In a world where most philosophical works are several hundred pages in length and "The Industry" moves very quickly, it is easy to overlook the significance of a short play written in the language of the commoner, whose design seems to place as much emphasis on comic style as on content. Such is the all too common occurrence with regard to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a play which I have seen written off time and again as silly, BBC-style comedy. However, this is in my opinion a very important philosophical work of 20th Century literature, especially when one considers the universality of it’s philosophical implications. It’s importance lies not in it’s fervent and consistent assertion of any given philosophical ideal or method of choice, but in it’s realistic depiction of 20th Century man without direction — that is, man who considers many options, chastises himself for not being consistent, and is in the dark for most of his existence. That is not to say, however, that this work lacks direction. The absence of logic instead follows itself through to a logical, and more importantly, a humanistic conclusion.

The object of this essay is then also less focused on any definite assertion of philosophy, less so to advocate the belief in any one of those presented, and least of all to promote any one of the discussed modes of choice, but to show the importance of its universality and to focus our appreciation on the process by which moral and spiritual reconciliations and catastrophes occur and by which children are able to play with grandmasters.

Upon finishing Stoppard’s play, I took a moment to consider the single most urgent matter which came to my mind: "Are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern REALLY Dead?" (Shakespeare never actually shows the execution.) All we know is that Hamlet is nowhere to be found . . . a small death of his own. To the rest of the Shakespearean characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are as good as dead. The question that must be raised is the question of the meaning of death in the confines of the play, which we answer by recalling that in the play, death was nothing more than the absence of presence, and since they have no presence in Hamlet or in their own play, they are dead. If we consider the characters themselves, we may wish to think back to the scene in which they are unable to decide between life in a box or death in a box. Further questions which may be raised to bring this point to light include: Can they even discriminate between dead and alive? Would they know it they were dead, would they forget that they were not alive? Aren’t they like the Chinese philosopher? Were they even alive to begin with — before their summoning? Before the start of the play? They surely can’t remember, and you never cared either way before the start of the play, because their existence, their presence was not made. They were, for all intents and purposes, dead before their summoning, before they were called to proceed according to imposed law, to trigger actions with their fated actions, which were in turn triggered by other fated actions, or lucky actions. The two are inseparable. Luck? Fate? . . . God?

Once out of joint with Hamlet, the courtly faces wither and die. Once the play is over, the faces we know should wither and die. Possibly leaving behind the faces present before their summoning. Probably not. The faces and figures die, but still you may wonder about their true selves. What happens to their "eternal souls" once they leave our thought, dead to us? Do flights of angels sing them to their rest? Are they carried on to God? Is there a God? All questions which lie beyond the realm of our understanding.

This self-creating cycle of uncertainty would eventually serve to fuel a process by which the entirety of the play is explained in terms which can hope to be instinctive. More immediately, the discussion of death is essentially a study of man’s state of non-being, that is to say it concerns itself with the inevitable conclusion of a hopeless and helpless being in an instance that is undeniably beyond the reach of man’s will and man’s philosophy, and as such is a fundamentally sound building block for philosophical thought. Death cannot be avoided through the practice of any religion, philosophy, or science, and so we are capable of speaking of death without first speaking of religion, philosophy, or science, and therefore somewhat capable of abandoning bias, which is an important condition of any credible discovery.

As a study of man’s essence and role in non-being, death is related, if inversely, to the matter of man’s being and the role man plays in life. The discussion of the death of our protagonists thus leads to questions about their lives, their beings. It is this study of man’s being that pervades much of all philosophical thought, and so it is in this play, disguised in this instance as the study of our main character’s identities. In general, my main thesis with regard to this work is that Stoppard uses the uncertainty of his main characters’ identities as a sustained metaphor for the philosophical state of reflection concerning their essences as components of mankind, and that, as death and non-being are related oppositely (for now), to life and being, we can see Death as a sort of inverse function of Identity, and in the way that we can exclude uncertainty about death due to the aforementioned nature of it, we must take extra care to include this logical uncertainty into our figurings for our protagonists’ identity. Furthermore, I venture to say that Stoppard has done just this, and in such a way as to round out and "realize" his characters by adjusting his uncertainty from that of the logician to that of the human, which is more opposite death, and also much more like life. It is important to note, however that the philosophical underpinnings of this work will not allow me to imply a causal relationship between the two above comparisons. Even the use of "opposites" should be taken as a simplification, as it relies on the law of contradiction, which (along with causality) we will contradict later.

