berlin normand - rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead - theater of criticism

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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Theater of Criticism

Normand Berlin

Modern Drama, Volume 16, Number 3-4, Fall/Winter 1973, pp. 269-277

(Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

DOI: 10.1353/mdr.1973.0023

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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead:Thea ter of Cri ticism

NORMAND BERLIN

TOM STOPPARD'S ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD enteredthe theater world of 1966-67 with much fanfare, and in the ensuing years ithas .acquired a surprisingly high reputation as a modern classic. It is animportant play, but its importance is of a very special kind up to now notacknowledged. The play has fed the modern critics' and audiences' hunger for"philosophical" significances, and as absurdist drama i t has been comparedfavorably and often misleadingly with Beckett's Waiting for Godot. However,its peculiar value as theater of criticism has received no attention. To helprecognize this value I offer the following discussion.Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a derivative play, correctlycharacterized by Robert Brustein as a "theatrical parasite."} It feeds onHamlet, on Six Characters in Search ofan Author, and on Waiting for Godot.Stoppard goes to Shakespeare for his characters, for the background to hisplay's action, and for some direct quotations, to Pirandello for the idea ofgiving extra-dramatic life to established characters, to Beckett for the tone,the philosophical thrust, and for some comic routines. The play takesShakespeare's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - time-servers, who appearrather cool and calculating in Shakespeare, and whose names indicate thecourtly decadence they may represent - and transforms them into garrulous,sometimes simple, often rather likable chaps. Baffled, imprisoned in a playthey did not write, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern must act out theirpre-arranged dramatic destinies. Like Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon, theycarryon vaudeville routines, engage in verbal battles and games, and discourseon the issues of life and death. However, whereas Beckett's play, likeShakespeare's, defies easy categories and explanations, and remains elusive inthe best sense of the word, suggesting the mystery of life, Stoppard's play

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welcomes categories, prods for a clarity of explanation, and seems moreinterested in substance than shadow.

Stoppard's play is conspicuously intellectual; it "thinks" a great deal, andconsequently it lacks the "feeling" or union of thought and emotion that weassociate with Waiting for Godot and Hamlet. This must be considered ashortcoming in Stoppard's art, but a shortcoming that Stoppard shares withother dramatists and one that could be explained away if only his intellectualinsights were less derivative, seemed less canned. To be sure, plays breedplays, and it would be unfair to find fault with Stoppard for going to otherplays for inspiration and specific trappings. In fact, at times he usesShakespeare and Beckett ingeniously and must be applauded for hisexecution. But when the ideas of an essentially intellectual play seem tooeasy, then the playwright must be criticized. Whenever Stoppard - hispresence always felt although his characters do the talking - meditates onlarge philosophical issues, his play seems thin, shallow. His idiom is not richenough to sustain a direct intellectual confrontation with Life and Death.Consider, for example, Guildenstern's question: "The only beginning is birthand the only end is death - if you can't count on that, what can you counton?,,2 Put in this pedestrian way, the idea behind the question loses its force.Or take Guildenstern's remarks on Death: "Dying is not romantic, and deathis not a game which will soon be over . . . Death is not anything . . . death isnot . . . It's the absence of presence, nothing more . . . the endless time ofnever coming back . . . a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows throughit, it makes no sound . . . . (p. 124). Examples of this kind of directphilosophical probing can be found throughout the play. We hear a mantalking but do not feel the pressure of death behind the words. The passageseems false because the language does not possess the elusiveness and theeconomy that are essential if a writer wishes to confront large issues directly.

