Study of Intertextuality in

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: A Kristevan Reading

Fatemeh sadat Basirizadeh*

Amir Emami Rad **

Abstract

First it should be cleared that the so many signifying systems are used in a play performance.

Stage direction, time, place, participants, lightening, music and even spectators positions to the

platform and etc. are different means recruited by a playwright in a performance; moreover, it is

nearly impossible for a playwright to delineate the different extremes of various sources in a

performance. Gruber (1986) considering the difference of intertextuality in a drama and its

performance states: “the impact of intertextuality in the reading of a play may differ substantially

from its impact in performance, and measuring that effect in itself proves problematic” (102).

Intertextuality, therefore, paves the way in which a text may influence some later works. This

method of consideration may cause to believe that all literary works are interacting with each

other; hence, literary texts are not only the results of the past discourses but also they are open to

the futures. In this study, in order to avoid the broadness of the issue, the intertextuality on the

basis of Stoppard’s text is going to be discussed.

Key terms: Ambivalence, Dialogism, Semiotics, Intertextuality, Texts within Text.

* Young Researchers and Elite Club, Qom Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qom, Iran

**Islamic Azad University, Arak Branch,Arak,Iran

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1. Introduction

It is highlighted that among the intertextuality’s most practical applications and functions is “(re)

evaluation by means of comparison, counter-position and contrast” (Orr 7). The interpretation is

the process of extracting meaning out of a text. There is no doubt that any writer of a text is a

reader of the text before being a creator; therefore, the work of art is made of many references,

quotations and influences. “Works of literature are built from systems, codes and traditions

established by pervious works of literature” (Allen 1).

Jonathan Culler (1976) names the notion of intertextuality as:

The paradox of linguistic and discursive systems: that utterances or texts

are never moments of origin because they depend on the prior existence of

codes and conventions, and it is the nature of codes to be always already

in existence, to have lost origins. (1382)

Kristeva, in opposition to many other critics cares about the author’s and the reader’s

personal life, as in Encyclopedia of Literary Critics and Criticism is mentioned:

As Kristeva proceeds with her psychological analysis of the author, her

study intermingles details from the author’s works and life on an equal

footing, in opposition to the caveat of many other critics, that a writer’s

biography must not be literally equated with the writer’s creative life.

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Kristeva then appeals to the reader’s personal psychological experience, at

times in a hypnotically suggestive

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tone, to verify the universality of phenomena such as sadomasochism

and the oedipal complex. (Murry 637)

Kristeva, here, concentrates as Payne (2010) states: “elaborating a theory of emergence of

subjectivity within language” (284).

While it is difficult to explain what makes sense from a new instance of a discourse,

intertextual codes may help us to solve the problem. The notion of intertextuality means that

in order to read is to put a work within a space, relating to other works and to the codes

existing in that space. Writing is also the same activity; as it has been mentioned earlier: any

writer is a reader before being a creator. Considering the application of intertextuality in

reading literature as well as its writing and their differences, Riffaterre (1994) in

“Intertextuality vs. Hypertextuality” argues: “identifying relevant sign-system is essential to

reading literature, using only such systems is essential to writing literature” (780). The study

of intertextuality is not only the investigation of sources and influences, but placing the text

in a network within some earlier and possible later texts; therefore, the text is put in the

crossroad of other texts.

Textuality is inseparable from intertextuality. Because of their

practical, pragmatic, utilitarian aims, nonliterary texts rely on

referentiality to carry meaning and on explanatory features to clarify it.

By contrast, literary text replaces referentiality with ad hoc linkages

from sign-system to sign-system. (Riffaterre, “Intertextuality” 781)

Kristeva’s prominent essay, “Word, Dialogue, Text”, is “planting out of Bakhtin’s

various concepts, such as dialogism, carnival, poetic language, as various seedlings in French

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seedbed of Saussurean linguistics. At each planting out, Kristeva begins overtly with

reference to Bakhtin, such that her own contribution can then be inserted” (Orr 26). Kristeva

believes that any kind of text is not only a vehicle of conveying information that it signifies

but also reveals many reflective language.

2. Vertical Level of Intertextuality

2.1. Semiotic Base

Allen (2000) generalizing the implication of intertetxtuality in literary works in semiotic level

says: “Authors of literary works do not just select words from language system, they select

plots, generic features, aspects of character, images, ways of narrating, even phrases and

sentences from pervious literary texts and from the literary tradition” (11).

R&GAD is Stoppard’s first major work around Shakespearian tragedy. The play starts

with the presence of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the stage as the real characters in the

actual world; nevertheless, the audiences soon recognize the play as unfolded literally in

Hamlet. Stoppard treats the story of Hamlet in a different manner, he magnifies roles of two

Shakespearean minor characters and narrates the story while they are given the central of

concentration; however, they are not going to do any action qualified for their position, they

will do within the Hamlet destination.