The concept of conflicting philosophies and modes of choice throughout the play is one which gains credibility as we progress through the world which Stoppard has created for us. The play seems to "play" with different behavioral and deliberative patterns, each of which tend to exemplify certain ideals concerning the way one goes about his daily routine. The ideals represented in the work range from the inclusive to the individual, from belief to doubt, and from fraternity to fratricide — surprisingly dissimilar if we are to believe that the play is consistently advocating any one given ideal, but If we consider that the goal is not to answer, but instead to question, then we come to see that these violent swings can, and do occur in our own daily lives, and we are willing to accept that these ideals which Stoppard has placed before us are not only for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and even the Player and possibly Alfred) to examine, but for us to examine and apply to the world around us as practical reflections of an intellectual’s abstract design… the design of philosophy.

And what are we to do with these ideals? What use have we for fratricides? In our delirium, we’ve all but forgotten that these ideals are not necessarily our own, and how should they be? With such a range of thought as has been administered unto us, how can we possibly accept all of these absolutes, these rules of thumb which are placed in front of us, when half of them seem to contradict and nullify the others? We are not yet ready for the dismissal of the single law which governs all reason as we know it — the law of contradiction — which states that an object can never simultaneously posses two characteristics which are logical opposites (i.e., — A thing can never simultaneously be "red" and "not red"). It is early in the play, there is still some semblance of order, and we need to regain our wits about how to deal with these conflicting ideals. In short — we need to dump some baggage. We are soon relieved of our burden when, after a first confrontation with Claudius and Gertrude, our protagonists find themselves in a position where they are just as confused as we are, if not more so, and we are in turn made to identify with their situation. The bond between us strengthens when the conversation which enables them to assuage, or at least make sense of their plight, also serves as a device by which we may lessen our burdens, and we find ourselves (willingly or unwillingly) bound to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, victims of a need for order, or the semblance of order, or just some kind of explanation. And the statement that makes it all seem better — "each of them is …plausible, without being instinctive." The psychological power of this single statement relieves us of the burden of indecision. We believe that, since there is rationale behind our natural actions, because we can now logically justify the feeling that nothing fits and that all of our teachings (our rules of thumb) are contradictory — we are released from any guilt or from any blame and are made to feel that we are not expected to understand or to choose. The impact of this liberation is so great that we will remember this line throughout the rest of the play. So great, in fact, that we may in our careless freedom overlook the fact that what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were really discussing was the issue of their often confused names — their superficial identities and their methodologies of higher understanding, whose philosophy and significance we may have originally doubted. What we have essentially accomplished, willingly or unwillingly, is the unification of witnessed ideals with their underlying philosophies, and unknowingly tied them into the concept of Identity and of choice — a metaphor which may now operate freely throughout the play. It is this role of the spectator as the artist, the slave as the master, the child as the ultimate grandmaster, that will eventually make sense out of this cacophony of philosophy — but first, we should deal with some of the philosophies at hand.

In my experience, one of the simplest, most common ways for mankind to define itself, its surroundings, and its purpose on earth is by means of some type of theistic order in which man exists as a servile follower of, a loving devotee of, or at the very least — a misbehaved creation of some greater being whom I will refer to, for simplicity’s sake, as God. This theistic approach to the solution of man’s identity crisis is a belief which gives a large percentage of the worlds population the feeling that they really do belong, that their lives have meaning, and that they aren’t quite so alone at the end of the day. Furthermore, this belief provides the ethical and legal structure which governs much of the world, including nearly all of western society. As a device by which man identifies himself, however popular, Stoppard does little to exalt this belief as credible, and instead assigns it, through various mechanisms, the status of rhetoric. The reasoning behind this derision is likely to pivot on a belief that theism’s popularity is attributable mainly to its accessibility. In this respect, it bears tremendous resemblance to the "rule of thumb," in which many recognize the problem of inadaptability and the problems which arise from the strict adherence to these rules. The rule of thumb is best used as a general guideline or a teaching mechanism which can only hope to teach the more profound reasoning behind decisions — reasoning that cannot be taught. Ideally, the rule of thumb approach would be able to grow to a point where every situation could be accounted for and a min-max algorithm could be developed. However, because of the limited facilities of humans, this much information could never practically be learned. The strength of the rule of thumb approach to teaching is its simplicity, paradoxically, its simplicity is what makes it practically unusable most of the time.