But there are indirect ways to deal with life and death, and hereStoppard is highly successful. And here we arrive at the heart of thediscussion of Stoppard's art. According to Stoppard himself, his play was"not written as a response to anything about alienation in our times . . . . Itwould be fatal to set out to write primarily on an intellectual level. Instead,one writes about human beings under stress - whether it is about losing one'strousers or being nailed to the cross.,,3 Stoppard's words run counter to ourexperience of the play and indicate once again that writers are not the bestjudges of their own writing. Like all writers of drama, Stoppard wishes topresent human beings under stress, but he does so in the most intellectualway. In fact, there is only one level to the play, one kind of stance, and thatlevel is intellectual. The audience witnesses no forceful sequence of narrative,since the story is known and therefore already solidified in the audience'smind. One could say that the audience is given not sequence but status-quo,and status-quo points to a "critical stance - a way of looking at the events ofthe playas a critic would, that is, experiencing the playas structure,


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THEATRE OF CRITICISM 271

complete, unmoving, unsequential.In the act of seeing a stage play, which moves in time, we are in a

pre-critical state, fully and actively engaged in the play's events. When theplay is over, then we become critics, seeing the playas a structural unity and,in fact, able to function as critics only because the play has stopped moving. 4In the act of seeing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, however, ourcritical faculty is not subdued. We are always observing the characters and arenot ourselves participating. We know the results of the action because weknow Hamlet, so that all our references are backward. Not witnessing amovement in time, we are forced to contemplate the frozen state, thestatus-quo, of the characters who carry their Shakespearean fates with them.It is during Stoppard's play that we function as critics, just as Stoppard,through his characters, functions as critic within the play. It is precisely thiscritical stance of Stoppard, of his characters, and of his audience that allowsme to attach the label "theater of criticism" to the play, thereby specifyingwhat I believe to be Stoppard's distinctiveness as a modern dramatist.

We recognize and wonder at those points in Shakespeare's plays where heuses the "theater" image to allow us to see, critically, the play before us froma different angle, where, for example, we hear of the future re-creations ofCaesar's murder at the very point in the play where it is re-created, or wherewe hear Cleopatra talk about her greatness presented on stage "i' th' postureof a whore" at the moment when it is presented in that posture. At thesemoments Shakespeare engages us on a cerebral level, forcing us to think,stopping the action to cause us to consider the relationship between theaterand life. These Shakespearean moments are expanded to occupy much ofStoppard's play, just as Shakespeare's minor characters are expanded tobecome Stoppard's titular non-heroes.I have indicated Stoppard's shortcomings when he wishes to expresstruths about Life and Death. However, as critic discussing Hamlet andElizabethan drama, he is astute, sometimes brilliant, and his language iseffective because it need not confront head-on the large issues that onlypoetry, it seems, is successful in confronting directly. In a New Yorkerinterview with actors Brian Murray and John Woods, who played Rosencrantzand Guildenstern in the New York production of Stoppard's play, Murraysays: "I have been an actor most of my life, and I've played all kinds of partswith the Royal Shakespeare Company, but I never realized how remarkableShakespeare is until I saw what Tom Stoppard could do with a couple ofminor characters from Hamlet."s This fleeting statement in a rather frivolousinterview pinpoints what Stoppard does best: what he can "do with"Shakespeare's minor characters to help us realize "how remarkable Shakespeare is." That is, Stoppard helps us to see more clearly not "human beingsunder stress" but Shakespeare. The actor Murray is applauding a criticalfunction, and as we thread our way through the play Stoppard must bepraised for precisely that function.


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Here is an exchange between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in whichGuildenstern, pretending to be Hamlet (or, to put it better, playing Hamlet),is being questioned by Rosencrantz.