The title refers to the two minor characters in Hamlet who had been colleagues to the

Shakespeare’s tragic hero, brought to Elsinore and recruited by Claudius to perform act of

spying; characters and places as well as actions are familiar to the spectators who are

acquainted with Hamlet; their portrays in Hamlet manage their roles and actions with in

Stoppard’s. As soon as the play starts, any reader or spectator recognizes many clues to the

Shakespearian tragedy, the conventional idea of the setting components of the play, time,

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place and participants, intentionally lead them to the conclusion that Stoppard uses Hamlet as

the foundation. “The two Elizabethans passing the time in a place without any visible

character” (Stoppard, Ros 1), in a road where later is clear to Elsinore, having been

summoned by a messenger to an urgent matter in the early dawn as Rosencrantz points out:

“… a royal summons” (ibid 6). These two heroes are permanently together as they are in

Hamlet. Their destinies are determined with a great force of the meta-text. It is an undeniable

fact that R&GAD at least in its broad outline is narratively determined with Hamlet.

Stoppard’s loyalty to the tragedy of Hamlet and the firm structure keep him to manage the

whole story and actions of R&GAD within the Shakespeare’s. Considering the adaptation of

Shakespeare’s plots, Freeman (1996) states:

In a more important sense, Shakespeare's play provides Stoppard a

larger plot linking the dislocations of his own era with those occurring

in the late sixteenth century. Shakespeare, like Stoppard, wrote at a

time of paradigm shift, a time in which fundamental

reconceptualizations of reality and people's place in it were occurring.

(20)

Hamlet described in title: The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; the

opening scene is set in midnight, on a haunted battlement with the presence of a ghost; any

reader or audience, hence, would guess the story; the decline of a high ranking character, a

play that courageously can be said most contemporary audience are aware of its nature; the

title of R&GAD, on the other hand, signals a comic sense, the two minor characters turn to be

stars. Hamlet is building a world, inviting beholder to watch what it looks like; Rosencrantz

and Guildenstern are playing within an already built world. Mitchel believes that: “in both

plays there is a sense that if things change they can only get worse” (46).

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The style of uncommunicative dialogues full of pauses and hesitations, moreover,

reminds audiences of the precedent play of Beckett, Waiting for Godot; these techniques

make the plays more integrated. They also help spectators to understand the illusory

atmosphere of the play. Two characters cannot define themselves and their positions in

reality, they even cannot understand the present situation; they go back to the time of their

real existence in Shakespeare’s text to assert their roles; however, they do not remind the

past.

GUIL. And a syllogism: …

What’s the first thing you remember?

ROS. Oh, let’s see… The first thing that comes into my head, you

mean?

GUIL. No---the first thing you remember.

ROS. Ah. (Pause.) No, it’s no good, it’s gone. It was a long time ago.

GUIL(patient but edged). You don’t get my meaning. What is the first

thing after all the things you’ve forgotten?

ROS. Oh I see. (Pause.) I’ve forgotten the question. (Stoppard, Ros 5)

Going back from a chaotic world of their existence in the source text of Hamlet and their

inability to justify their presence to their existence with the logical world of Shakespeare’s

Hamlet make them frightened.

ROS. I’m afraid.

GUIL. So am I.

ROS. I’m afraid it isn’t your day.

GUIL. I’m afraid it is. (ibid 4)

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The plot of the play is started where it will be ended, in this circular movement,

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern exchange different speeches doing useless actions to enter to

the meta-text of Hamlet; their speeches, movements and roles are justifiable only when they

play their roles in Hamlet. Levenson (2001) points that: “Stoppard rearranging and

defamiliarizing Shakespeare’s sequence, directs attention to correspondences between

Hamlet and his other sources” (161). Their errand starts in dark, Guildenstern, trying to

conquer his nervousness, spins the coin and it comes ninety two consecutive times heads. In

the course of their acquaintances with the player band and also later the coin play comes to

the same result, heads; however, it comes tails when the time in fact is flashed back to the

Shakespearian tragedy when the Hamlet’s characters come to the stage. From this point

Stoppard enters to the play and its main characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Hamlet.

The PLAYER turns and goes. ROS has bent for a coin.

GUIL (Moving out). Come on.

ROS. I say --- that was lucky.

GUIL (turning). What?