In the most conspicuous mechanism of derision, Stoppard manages to work this idea into what cannot help becoming one of the more memorable scenes in the play: the game of questions — a scene whose mere presence in a play which constantly juggles philosophical ideas and allusions forces us to question its relevance, and whose sheer brilliance begs us to note its pertinence. In this scene, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern attempt to refine the skills they will use in hopes of understanding Hamlet’s "transformation," but closer examination reveals that only four of the eleven points scored are due to statements, while seven are due to fouls — Repetition, grunts (hesitation in the film), synonyms, rhetoric, non sequiturs, repetition, and rhetoric. The first instance of rhetoric forces the association between rhetoric and religion:

while other fouls ask us to see this association in a negative light:

The negative view of religion rests on the interpretation that this reflects the way in which we are penalized by theistic institutions for questioning the existence of God and forced to use the rule of thumb as a reactive means for self-preservation, or rather the way in which our children are taught to believe unquestioningly before they are old enough to make a thoughtful decision and are therefore less able to innovate and may find themselves forced into situations that they don’t have the facilities to get out of. If the question of God’s existence is not allowed to follow logically from the ability to choose, then we must recognize in this a comment on a world whose inhabitants are forced to accept certain beliefs and values for no other reasons but their youthful inability to decide intelligently and the social confines which grow stronger with the passing years until the individual has matured into a web of belief and may subsequently be unable to decide against his dogmatic religious structure if he so chose.

The final two lines of the latter quotation concern themselves with the existence of questions without answers in the play, and universally in our daily lives. We are forced to recall a scene of similar importance which occurs after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have first met Gertrude and Claudius:

It’s important to note the distinction that Rosencrantz makes between his past and his present. Here, he emphasizes the fact that there were always answers to his questions, while only six pages later, he himself makes the point that "It’s all questions." — a transition that is of chief importance in the work. The use of the word "looked" in the previous quoted section seems almost a bit malapropic, and again we might see the appearance of human limitations, which is noted explicitly by Guildenstern with the statement that "There’s a limit to what two people can do" (89). We will shortly examine the matter of quantity, but rest assured that if two people can’t do something in this play, then it can’t be done.

Also notable in the above quotation is the further association of the word rhetoric with religion, the sarcastic, derisive tone with which it is treated, and the relationship here established between religion and a lack of predictable consistency which is illuminated further (in other situations) as being due to the wealth of factors at work, the full volume of which lies beyond the realm of human comprehension. Simply put, the rule of thumb is susceptible to great loss in that it is not always capable of reproducing an advantageous positional parameter due to the indeterminate nature of the forum in which we are forced to move about.

Through these observations, we come to understand that this game of questions is not confined to this single scene and that it exists not only as a means of practice, but as a sort of method by which our protagonists attempt to solve all of their problems — including their great problem of identity. It should be treated with some degree of sadness, however, because their narrow human scopes are not capable of producing the answers they seek. Instead, we are left with a game which is perpetually being interrupted by fouls — manifestations of a type of human error which they can never hope to figure in to their "calculations" and which will eventually tie them to their indecision.

