it—pale sky before dawn, a man
standing on his saddle to bang on the shutters—
shouts—What’s all the row about?! Clear off!—
But then he called our names. You remember that
—this man woke us up.
Guildenstern: Yes.
Rosencrantz: We were sent for.
Guildenstern: Yes.
Rosencrantz: That’s why we’re here. (He looks round,
seems doubtful, then the explanation.) Traveling.
Next Stage: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead | 
 That’s From Hamlet!”
Can you speak that obscure English
dialect, Elizabethan Danish? You
may be doing it already and
not even know it. If you’ve ever
spoken of “the primrose path,” or
sagely and sadly remarked that
“something is rotten in the state of
Denmark,” or suspected there was
“method in [someone’s] madness,”
or scrawled “sweets to the sweet”
on a card while sending chocolates,
or philosophically mused that
every “dog will have his day,” or
smugly noted that your social rival
was “hoist with his own petard”
(extra points if you used “with”
instead of “on”), or got out of an
awkward request by demurring,
“neither a borrower nor a lender be,”
or hesitated between unpleasant
alternatives by acknowledging
“there’s the rub,” or accepted praise
for a perfect soufflé by chirruping,
“the readiness is all,” you’re fluent
in Hamlet.
Tom Stoppard took his baldly
prosaic and intentionally
ending-spoiling title for
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are
Dead from the very last scene
of Shakespeare’s tragedy. But
others have rummaged for more
poetic offerings from among
the play’s nearly 4,000 lines. Did
you realize that all of these plays,
songs, books, and films took their
titles from lines in Shakespeare’s
masterpiece? “That is the
question.”
An Impressive Yet Incomplete List
Leave Her To Heaven (1945)—
This Gene Tierney vehicle was based
on a Ben Ames Williams novel about a
beautiful but insanely jealous woman
and the murderous havoc she wreaks.
The film’s tagline? “Hers was the
deadliest of the seven sins!” Leave Her
to Heaven comes from Act I, scene v, as
the Ghost tells an enraged Hamlet not
to harm Gertrude.
What Dreams May
Come (1998)—A Robin Williams
extravaganza roundly hooted by
critics. The film tells the story of an
heroic, if dead, pediatrician braving
the Netherworld to rescue his wife, a
failed artist but recently successful
suicide. Fans praised it as gorgeous eye
candy; naysayers dismissed it as too
treacly. Its title is taken from a lesser-
known line in Act III, scene i, the most
famous soliloquy ever written.
Next Stage: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead | 10
Undiscovered Country
(1979)—Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of
Arthur Schnitzler’s 1911 play Das Weite
Land is an ironic and witty snapshot of
the Freudian entanglements among
a group of intimates in turn-of-the-
century Vienna. And yes, you guessed
it, it’s from the soliloquy in Act III,
scene i.
To Be or Not to Be (1942)—
This Ernst Lubitsch classic is one of
the finest romantic comedies ever
made. It tells the story of Josef and
Maria Tura and their troupe of Warsaw
actors, under German occupation. Jack
Benny is the vain Shakespearean actor
whose Hamlet becomes apoplectic
when a young aviator walks out on
his soliloquy every night, but who
selflessly puts his life on the line for
Poland. Carole Lombard, in her final
performance (she was killed in a plane
crash returning from a war bonds
tour before the film’s release), is
the luminous diva dallying with the
handsome flyboy and trying to stop
the treacherous Professor Siletsky
from betraying the Resistance. The
Nazis are no match for them. Mel
Brooks turned out a passable
remake in 1983. The title, of course,
comes from the soliloquy-to-end-all-
soliloquies, as Hamlet considers his
options in Act III, scene i.
Slings and Arrows (2003–
2006)—This television series tells of
the…well…slings and arrows Geoffrey
Tennant endures when he takes the
helm of the New Burbage Theatre
Festival. Not only is he struggling with
temperamental artists and bean-
counting managers to get the curtain
up on productions of Hamlet, Macbeth,
and King Lear, but he’s dealing with the
ghost of the previous artistic director.
The apt title comes just after the
ultimate Shakespearean question in
Hamlet’s Act III, scene i, soliloquy.
The Play’s the Thing (1927)—
P.G. Wodehouse translates and adapts
Ferenc Molnár’s comedy of desperate
thespians in a château. More than
half a century later, Tom Stoppard will
create his own adaptation, plunking
the hapless artists on an ocean
liner and calling it Rough Crossing.
Wodehouse took the title from
Hamlet’s clever Act II, scene ii, plot
to trap “the conscience of the king.”
Murder Most Foul (1964)—
Margaret Rutherford is Agatha
Christie’s indefatigable Miss Marple
in this rollicking adaptation of the
classic murder mystery, Mrs. McGinty’s
Dead. The title is taken from the
Ghost’s pardonable editorializing in
Act I, scene v, about being poisoned
by his own brother.
Cue for Passion (1958)—Elmer
Rice’s play is a super-Freudian retelling
of the Hamlet-Gertrude-Claudius
triangle set in California amid mid-
20th-century chic. Tony makes a
conspicuous brooding churl of himself
over his mother’s remarriage. No
one knows why he’s come back from
photographing Bali, but his stepfather
knows it bodes no good. The title
comes from Hamlet’s self-flagellating
lament in Act II, scene ii, that even the
Player can move himself to tears over
a tragedy that is entirely counterfeit,
without Hamlet’s very real “motive
and cue for passion.”
Infinite Jest (1996)—David Foster
Wallace’s 1,100-page tome takes
its title nearly too seriously. Foster
creates a near-futurescape that is
at once funny and terrifying, where
entertainment can be completely
debilitating. Praised as Pynchonesque,
dismissed as bloated, bought by many,
read by few, the novel achieved a kind
of cult status when it appeared. The
title is taken from Hamlet’s musing
over poor Yorick’s chapfallen skull in
Act V, scene i.
Next Stage: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead | 11
“Cruel to Be Kind” (1979)—
Nick Lowe’s song told us all it was
imperative to be cruel to be kind “in
the right measure.” Originally written
for Elvis Costello’s band, the tune was
rejected, so Lowe decided to record
it himself. O, Nick Lowe’s prophetic
soul, it was a big hit for him. The
title is crushed a bit from Hamlet’s
sorrowful admission that he has no
other comfort for his mother—“I must
be cruel, only to be kind”—in Act III,
scene iv.
“What a Piece of Work
Is Man” (1967)—This adaptation
of Hamlet’s plaintive outburst to
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about
his melancholy and discontentment
was set to music by Galt MacDermot
and woven into the musical Hair. It
comes from Act III’s long and fruitful
scene i.
 Yep,
All the World’s a Stage
(So You Better Know Your Lines)