ROS. It was tails. (Stoppard, Ros 17)

The play is so much lent to mimetic reading and interpretation from Hamlet and

Waiting for Godot that many commentators may emphasize Stoppard’s debts to the one or

both and disregard the play’s uniqueness design. Stoppard is quoted in Hayman (1977) in the

“First Interview with Stoppard”: what he is always trying to say is “Firstly, A. secondly,

minus A” (10). This statement echoes Stoppard’s definition of Beckett’s theatrical dialectic.

The play is also so familiar for the one who has read Waiting for Godot. Rosencrantz

and Guildenstern speak phrases and direct quotations from Waiting for Godot; time is not

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located in an orderly chronological line, scenes are mainly general for beholders, play within

play; word play of shifting from less poetic to more poetic idiom to show other kinds of

changes as well as the abundance of recruiting clichés. “Resonances of Hamlet and Waiting

for Godot sound clearly in the multitudes of puns, both serious and frivolous, which are

integral to the meaning of R&GAD” (Levenson 161). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as their

counterparts, Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, are playing their roles but in an

omnipotent discourse in which they condemned to an authorized action. All four main

characters of the two plays are waiting for something; they, nevertheless, are not certain for

what they wait. They all put themselves in a process of playing different games in order to

pass the time. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern unlike Vladimir and Estragon who are assumed

to be presently alive and waiting are dead and absent, whom the author resurrects in different

reproductions from their meta-text of Hamlet.

The meta-text does not provide any explanation about their present and future;

therefore, they are unable to define their identities which are made only through the text. The

author who defines their identity is not present; they have been achieved to play in another

playwright’s work trying to redefine themselves; but, they are not free from the borders of the

pervious text. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in other word, are moving on a circle in the

play; they come to the beginning at the end of the play. Vladimir and Estragon have the same

condition in Waiting for Godot. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pursue Hamlet‘s text which

dominates their presence. Bareham who believes the autonomy of Stoppard is in selection of

some materials from Hamlet and Waiting for Godot, is quoted in Levenson (2001) as:

“Stoppard consciously depended on Beckett and expected his audiences to be aware of the

dependence, but nonetheless presented thought, action and theatrical experience distinctly

from that in Waiting for Godot” (162).

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Above all, the play scenography and mise-en-scѐne and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot,

are interrelated. Brater(2001), considering this relation states:

It is here that Beckett’s influence is most chillingly apparent. Apart

from the pirate ship, which is straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan –

more real, of course, because only cunningly imagined in Shakespeare

– the landscape for this play is mostly a lighting job, stark and

atmospheric, a minimalist’s Waiting for Godot minus rock and tree. No

more court scenes, graveyards, or ghostly apparitions. Stoppard is

relying on his audience to fill in the blanks. (204)

Hamlet is the only character whom Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can define their

existences with; they, so, are enforced to follow this Godot like figure to discover the reality;

Vladimir and Estragon, also, wait for the Godot to understand the reality.

ROS. We could go.

GUIL. Where?

ROS. After him.

GUIL. Why? They’ve got us placed now---if we start moving around,

we’ll all be chasing each other all night.

ROS. How very intriguing! (turns.) I fell like a spectator---an appalling

business. The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational

belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute…

GUIL. See any one?

ROS. No. You?

GUIL. No. (Stoppard, Ros 21)

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These works are interconnected not only through language but also through

philosophy and logic. Philosophical tools like syllogism are mainly broken down with the

lapses of memory and variables of perceptions. The interpretation of philosopher Jonathan

Bennett concerning the role of memory in R&GAD with the light on Hamlet and Waiting for

Godot is brought in The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard as: “The point is made that

memory is needed for access to the past … their inability to initiate action stems partly from

lack of memory, even more than memory, in Wittgenstein word; the concept of seeing makes

a tangled impression” (181). This idea is shown in a dialogue between Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern at the beginning of the third act as:

GUIL. Are you there?

ROS. Where?

GUIL(bitterly): A flying start …

Pause.

ROS. Is that you?

GUIL. Yes.

ROS. How do you know?

GUIL(explosion): Oh-for-God-sake!

ROS. We’re not finished, then?

GUIL. Well, we’re here, aren’t we?

ROS. Are we? I can’t see a thing.

GUIL. You can still think, can’t you?

ROS. I think so.

GUIL. You can still talk.

ROS. What should I say?

GUIL. Don’t bother. You can feel, can’t you?

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ROS. Ah! There’s life in me yet!

GUIL. What are you feeling?

ROS. A leg. Yes, it feels like my leg.

GUIL. How does it feel?

ROS. Dead.

GUIL. Dead?

ROS (panic). I can’t feel a thing! (Stoppard, Ros 57)

2.2. Dialogism

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, participating in different scenes of Hamlet, cannot remind the

language and meaning of Shakespeare’s as soon as they separate from other characters of

Hamlet. The poetic iambic pentameter lines in Hamlet are changed to the prosaic absurd

utterances, full of clichés in R&GAD. The language game of Stoppard is a medium of

differentiation.