On the technical side, I propose that the difference 7 — 4 = 3 may be of significant importance to Stoppard as a symbol which suggests that the difference between human fault (correspondent to the fouls) and human ability (represented by "Statement-type" points scored) may lie in the trinity — that is to say that the imposition of such a religious measure on the young and malleable may help produce the noted effect that humans are incapable of considering all of the factors involved because they only see what they are prepared to see through the religious ethical kaleidoscope or through their oversimplified teachings — ruling out the Machiavellian motives and the inventive positional parameters which also influence human behavior, and ruling out the presence of human evil or heretic modes of thought. While it is not proper to say that the inclusion of these factors could ever make the list of factors complete and allow for accurate prediction, it might help a bit for them (us) to do all they (we) can.

A prime example of the heretofore mentioned self blinding occurs in the forest on the way to Elsinore, in a scene in which Guildenstern defines reality explicitly as a function of perception, and through which he emphasizes the importance of intimate brotherhood. In his "Unicorn Speech," it is interesting to note that Guildenstern does not consider the possibility that the horse was killed intentionally as a violent demonstration of man’s capacity for evil. He is at intrinsically unwilling to consider that there is any deviation from what he has been taught and is unable to properly evaluate his position in terms of the subjective semiconditional values of others in his world This trait haunts him throughout the play, especially in instances when he relies trustingly on the devices of the king. Unable or unwilling to recognize the extreme disadvantage, and even the danger of his position, he prevents himself from discovering key elements which would otherwise persuade him to either rethink his strategy or to abandon the cause — to ask for a draw, so to speak. He recognizes that "there is a logic at work", but refuses to believe that it can lead to his demise. Instead, his focus in this speech is his concern with the importance of intimate humanistic relationships — the importance of fraternity, which is a variation of the positional playing style in which you maintain continual publicity of your positional evaluation of the independent variables that are the relational, and hope that the power of this aesthetic is sufficient to rally the support of others (increasing the power of your position) or persuade your opponent to divulge his evaluations and utilize this knowledge to better your position. However, it is dangerous to take for granted that the opponent is going to be honest with you, doing unto others what he would have done unto him. Instead, all outside knowledge must be taken with a grain of salt. This is usually not a problem because your opponents are never really sure of you, either. Fraternity important thematic concept which operates on various levels throughout the play. It is an idea which is brought into view before any dialogue is even spoken — in Rosencrantz’s character note, which states that although he is not surprised by the run of heads, "he is nice enough to feel a little embarrassed at taking so much money off his friend" (11). It is this type of loving behavior that Rosencrantz exhibits most reliably throughout the work, and is perhaps most poignant upon the discovery of the contents of Claudius’s letter, at which point he is heartbroken and says "We’re his friends." (110), emphasizing the importance of brotherly love. Guildenstern responds with his characteristic skepticism (and some degree of unconditionality), noting that their friendship is only known to them as hearsay — words spoken by the King. After all, Hamlet couldn’t even remember the names of his "excellent good friends." Rosencrantz tries to argue the matter, but to no avail. He is overwhelmed by forces beyond his control and his consideration. To put this idea into familiar terminology, he is unable to understand the subjective nature of the evaluation of this independent relational parameter (fraternity), and is therefore unable to understand the variation inherent in the semiconditional values which are used by both he and Guildenstern to determine the strength of their respective positions. Once again, it can be seen that the oversimplification of a situation by means of the rule of thumb can create serious problems when other "playing" styles are trying to be implemented In this instance, Rosencrantz’s positional style is effectually "stuck" — "stalemated" if you will — because of misassumptions at the very basest level of his understanding. He can no longer proceed with his original positional offensive. Instead, his main concern must now be in the interest of self-preservation, and so he must resort to reactionary (or at the very least combinational) methods. It is easy to see why the positional style should only be played by those skilled enough to maintain their advantage. The method by which Rosencrantz finishes up the "game" is an interesting one which we will discuss later.