It will not have escaped your notice

that a number of cast members
in today’s performance of
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are
Dead are playing actors. They
are actors of course, strictly
professionals. But just as Tom
Stoppard has asked that one
actor play Rosencrantz, and one
actor play Guildenstern, one play
Hamlet, one Ophelia, one Polonius,
one Gertrude, and one Claudius,
six of the company are asked to
“play” actors. What’s more, they
are asked to play tragedians;
indeed, they are asked to play the
Tragedians who pop in at Elsinore
and offer their services to the
highly excitable young prince
of Denmark, who will deputize
them to help him “catch the
conscience of the king.” Nothing
so unusual in this; any production
of Hamlet worth its salt will have
to have such players. But it is how
Stoppard has employed his troupe
and the prominence he’s given
them in his drama (particularly
The Player at their helm) that
makes all the difference.

Next Stage: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead | 12

{ }
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.
—The Player, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Tom Stoppard uses his Tragedians to create a kind of
threshold, a liminal space between the world of the
characters and that of the audience—a no-man’s land
between their reality on stage and our reality in our seats.
This is a common device for Stoppard, who is very fond
of putting performance front and center in his work: in
addition to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, The Real Inspector
Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, and The Real Thing—just to
name a few—all feature performance of some kind and
most have a literal play-within-the-play. Such layering
creates an intentional confusion of realms, allowing each
level of relative reality to comment upon the other, pointing
up the unreliability of language, the difficulty of sincerity,
and the disquieting percentage of our so-called real lives
that is actually a performance of some kind.
Actors make a marvelous symbol of this trio of troubles:
their lines are scripted for them, so what they say is not
always in their power; they must take on a personality
(or more than one) supplied for them by a sometimes
indifferent, sometimes hostile higher power, viz. the
playwright; they must always be “on.” Stoppard is not the
first to recognize the usefulness of the actor as Everyman.
After all, Shakespeare, who first wrote that “all the world’s
a stage,” and that life is but “a poor player that struts
and frets his hour upon the stage,” constantly worked
the metaphors of his profession to describe the human
condition. He knew whereof he spoke, because William
Shakespeare, in addition to penning plays, trod the boards
himself.
The life of an Elizabethan actor was interesting for both its
unique opportunities and overwhelming obstacles. While
itinerant performers who did not enjoy noble patronage
were hounded and “berogued,” those who did wear the
livery of a lord found themselves largely able to escape the
badgering of local law enforcement. Still, touring players
were often little more than organized beggars. And even
members of London’s most successful troupes, like the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men or the Admiral’s Men, were obliged to
take to the road when the theaters were closed due to an
outbreak of plague. Of course, virtually every year in the
reign of Elizabeth I and James I was considered a plague
year. And the authorities could shut down any place where
people congregated to minimize the risk of contagion
whenever the number of plague deaths in a week reached a
certain number.
Actors who managed to become shareholders in the major
companies could do pretty well for themselves; Shakespeare
bought himself a coat of arms with his earnings, which
allowed him to call himself a gentleman—no small thing in
such a class-rigid society. The theater was the financial and
social making of gifted actors like Ned Alleyn and Richard
Burbage. It also brought fame without security, as it does
today, to fascinating and talented wastrels.
While London’s thirst for theatrical entertainment was all
but unquenchable, the profession was nevertheless subject
to a scourge worse than plague: faddism. Having survived
the lust for blood that made bear-baiting so popular and
the bloody mess of the plague, theater nearly fordid
itself by promoting a novelty—companies of young boys.
The town went mad for these pint-sized players. In fact,
Shakespeare puts his own disdain for the trend into Hamlet,
as Rosencrantz explains to Hamlet why the Tragedians are
touring instead of playing in the city. Hamlet asks if the
players have grown rusty; Rosencrantz answers bitterly:
Nay, their endeavour keeps in the wonted pace:
but there is, sir, an aery of children, little eyases,
that cry out on the top of question, and are most
tyrannically clapped for’t[.]
Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
In fact, there’s so much about the art of the actor and its
intersection with life in Hamlet that Stoppard’s choice to
take the play to pieces and reassemble it as something
completely his own to describe our modern world seems
not only obvious but almost imperative. In Rosencrantz
& Guildenstern Are Dead, moved by the metaphysical
implications of the comparison between acting and being,
Stoppard seeks to formulate questions that don’t have neat
answers. Our deepest feelings, our most private thoughts,
can only be communicated by using the same tools that an
actor employs to create a character. So is truth beggared?
Or is acting ennobled? Consider Hamlet’s anger when his
mother accuses him essentially of overacting his grief for his
father’s death. He wheels on her:
‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected ‘havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
Hamlet, Act I, scene ii
When Stoppard’s Player says, “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,” an entire new dimension of our experience opens
up. Does a character exist offstage? Before you answer
definitively, ask yourself, “Are we doing more than ‘acting’
in our everyday lives?” And what’s more alarming, “In
whose drama?”
Next Stage: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead | 13
Glossary

