Dignifying the Undignified - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Tom Stoppard wrote the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in the 1960s. This post is about his film production of the play from 1990.

The most famous fall guys in the canon? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, obviously.  

Like everyone else in Hamlet they end up dead. However, their deaths were gratuitous and instrumental; as instruments of the plot they didn’t even get the dignity of being slain onstage. Maybe that’s why Tom Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead? To give them a dignified send off?  Who doesn’t want that? I guess that as death approaches (if in advancing age we can read the approach of death and surely, accidents and 'bolt from the blue' heart attacks aside, we can) the kind of death we’ll get becomes clearer. No-one wants to end up like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern did in Hamlet. A bad joke terminated in darkness. An accurate description of life and death!

This observation reminds me of one of Beckett’s few straight lines in Waiting for Godot was “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more”  – but while my description of life and death is as Beckettian as Beckett it is 60 years too late to be original. I have mentioned Beckett here because the relationship between Waiting for Godot and Stoppard's play is a close one. Vladimir and Estragon are prototypes, or rather, fairly recent archetypes for the kind of characters Stoppard invents to breathe new life (or is that new death?) into the forgotten men of Hamlet. It is doubtful if Stoppard could have re-made and re-membered the two men so vivdly without the example set in Godot.  

So in Beckett, as for Stoppard, death is ugly and democratic. As far as each dying person is concerned it’s all the same; death is death is death, For others, those we leave behind , it matters. Of course, for so many there is no one who cares. Death may be a touchy subject for the mourners of the beloved. But for the rest of us nobodies, no one really cares. And Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the everyman nobodies. If they can be remembered and celebrated there’s hope for the rest.

The movie  starts with Tim Roth and Gary Oldman as the eponymous ‘heroes’ on horseback. They are just as silly as I remember them from Hamlet.

They’re definitely more sillied against that silly, though. Somehow they manage to toss a coin 156 times and come up with heads with each one. They’ve been summoned on official business nut they are as clueless as Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot.  It seems to me that much of this film pays direct, explicit homage to that play.

The heroes, struck by the unlikeliness of having a coin come up 156 times on heads, and  finding themselves  “going around in circles” begin to suspect that the dice are loaded – that they are being controlled, written, directed. These two are very self-consciously characters in a play; they’re trapped and they know it. It doesn’t get them down. .They decide to play along, looking for clues as to what can possibly be afoot with themselves, with Hamlet, with Denmark. Just before they literally start to play with words in the famous ‘question tennis’ match they comment: “What are you playing at? Words, Words, they’re all we have to go on”

The interplay between the plot of Hamlet and the two heroes’ plot throws new light on all involved. Gertrude and Claudius are just as vicious and scheming as before but Hamlet appears selfish and cruel. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are caught up by the main current of Shakespeare’s plot to the extent that they don’t rightly have a plot of their own. In this respect all they have is one another; they are not masters of their own destiny; they are subject to forces that are outside and far more powerful than they are. Yet they are shown to be interesting and convincing characters in their own right. Unlike their more celebrated schoolfriend, they appear kind, humorous and self-reflective.

Another thing – they seem to know that they’re doomed.  One of the two (Gary Oldman) comments that:  “We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it, before we know that there are words. How we come blooded and squalling with knowledge that for all the points on the compass there is only one direction and time is its only measure.” This could have come straight out of Beckett.

Later in the film as the two sit side by side in the hold of the boat to England (their final journey) their relationship appears ever more like that between Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot.  They don’t really know where they’re going, but they know that they’ve only got one another. Their frustrations, their affection, their mutual interdependence come to the fore.  It is as if this play has been made possible in the space opened up by Beckett’s play. These two men may be outside history, they may be hopeless, silly, inconsequential characters, they are the most famous fall guys in the canon of English literature but this play raises their lowly status; it dignifies the indignity of their place in that canon.

They die in the end but the reality of that death is uncertain. The king of England who receives Hamlet’s forged letter commanding their death turns out to be the leader of the players (Richard Dreyfus) who’d put on the Murder of Gonzago at Elsinore to catch the conscience of his uncle. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead – the news delivered by Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet is not news because anyone who knows Shakespeare’s play knows this ending.  The actors’ travelling stage folds up at the end suggesting that the execution of the two friends has been a fiction. Stoppard’s success is not so much in having opened this window of possibility that they were saved, rather it is in having made these two nobodies  into two interesting and sympathetic characters that an audience could love.