ROS. Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his onlyson. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king.GUlL. Yes.ROS. Unorthodox.GUIL. Undid me.ROS. Undeniable. Where were you?GUlL. In Germany.ROS. Usurpation, then.GUlL. He slipped in.ROS. Which reminds me.GUlL. Well, it would.ROS. I don't want to be personal.GUlL. It's common knowledge.ROS. Your mother's marriage.GUlL. He slipped in.ROS. . . . His body was still warm.GUlL. So was hers.ROS. Extraordinary.GUlL. Indecent.ROS. Hasty.GUlL. Suspicious.ROS. It makes you think.GUlL. Don't think I haven't thought of it.ROS. And with her husband's brother.GUlL. They were close.ROS. She went to him -GUlL. - Too dose -ROS. - for comfort.GUlL. It looks bad.ROS. I t adds up.GUlL. Incest to adultery.ROS. Would you go so far?G UIL. Never.ROS. To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir,you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before hisyoung brother popped onto the throne and into his sheets,thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now whyexactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner?GUlL. I can't imagine! (pp. 49-51)

This dialogue says as much about Hamlet's dilemma - crisply, comically - asmany a critical essay, and it makes T. S. Eliot's search for an objectivecorrelative in Hamlet seem academic. How effectively Stoppard repeats thatphrase "He slipped in" to cover Hamlet's concern with both politics and sex.


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How precisely Rosencrantz's low-key "It makes you think" characterizesHamlet's usual mode of behavior. How brilliantly Stoppard brings togetherthe warmth of a newly dead body and the heat of a mature woman's body,Hamlet's two main preoccupations. Not that Stoppard in a few words hasreached the heart of Hamlet's mystery; it never will be reached. But he allowsus to place the mystery within a refreshingly clear framework. At the sametime, by having Guildenstern play Hamlet, by having him put on thattheatrical mask - calling to mind the various maskings of the Player -Stoppard allows us to think of man's usual condition: "Give us this day ourdaily mask."

Stoppard, again as critic and again through stichomythic dialogue,presents his thoughts on that vexing problem of Hamlet's madness.

ROS. Hamlet is not himself, outside or in. We have to glean whatafflicts him.GUlL. He doesn't give much away.PLAYER. Who does, nowadays?GUlL. He's - melancholy.PLA YER. Melancholy?ROS. Mad.PLAYER. How is he mad?ROS. Ah. (to GUlL] How is he mad?GUlL. More morose than mad, perhaps.PLAYER. Melancholy.GUlL. Moody.ROS. He has moods.PLAYER. Of moroseness?GUlL. Madness. And yet.ROS. Quite.GUlL. For instance.ROS. He talks to himself, which might be madness.GUlL. I f he didn't talk sense, which he does.ROS. Which suggests the opposite.PLAYER. Of what?Small pause.GUlL. I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madderthan a man talking nonsense not to himself.ROS. Or just as mad.GUlL. Or just as mad.ROS. And he does both.GUlL. So there you are.ROS. Stark raving sane. (pp. 67-68)

Here we proceed to a conclusion about Hamlet's insanity-sanity through amaze of conundrums, interestingly imitating Hamlet's own procedure offinding directions out by indirections. And along the way we begin toobserve, again as critics, a condition of modem life, in which people do not


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reveal much about themselves "nowadays," "times being what they are."Stoppard forces us to question certain assumptions about a character inanother dramatist's play and, by extension, about man in the play-writ-Iargecalled life.Stoppard confronts another critical crux in Hamlet when he has thePlayer present this brief statement on the dumb show: "Well, it's a device,really - it makes the action that follows more or less comprehensible; youunderstand, we are tied down to a language which makes up in obscuritywhat it lacks in style" (p. 77). Again we find that an attempt to answer thekind of question a critic would ask leads to a larger statement about theinability of language to communicate.