GERTRUDE. Good (fractional suspense) gentlemen. They both bow.

He has much talked of you, And sure I am, two men there is not

living to whom he more adheres. If it will please you to show

us so much gentry and goodwill as to expand your time with us

awhile for the supply and profit of our hope, your visitation

shall receive such thanks as fits a king’s remembrance.

ROS. Both your majesties might, by the sovereign power you have of

us, put your dread pleasure more into command than to treaty.

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GUIL. But we both obey, and here give up ourselves in the full bent to

lay our services freely at your feet, to be commanded.

(Shakespeare 111; Stoppard 18)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

GUIL. And receive such thanks as fits a king’s remembrance.

ROS. I like the sound of that. What do you think he means by

remembrance. (Stoppard 20)

Before the play begins, audiences are been aware with the explicit title that the two

protagonists are not only going to die but also they are dead; they are men and men must die

and they have died in Hamlet’s off-stage. Robinson (1977) states:

In R&GAD, the lack of sustained action lies at the heart of the comic

situation since the play is silhouetted against Hamlet, with the heroes

never becoming part of that drama. Instead they are entangled in a

series of farcical incidents which bear no relation to each other and in

which they can discern neither progress nor direction. (45)

The situational irony is that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are ignorant about their presences,

made through a fictional reality in which there is neither time nor space limitation; however,

the two characters are aware of the duality in their playground of two coincident language

game of Stoppard. They know how to speak in different contexts; the language differs when

the play enters to the meta-text of Hamlet; their comical conversations that are not perceptible

even for themselves change to the logical meaningful expressions mainly in archaic, poetic

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language of Shakespeare when they meet other Shakespearian actors like Hamlet, Claudius,

Gertrude and other courtiers in the conjunctive points to the Hamlet. They, hence, tunes their

speeches to the text in which they play their roles. They use modern language and theme in

Stoppard’s text; nevertheless, they turn to be as two ignorant attendants who are not as great

as Hamlet and are not qualified to act outside the play within Hamlet. Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern, in different scenes which the play exits from the Hamlet, are prepared for

sequences of uncommunicative dialogue as Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for

Godot.

R&GAD, typical of Stoppard’s work, is essentially “dialectical, but without a final

synthesis ever being reached” (Levenson 162). Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the main source for

this dialectic; furthermore, the mid twentieth century conventions provide the essential

medium for expressing the idea through literature. “This medium is nonheroic and self-

consciously derivative” (ibid 162). This application not only refers to the western culture but

also it refers to the new concept proposed in science, like relativity. Stoppard expresses

Hamlet with these mediums to appropriate it in modern era. Freeman (1996) argues that the

change of prospective in Stoppard’s plays makes them qualified for their time and future; he

adds that: “Rosencrantz anticipates the postmodern/deconstructive questioning and

dismantling of the individual authorial self” (32).

2.3. Texts within Text

The identities and existences of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are made through the text; the

two characters are resurrected to find the origin of their plights; they are in quest of their

origin and presence which are consequences of an imposed condition by the author:

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GUIL. (tensed up by this rambling). Do you remember the first thing

that happened today?

ROS. (promptly). I woke up. I suppose. (Triggered) Oh---I’ve got it

now---that man, a foreigner, he woke me up.

GUIL. A messenger. (He relaxes, sits.)

ROS. 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.

GUIL. Yes.

ROS. That’s why we’re here. (He looks round, seems doubtful, then

the explanation.) Travelling.

GUIL. Yes. (Stoppard, Ros 6)

Being borrowed from Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are resurrected in each

performance and die at the end by the playwright; however, they are not as same as these two

characters in Shakespeare’s text; they are in Stoppard’s play, the modern projections of their

Shakespearian counterparts who are trapped in Hamlet. Stoppard summons them from Hades,

giving them the opportunity to replay their determinative roles and to make their destinies.

They, however, cannot change their ends; it has been already provided in another text and

they are dead in it. Spectators gradually become aware that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are

not going to play different roles; instead, they are playing words.

ROS. What are you playing at?

GUIL. Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.

ROS. Shouldn’t we be doing something---constructive?

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GUIL. What did you have in mind?… A short, blunt human

pyramid…?

ROS. We could go.

GUIL. Where?

ROS. After him.

GUIL. Why? They’ve got us pleased now---if we start moving around,

we’ll be chasing each other all right. (ibid 21)

Stoppard does not try to save them; nevertheless, he renders them in another game. Their

roles are being revealed by the Player when they meet at the beginning of the play as:

ROS. My name is Guildenstern, and this is Rosencrantz. Guildenstern

confers briefly with him (without embarrassment.) I’m sorry---

his name’s Guildenstern, and I’m Rosencrantz.