Atonement: reparation for an offense or injury.
Avuncular: having to do with an uncle.
Cartographers: mapmakers.
Capon: a neutered rooster—once a fairly standard menu item.
Cox’n: the coxswain (pronounced cox’-un) is the person in
charge of steering a boat.
Disport: to amuse or divert.
Dogmatic: asserting strict opinions in a doctrinaire or arrogant
manner; opinionated.
Elsinore: a city in eastern Denmark, whose castle provides the
setting of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Empiricism: a theory of knowledge emphasizing the role
of actual experience, especially sensory perception, in the
formation of ideas, while discounting the notion of innate
ideas or mere hypothesis.
Equanimity: even-tempered.
Flagrante delicto: caught “red-handed” or in the act of the
crime; especially used as a euphemism for being caught in the
act of sex.
Guilder: name for a gold coin.
Inexorable: unyielding; unalterable or inevitable.
Law of averages: the notion that outcomes of a random event
repeated will “even out” over time—applied in everything from
flipping coins or betting on a roulette wheel to commenting on
sports.
Law of diminishing returns: the economic observation that,
in a production system with fixed and variable inputs, there
comes a point when each additional unit of variable input
yields less and less additional output.
Law of probability: the likelihood that something will or won’t
happen (commonly perceived as a likelihood that changes in
relationship to events of the recent past).
The Murder of Gonzago: an anonymous tragedy that begins
with a dumb show and whose plot tells the story of a king
murdered by his brother. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the play
is called The Mousetrap when it is reworked and performed
before Claudius in conscious parallel to the events of the
Danish court.
Myopia: near-sightedness; more figuratively, a lack of
foresight; a narrow view of something
Non sequitur: something that doesn’t follow; a logical fallacy
or a statement with no evident relation to the preceding
comment, and often humorously absurd as a result.
Nomenclature: a system of naming.
Portentous: full of significance or meaning; a prophetic
indication.
Pragmatism: a practical approach to solving problems.
The Rape of the Sabine Women: a legendary incident in the
early history of Rome, which in turn inspired many works of art
and literature.
Remonstrate: to argue, especially to urge reasons in opposition
Stays: heavy ropes, wires, or rods on sailing ships that run from
the masts to the hull, usually along the centerline of the vessel.
Syllogism: in deductive reasoning; a formal argument
consisting of two premises and a deduction purporting to
follow from them. Often, syllogistic reasoning lends itself to
false conclusions: all tables have four legs; my dog has four
legs; therefore, my dog is a table.
T’ang Dynasty: Chinese dynasty from 618 to 907; a golden age
of culture and art.
Truancy: intentional unauthorized absence, as for instance
from compulsory schooling.
Ventages: A small hole, like the stop in a flute.

Lee: the quarter or region toward which the wind blows, or

shelter from the wind.

Lot: Abraham’s nephew in the Biblical book of Genesis and

in the Koran; his wife turns into a pillar of salt fleeing the
destruction of Sodom, and in the Genesis account Lot is
subsequently seduced by his two daughters.

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