Other examples of Rosencrantz’s tendency toward the positional style of humanism include his willingness to perform various embarrassing feats for Guildenstern — positional sacrifices in which he stands to lose the material of his social dignity. These include stretching his legs for him (100), and licking his toe and waving it around for him so that he might determine whether or not the draught may be coming from the floor (59), both of which may raise questions about homosexuality in the play. In these cases, Rosencrantz never experiences any serious conflict because his evaluation of fraternity is basically the same as Guildenstern’s. If we were to be introduced to another view of the situation (i.e., by someone who might have seen the sacrifice), we might all have a more difficult time. Instead, thoughts of homosexuality are immediately dispelled by Rosencrantz’s response to the rhetoric-laden question which Guildenstern asks after Rosencrantz offers to lick his toe:

Instead of wondering about our protagonists’ sexual orientation, we now understand these offerings to be gentle manifestations of a human love which derives from fraternity, trust, and the true intimacy which Guildenstern was speaking of in his Unicorn speech. We must realize that if anybody were to come in while Rosencrantz was licking Guildenstern’s toe, the event would become more of a reality, and would certainly cause a scandal. It seems that Guildenstern is somewhat aware of this, and is consequently unwilling to let Rosencrantz actually perform the sacrifice, but instead recognizes and allows for Rosencrantz’s greater position by virtue of his willingness to sacrifice. As it is, any relations which are carried out by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will remain in the socially untouchable realm of true humanity.

In this work, Stoppard also finds ample time to make allusive references to the beliefs and practices of existentialist thinkers, as well as some of their works. Like Humanism, Existentialism is referred to before the dialogue of the play even begins — in Guildenstern’s character note, which states that although Guildenstern is aware of the oddity of the long run of heads, he is not alarmed about it, and is concerned mostly with the implications of the phenomena. This concern for the way in which events can induce frightening outcomes reminds us of the writings of Sartre, and his concept of "nausea," especially if we consider that the flipping of the coin may relate to the two protagonists’ salvation, in much the same way as the tale of the two thieves in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The concept of Nausea reappears throughout the text, called by Guildenstern "Fear! The crack that might flood your brain with light." (15). No sooner does he get this exclamation out than he begins to note the severity of it, and wish to be able not to believe it, responding to Rosencrantz’s statement that it might not be his day with the confidence that he is afraid that it is. He doesn’t want to be right in his somewhat nihilist beliefs, and so he (like most of us) wavers from time to time, one minute asserting his existential beliefs through such mechanisms as skepticism and Phenomenology, and the next refuting them with statements like "we are presented with alternatives. … — But not choice!" (39), and "…if we happened, just happened to suspect that our spontaneity was a part of their order, we’d know that we were lost." (60), which directly opposes Sartre’s paramount belief that man has free will in the form of choice, and that man is responsible for all implications of his actions.

The ultimate assertion of existentialist thought in the play is made by the Player in the forest on the way to Elsinore. He tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he "is of the Blood, Love and Rhetoric school," and that he can do "Blood and love without the rhetoric" and "blood and rhetoric without the love," but that he cannot do it without the blood. "Blood is compulsory — They’re all blood you see." (33). Here, we can imagine that the Rhetoric is used to represent the theistic approach to acting, that the Love is used here to represent the humanistic, and that the Blood serves to represent universal suffering, which (as in Godot) is used to represent the main concepts behind Existentialism and nihilist Skepticism. An alternative analysis of the impact of existentialism in this play would be to take the relationship of "blood, love, and rhetoric" as an illustration in which the correlation between Sartre’s concept of nausea (fear) and universal suffering (blood) always factor into the situation, whether you play the most advanced (positional) or the most simplified (reactive) method, love and rhetoric, respectively. The rationale behind this is the fact that neither method can guarantee a positive outcome, and we are consequently left to execute each movement in fear that we may not be right because we cannot connect the present state with the ultimate goal, and cannot develop a min-max algorithm due to our limited facilities for remembering rules of thumb.

Another means by which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hope to find answers to their questions is the use of science and logical thought, although Guildenstern himself notes that "The scientific approach… is a defense against the pure emotion of fear" (17), which can be considered to be suggestive of a solution to the problem of the last paragraph. While he is saying this, however, he is inventing a ridiculous syllogism which he hopes will refute his previous one which placed them in "un-, sub-, or supernatural forces." Through this attempt, we see the overwhelming capacity for human error as an inextricable part of the logical pursuit, and we are again made to question the validity of science as a means by which humans arrive at answers.