PLAYER. A pleasure. We’ve played to bigger, of course, but quality

counts for something. I recognized you at once.

ROS. And who are we?

PLAYER. ---as fellow artists.

ROS. 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. (Bows

again.) Don’t clap too loudly---it’s a very old world. (ibid 8)

Stoppard’s commitment to the Shakespearian tragedy does not prevent him to relate

the protagonists to Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot; Guildenstern is

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usually considered to be more intelligent, they have different personalities despite their usual

bewilderments over names. They do not know who is who? Guildenstern treats it “without

embarrassment” (ibid 8); however, next time when they are within the text of Hamlet in

acquaintance with Gertrude and Claudius, they are embarrassed.

ROS. You made me look ridiculous in there.

GUIL. I looked just as ridiculous as you did. (ibid 19)

The confusion over names is due to the fact that names are anchored in social traditions. In

the real world names are used for the function of social recognition; they are recognized in

their real existence within Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Act II, Scene II, in their first meeting

with Claudius and Gertrude when they are wanted to visit Hamlet and “fit king’s

remembrance” (Shakespeare 111).

Stoppard’s Elsinore and Hamlet are not familiar and predictable; moreover, they seem

to be comic arrangement of Hamlet. Stoppard reproduces Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an

unexpected and humorous ways. The revised Shakespeare’s play appears at the very

beginning with two anonymous Elizabethans on an unlocalized stage and it becomes more

apparent with the entrance of travelling players and a pantomime show of Hamlet’s

melodramatic gesture in Ophelia’s closet, the episode that in Shakespeare’s tragedy does not

enacted but described.

Shakespeare uses the technique of play within play in Hamlet, this technique may

cause beholders to identify more with the tragic hero in realizing his action and it may cause

audiences to foreshadow the end. Stoppard constructs R&GAD on the technique of play

within the play; Brater (2001) states: “Shakespeare’s Hamlet is now the play-within-the-play,

though this dumb-show will prove to be these passive onlookers’ ultimate undoing” (204).

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Although Hamlet is considered to be the main source for the story; the direct references to

different scenes make R&GAD a play that encompasses story of Hamlet, it also includes the

quality of dynamicity in performance; “the production efficiently subverts the traditional

relationship between background and foreground as it has been generally understood within

the western theatre’s conventions for the staging of high drama” (ibid 204).

2.4. Ambivalence

The nature of the connection between R&GAD and Hamlet is described in Hutcheon (2006)

in the following classifications:

An acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or

works, A creative and an interpretive act of

appropriation/salvaging, An extended

intertextual engagement with the adapted work, (8)

The two characters are in fact arisen from Hamlet, to reenter the play in

Shakespeare’s text in Act II, Scene III; this is the first textual conjunctive point of two plays

in which Stoppard uses the same words to help the audience for entering the meta-text. This

scene is as:

KING. Welcome, dear Rosencrantz and Guildenstern! Moreover that

we much did long to see you, the need we have to see you did provoke

our hasty sending; something you have heard of Hamlet’s

transformation; so call it, sith not the exterior nor the inward man

resembles that it was, what it should be more that his father’s

death, . . . (Shakespeare 111; Stoppard 17)

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Stoppard performs what Shakespeare has articulated by Ophelia; in other word,

Stoppard shows what Shakespeare tells; this scene in Hamlet is described by Ophelia through

a dialogue with her father in Act II, Scene I as:

POLONIUS. How now, Ophelia! What’s the matter?

OPHELIA. O, my lord, my lord, I have been so affrighted!

POLONIUS. With what, i’ the name of God?

OPHELIA. My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, lord Hamlet . . .

(110-11)

In R&GAD, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, witness the same scene between Hamlet and

Ophelia as soon as they arrive to Elsinore; their arrival is not indicated by any moment

through space but a change of lightening; it is suggested in the stage direction as follow:

He tosses the coin to GUIL who catches it. Simultaneously a lighting

change sufficient to alter the exterior mood into interior, but nothing

violent. And Ophelia runs on in some alarm. Holding up her skirt---

followed by Hamlet. . . . (Stoppard, Ros 17)

What Stoppard means in mentioning exterior and interior is very clear. Two characters are

entering to the source play of Hamlet, the lighting of stage helps spectators to accompany

heroes to the story of Hamlet.