Quotations as evidence of Stoppard's critical examination ofHamlet canbe multiplied. His critical interest, however, is wide and takes in Elizabethandrama and theatrical art in general. I offer only one example, an interestingdialogue on tragedy:

GUlL. You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? Thegreat homicidal classics? Matri, patri, fratri, sorrori, uxori and itgoes without saying -ROS. Saucy-GUlL. - Suicidal - hm? Maidens aspiring to godheads -ROS. And vice versa -GUlL. Your kind of thing, is it?PLAYER. Well, no, I can't say it is, really. We're more of the blood,

love and rhetoric school.GUlL. Well, I' ll leave the choice to you, of there is anything to choosebetween them.PLAYER. They're hardly divisible, sir - well, I can do you blood and

love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood andrhetoric without the love, and I can do you all threeconcurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you love andrhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory - they're allblood, you see.GUlL. Is that what people want?PLA YER. It's what we do. (pp. 32-33)

Stoppard, a drama critic before turning playwright and in this play aplaywright as drama critic, crisply pinpoints the characteristics of Greek andElizabethan tragedy and, enlarging the range of his criticism, uses these tragiccharacteristics to indicate what "we" - players and audience - do.

I am arguing that Stoppard is most successful when he functions as acritic of drama and when he allows his insights on the theater to lead him toobservations on life. He is weakest, most empty, when he attempts toconfront life directly.6 Stoppard is at his artistic best when he follows theadvice of Polonius: "By indirections find directions out." This is as it shouldbe, I think, because Stoppard's philosophical stance depends so heavily on the


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"play" idea, the mask, the game, the show. Not only is the entireRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead a play within a play thatShakespeare has written, but throughout Stoppard uses the idea of play.Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and of course the Player, are conscious ofthemselves as players, acting out their lives, and baffled, even anguished, bythe possibility that no one is watching the performance. All the world is astage for Stoppard, as for Shakespeare, but Shakespeare's art fuses world andstage, causing the barriers between what is real and what is acted to breakdown, while Stoppard's art separates the two, makes us observers and criticsof the stage, and allows us to see the world through the stage, ever consciousthat we are doing just that. The last is my crucial point: Stoppard forces us tobe conscious observers of a play frozen before us in order that it may beexamined critically. Consequently, what the play offers us, despite itsseeming complexity and the virtuosity of Stoppard's technique, is clarity,intellectual substance, rather than the shadows and mystery that we find inHamlet or the pressure of life's absurdity that we find in Waiting for GodOl.Of course, we miss these important aspects of great drama, and some criticsand reviewers have correctly alluded to the play's deficiencies in theserespects,7 but we should not allow what is lacking to erase what is there -bright, witty, intellectual criticism and high theatricality.

I present one final example, taken from the end of the play, todemonstrate Stoppard's fine ability to make criticism and theater serve as acommentary on man. In this incident - "Incidents! All we get is incidents!Dear God, is it too much to expect a little sustained action?!" -Guildenstem, who all along has shown contempt for the players and for theircheap melodrama in presenting scenes of death, becomes so filled withvengeance and scorn that he snatches the dagger from the Player's belt andthreatens the Player:

I'm talking about death - and you've never experienced that. And youcannot act it. You die a thousand casual deaths - with none of thatintensity which squeezes out life . . . and no blood runs cold anywhere.Because even as you die you know that you will come back in adifferent hat. But no one gets up after death - there is no applause -there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's - death- (p. 123)

He then stabs the Player, who "with huge, terrible eyes, clutches at thewound as the blade withdraws: he makes small weeping sounds and falls tohis knees, and then right down." Hysterically, Guildenstern shouts: "If wehave a destiny, then so had he - and if this is ours, then that was his - and ifthere are no explanations for us, then let there be none for him - " At whichpoint the other players on stage applaud the Player, who stands up, modestlyaccepts the admiration of his fellow tragedians, and proceeds to showGuildenstern how the blade of the play dagger is pushed into the handle.