There is a play with words when two players attempt to find the main cause of Hamlet

melancholy; in this dialogue, Stoppard sums up the story of Hamlet to the audiences,

expressing an abstract of Hamlet’s experiences as:

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ROS. To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir,

you come back to find that hardly was a corpse cold before his young

brother popped onto his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending

both legal and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in

this extraordinary manner? (29)

In Act II, Scene II, Polonius informs them of the arrival of playing band whom

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had met in the road to Elsinore in Stoppard’s work.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are abandoned and the conversation in Hamlet between

Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in which Hamlet shows his depression is encapsulated

by Stoppard as:

ROS. And what did we get in return? He’s depressed! … Denmark’s a

prison and he’d rather live in a nutshell; some shadow-play about the

nature of ambition, which never got down to cases, and finally one

direct question which might have led somewhere, and led in fact to his

illuminating claim to tell a hawk from a handsaw. (32)

It is very clear that the scenes involving Hamlet, Claudius, Ophelia are taken directly from

Hamlet; these joining points of the two plays bring a kind of coherence between two plays

and make it possible to perform both simultaneously in a stage, and have two plays at a

proper moment.

The interactions of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz with the tragedians cause the

spectators to remind the Hamlet. The two samples of the play are as:

GUIL. Who decides?

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PLAYERS (switching off his smile). Decides? It is written. . . .

………………………………………………………………

GUIL. I’d prefer art to mirror life, if it’s all the same to you.

PLAYER. It’s all the same to me sir… (47)

The second one explicitly reminds Hamlet. Stoppard directly refers to the meta-text of

Hamlet where it is already written and to Shakespeare who believes art should mirror life.

The player of the dumb-show foreshadows the destiny of Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern; nevertheless, they do not recognize their merit.

PLAYER. … (The poisoner king) tormented by guilt… haunted by

fear… decides to dispatch his nephew to England… and entrusts this

undertaking to two smiling accomplices friends… two spies… giving

them a letter to the English court and so they depart… the English

King reads it and orders their death…(Stoppard, Ros 48)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

GUIL. No, no, no, … you’ve got it all wrong that isn’t what makes it

death. It’s just a man failing to reappear, that’s all, now you see him,

now you don’t … (ibid 49).

His speech is interrupted with the cries of “Lights!” This epiphany is paralleled with

Hamlet’s, where Claudius escapes from Hamlet’s trap. “The king rises! ... Give o’er the play!

… and cries for … Lights, lights, lights!” (ibid 50); in Hamlet’s play within play, the murder

of Gonzago, Claudius, beholding the play of Gonzago whose ear is poured with the poison

while he was sleep and the murderer gets the love of his wife, rises and quits the show crying

“Give me some light: away: … Lights, lights, lights” (Shakespeare 122).

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Gruber (1986) considers Guildenstern’s attempt to murder the player as the freedom

of action, arguing: “GUIL seems here to hope to win dramatic stature by an act of violence,

to gain identity from a conventionally heroic act of will. In fact, Stoppard seems to be saying,

such conventional heroism is not necessary; all that was required of GUIL was the

destruction of a letter” (106). Gruber’s suggestion is so persuasive; as the gesture of killing of

the player with Guildenstern only justifies the autonomy and freedom of action for him, he is

also free to choose the best way and the least expense way that would be the demolition of

the letter.

In R&GAD, everything is predestined within a scheme, in which the protagonists are

moving to death in spite of their struggles.

It is a minor piece of technical detail in Hamlet that Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern die to demonstrate the malice of Claudius and quick-

wittedness of Hamlet. Stoppard’s play uses this known outcome as the

main source of interest. His adaptation relies upon the audience’s

knowledge of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s fate as its most

significant fact. They have no control at a literal level because the story

has already been written, and they have no future. (Mitchel 46)

Stoppard’s players feel confusion about Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s identities

concerning theirs in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Rosencrantz thinks about the difference between

being dead in a box and alive in a box; he, hence, is depressed. Their solitude is once again

broken with the presence of Gertrude and Claudius who ask about their encounter with

Hamlet, the dialogue is paralleled with the Act III, Scene I of Hamlet as:

GERTRUDE. Did he receive you well?

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ROS. Most like a gentleman

GUIL. But with much forcing of his disposition.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

CLAUDIUS. Sweet Gertrude. Leave us too, for we have closely sent for

Hamlet hither, that he, as t’ were by accident, may here Affront

Ophelia. (Shakespeare 117; Stoppard 42-3)

Stoppard has a difficulty of ending the play because there is no progression within the

play; he in fact is helped with Hamlet.

ROS. All right, then. I don’t care. I’ve had enough. To tell truth, I’m

relieved.

And he disappears from view. GUIL does not notice.

GUIL. Our names shouted in a certain dawn… a message. Summons…

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could

have said – no. But some missed it. (He looks around and sees he is

alone.) Rosen? Guil?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Well, we’ll know better next time. Now you see me, now you (and

disappears). (Stoppard, Ros 76)

This moment, the light is going out on Guildenstern, and the stage is brilliantly lit for

the final scene of Hamlet when Horatio is mourning over the dead bodies of Claudius,

Gertrude, Hamlet, Laertes; the two English ambassadors stand over the causalities say: the

scene is described in the stage direction as: “the sigh is dismal; and our affairs from England

come too late. The ears are senseless that should give us hearing to tell him his

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commandment is fulfilled, that R&GAD. Where should we have our thanks?” (Stoppard, Ros

76). Stoppard quotes the final scene of Shakespeare’s; however, “Stoppard’s own conclusion

is a rather arbitrary fading out of the two heroes” (Robinson 45).

The final scene is related to Hamlet’s final scene, Act V scene II, in which Gertrude is

poisoned, Polonius is stabbed, Laertes is wounded and Hamlet has drunk from a poisonous

cup; Stoppard, however, shows the scene in a tableau which is described as: “immediately the

whole stage is lit up, revealing, upstaged, arranged I the approximate positions last held by

the dead Tragedians, the tableau of court and corpses which is he last scene oh Hamlet. That

is King, Queen, Laertes and Hamlet all dead” (Stoppard 76).

In order to be started with the presence of these two characters in another

performance; the play ends in the middle of Horatio’s monologue in Hamlet.

HORATIO. Not from his mouth, had it the ability of life to thank you:

he never gave commandment for their death. But since, so jump upon

this bloody question, you from the Polack wars, and you from England,

are here arrived, give order that these bodies high on a stage be placed

to the view; and let me speak to the yet unknowing world how these

things come about: so shall you hear of carnal, bloody and unnatural

acts, of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, of death put on

cunning and forced cause, and, in this upshot, purposes mistook fallen

on the inventors’ heads: all this can I truly deliver. (Stoppard 76;

Shakespeare 142)

Stoppard, here, ends the play within the story of Hamlet; the conjunctive point of two plays is

also made through restating Shakespeare’s. It is very interesting that Stoppard makes

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beholders prepared for Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s another resurrection in the dawn

with the final scene, as it is prescribed in stage direction, ends with Horatio’s monologue

which is “faded out and overtaken by music and dark” (Stoppard, Ros 76).

Both plays are interested in man’s identity but in different ways; character’s identity

is what the spectators are inquiring in both plays; Shakespeare in Act IV, Scene IV questions

the man’s identity and essence, when Hamlet states:

What is a man?

If his chief good and market of his time,

Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.

Sure, He that made us with such a large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not

That capacity and god-like reason

To fust in us unused. (130)

Stoppard articulates this idea in a dialogue between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with a

series of questions a shout of Guildenstern as: “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?” (23).

Though Hamlet’s question is more philosophical, it is partly answered by himself as it is

brought in pervious lines; on the other hand, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cannot understand

their nature and the uncertainty is a motif that can be observed more in the later one. The

answer to the question can be rhetorically made by the spectators.

One of the most famous scenes of the Hamlet is the soliloquy of Hamlet in Act III,

Scene I:

To be, or not to be: that is the questions: . . . (118)

25

Which is paralleled with Stoppard’s when Rosencrantz with the image of death in a box

states:

Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end? … We

have no control. None at all… 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 for ever. It

must have been shattering --- stamped into one’s memory. … 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, there’s only one direction, and time is its

only measure. (Stoppard 42)

3. Horizontal Level of Intertextuality

Having been related intertextually to other’s works like Pirandello’s, Beckett’s, T. S. Eliot’s

and other’s causes the audiences of R&GAD having been effected differently from what they

may be inspired from Hamlet; Stoppard’s play as well as Shakespeare’s is related to its time.

Stoppard clearly applies the elements of Shakespeare’s plays and constructs a new story

which transports an inexperienced sense; it even alters the experience of any spectator who

has watched or read the story of Hamlet; After Stoppard, “Shakespeare’s Hamlet would never

be quite the same again” (Brater 203); hence, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as central

characters of the play are not being looked as loyal, attentive and cautious as they used to be

expected to be in Hamlet.