Here we seem to witness, for the only time in the play, an act being


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performed, a choice being made, not dictated by the events of Shakespeare'splay - only to discover that we have witnessed playing, theater. Guildensternand Rosencrantz are taken in by the performance of a false death, bearing outthe Player's belief, stated earlier in the play, that audiences believe only falsedeaths, that when he once had an actor, condemned for stealing, really die onstage the death was botched and unbelievable. What we have in Guildenstern's"killing" of the Player, therefore, is a theatrical re-enforcement of the earlierobservations on audiences by the Player as critic. As we spectators watch theevent - Rosencrantz had remarked earlier that he feels "like a spectator" -we intellectually grasp the fact that we had no real action, that no choice wasmade, Stoppard thereby making his philosophical point indirectly and withfine effect. In Stoppard a condition of life is most clearly understood, itseems, only when reflected in a critical, theatrical mirror.In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead we do not have the kind oftheater characterized by such phrases as direct involvement, emotional,pre-critical, theater of the heart, but rather a theater of criticism, intellectual,distanced, of the mind. In a very real sense, Stoppard is an artist-critic writingdrama for audience-critics, a dramatist least effective when he points hisfinger directly at the existential dilemma - "What does it all add up to?" -and most effective when he confronts the play Hamlet and Elizabethan dramaand theatrical art, thereby going roundabout to get to the important issues.Stoppard's play, because i t feeds on both an Elizabethan tragedy and amodern tragicomedy, gives us the opportunity to consider the larger contextof modern drama, especially Joseph Wood Krutch's well-known and ominousobservations on the death of tragedy and his prediction of the devolution oftragedy from Religion to Art to Document.8 Krutch finds an interestinganswer, I believe, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Using Krutch'swords, but not in the way he uses them, we can say that Rosencrantz andGuildenstem Are Dead is art that studies art, and therefore serving as adocument, dramatic criticism as play presenting ideas on Hamlet, onElizabethan drama, on theatrical art, and by so doing commenting on the lifethat art reveals. That is, Stoppard's play is holding the mirror of art up to theart that holds the mirror up to nature.

This double image causes the modern audience to take the kind of stanceoften associated with satire. And yet, Stoppard's play cannot be calledsatirical, for it makes no attempt to encourage the audience into any kind ofaction, as do Brecht's plays, or to cause the audience to change the waythings are. The play examines the way things are, or, more precisely stated, itintellectually confronts and theatricalizes the condition of man the playerand the world as theater. By the pressure of its critical energy, the playawakens in the audience a recognition of man's condition, not in order tochange that condition, but to see it clearly. In short, by presenting atheatrical, artistic document, Stoppard makes us think - the words"document" and "think" pointing to the modernity, the impoverishment,


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and the particular value ofRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The playpresents not revelation but criticism, not passionate art - Hamlet in thegraveyard - but cool, critical, intellectual art - Hamlet playing with therecorders. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in its successful moments,brilliantly displays the virtues of theater of criticism, and perhaps shows thedirection in which some modern drama will be going - "times being whatthey are."

NOTES1. Robert Brustein, "Waiting for Hamlet," The New Republic 4,November, 1967, p. 25.2. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, New York,1967, p. 39. Subsequent page references will appear in the body of the essay.3. Tom Prideaux, "Uncertainty Makes the Big Time," Life 9, February

1968,p.76.4. Here Northrop Frye's comments are illuminating. A Natural Perspec-tive, New York, 1965, pp. 8-10.5. "Talk of the Town," The New Yorker 4, November 1967, p. 52.6. In The Real Inspector Hound, New York, 1968, Stoppard again usesthe play-within-a-play technique, this time with two drama critics witnessinga play on stage and then joining in it. Here, however, the technique is usedmore for suspense and comedy than for presenting philosophical insights.7. In addition to the Brustein article, cited above, the following provideuseful commentary on the play: C. J. Gianakaris, "Absurdism Altered:Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," Drama Survey 7, 1968-69, pp.52-58; Andrew K. Kennedy, "Old and New in London Now," Modern Drama11, February, 1969, pp. 437-46; Jack Kroll, "R & G," Newsweek 30, October1967, pp. 90-92; Walter Kerr, Thirty Plays Hath November, New York, 1969,

pp.50-53.8. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper, New York, 1957, p. 143.

berlin normand - rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead - theater of criticism

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