26

The concentrations in these two plays are changed from events which are specific for

narration in the story of Hamlet, the son of king, to the common events of death and life. This

change of view point causes the spectators to participate to the structure of the plays;

therefore, the audiences increase the meanings with their own experiences; the following

excerpt reveals the nature of death and life as Guildenstern justifies:

GUIL. (tired, drained, but still on the edge of impatience; over the

mine). No … no … not for us. Not like that. Dying is not romantic, and

death is not a game which will soon be over … Death is not anything

… death is not- ... it’s the absence of presence, nothing more … the

endless time of never coming back … a gap you can’t see, and when

the wind blows through it, it makes no sound … . (Stoppard, Ros 75)

The play opens with the game of spinning coin, in which ninety two consecutive

times, it comes heads; the twentieth century observers who watch the scene may wonder why

the rule of probability does not work here; their observation does not correspond to the

scientific, positivistic regulation of the time; then, they may come to the conclusion that the

play is unreal or fantasy. In this world of fantasy, these two main players can be the same

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who had been attended in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s destinies are determined not only with Hamlet but also

with the mythical, moral and cultural significances; Stoppard uses the theme of literary

influence of Hamlet on his characters; hence, the possibility of other decisions can be

expected by audiences.

4. Conclusion

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Hamlet and R&GAD are written into literary history; however, there is not an overwhelming

limitation that it would be existed for an adaptation. There are some clues which are

connecting two plays, bringing a cohesive structure in which two plays may be considered to

be one; moreover, some factors as: the title, character’s names, places, costumes, motives,

themes, actions are being used from the source play.

Another model for Stoppard’s method can be found in Wittgenstein’s view of

philosophy to put everything before us, neither explains nor deduces anything. It may be

helpful to be noted that Wittgenstein understands language “as a system of concepts and sings

whose referential value, whose capacity to refer to or represent the real world or the human

self, is merely conventional and practical” (Habib 568). One of the fundamental realizations

of the variation of that same events is performed with the use of perspective changes;

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are free to act, to change their destinies but within the story of

Hamlet. The two protagonists are missioned to England, accompanied by their friend,

Hamlet; however, they fail to choice the best way preventing their friend’s death. Choice and

hesitation are two main motives of the play as they are in Hamlet. Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern have the same dilemma of moral challenge, as Hamlet has; they fail to response

the situation in which their friend’s life and their own are in danger. Hamlet, also, has the

same problem of revenge tragedy that transposed into cultural, moral and even relational

forces that eliminate Hamlet’s freedom of action.

Stoppard uses both Hamlet and Waiting for Godot in this play; he puts Rosencrantz

and Guildenstern in Beckett’s context, two tramps that are waiting in the middle of nowhere.

Though the narrative strategies differ in these two plays, Stoppard’s play finally finds the

same circular or spiral narration. The story ends with the point that it starts; two protagonists

are resurrected to play their roles in the original context of Hamlet and die again, they

disappear in Stoppard’s context; the play, in fact, ends in the point that it had been started.

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ROS. All right, then. I don’t care. I’ve had enough. To tell the truth,

I’m relieved. And he disappears from view. GUILdoes not

notice.

GUIL. Our names shouted in a certain dawn… a message, summons…

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we

could said-no. But some missed it. (He looks round and sees he

is alone.) Rosen-? Guil-?

He gathers himself.

Well, we’ll know better next time. Now you see me, now you

(and disappears) (Stoppard, Ros 76).

Stoppard’s play suggests that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are simultaneously

central characters in the drama of R&GAD and peripheral characters in Hamlet; Rabinowitz

(1980) expresses that: “Stoppard goes a step further. While we are the central characters in

our own lives, we simultaneously play minor roles in larger stories that baffle and confuse us:

there is a larger pattern behind our lives, but we lack the vision to see it” (257); therefore,

Hamlet’s exchanging letter in Stoppard’s play and Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s choice

of keeping Claudius letter are justified. It is a fact that Stoppard has not intended to write a

story different from Hamlet; instead, he has rewritten the same side of the story revealing

some possibilities of the situation.

The Stoppard’s work motivates any spectator to search for more and more networks

of relations beyond Hamlet. This work is open for anyone who wants to explore ideas, values,

thoughts and even techniques; there is the polyphony of different voices and values.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Hamlet who do trickery act to their

noble friend are looked like guiltless; the central figure of Hamlet is shifted to them. Their

29

destinies cannot be justified in the course of their actions, they are dead to meet their

predestination which is written by Shakespeare. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern enter in

Hamlet to be identified; there is no other foundation for them. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

are belonged to the source of Hamlet, they define literature classically in this dialogue:

PLAYER. … what do you want---jokes?

ROS. I want a good story, with a beginning, middle and end.

Player (to Guil): And you?

GUIL. I’d prefer art to mirror life, … (Stoppard, Ros 47)

Guildenstern defines literature classically as mimesis; however, his life ironically is made and

limited through the literature. Their life and death are what have been narrated in the premier

text; in other words, they are brought by Stoppard to appear playing their roles and finally

disappear from Hamlet. For Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are recreated with

language in general and literary work of Hamlet, in particular; they are limited within the

boundary of their textual destinies; so, they are mirroring of the art.

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