Another example of this assertion can be inferred from Rosencrantz’s statement that "The sun’s going down. Or the earth’s coming up, as the fashionable theory has it." (125), whit is itself a direct reference to the fact that before Copernicus, everybody believed in the Aristotelian idea that the sun and the stars circled around the earth, and that bodies fell to the earth because of some natural desire to be on the ground. Both of these ideas have long been outdated, but it is still not true that we have a complete understanding of the universe around us. A sacred cow was lost when Einstein unseated Newton for control of the physical universe, and it is to be expected that someday Einstein will also fall. Science is a process by which answers are made to be questioned, a self perpetuating process which leads to nothing more than increased possibility of human error.

This concept is also seen when we realize that Bohr’s model of the Hydrogen atom was unseated by Heisenberg, who stated that man can never determine the exact location of an electron because of man’s inability to observe the minute sizes and the incredible speeds. This idea is also similar to the laws of Schr" dinger, the father of quantum theory, who speculated that if you were to place a cat in a box with a sample of radioactive material, a Geiger counter, a device with a hammer, and a vial of cyanide, all of which were arranged so that the cat would be killed in the event of the random radioactive emission, the cat would exist in a limbo-like state of life, death, both, and neither as long as the box was closed, and there was no way of observing the outcome. This is an assertion that man is the measure of all things, a dogmatic proclamation that man cannot judge that which he cannot see, and a deathblow to the law of contradiction. It is surely no coincidence that Rosencrantz speaks of the uncertain nature of life in a box. Instead, Stoppard is asking us to realize the role that human error and uncertainty play in making the world a seemingly random place. It is also important to note that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern never are so bold as to flip more than one coin at a time. This would certainly affect the outcome of the consecutive tosses because it would be more likely to come out "not A" than it would be to come out "A". Thus, the human concept of consistency is shown to deteriorate under the weight of accumulating factors, and our concept of such elemental scientific postulates as the laws of contradiction and causality are called into question because our weak intellects are incapable of considering all of the factors involved in a causal relationship.

It may, however, be worthwhile for us to consider the possibility that the scientific process could defend us from fear in that science can create computers which would be able to fully explore a more simplified system (the game of chess) and prevent the universal suffering (nausea, fear) inherent in man’s intellectual shortcomings. However, this would introduce the fear noted in the statement that there will probably never be another human chess champion. Once again, answers lead to more questions.

Furthermore, it should be noted that in a system (such as life) which is so complex that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the work of Schr" dinger are very relevant, the death of the rule of thumb (the law of contradiction, etc.) prevents us from creating an algorithm by which our computers could fully evaluate a position, and therefore precludes the salvation of science.

With nearly all of our usual devices converted into a cloud of dust, we are now left to sift through the remains of a world which was created and destroyed for our education. As we find all of our cherished conventions torn and tattered, we come to realize that we really have very little use for them, and that what is most important remains — natural humanity. Our capacity for intimate relationships was our first instinct upon birth, and when we are stripped naked, it is all that remains. When we find ourselves in a world where nothing has meaning anymore, where nothing can be predicted, and where we can then seek no comfort in the small possibility that we were right about religion, what remains to lend meaning to life are not the extremes of birth and death, but the isolated moments in between, the people we meet, and the love we share in meaningful and intimate coalescence of ideals and selves.

We choose to integrate the positional and the combinational styles into a method of choosing intermediate positional goals which are at least roughly equal to our current position, allowing for a clearly defined combination to unite us with our goal. This is the consequence of life’s lack of a rigid structure, of man’s most basic freedom by which he is able to abandon any sense of preset essence and live for the here-and-now, an idea rarely implemented in simpler systems, except perhaps by those who just love to play games for the sake of the game, and not because they feel the need to win. In any case, this is far less frequent than its seeming simplicity would lead us to believe. The very reason by which we justify our fears and our inadequacies can be used to liberate us from the traditional values we so often find imposed on us by a society which pays too much attention the rule of thumb. We realize now that although the Player believed that the bad to end unhappily and the good unluckily (a concept rendered absurd by its association with The Importance of Being Earnest.), Rosencrantz believed in a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and Guildenstern believed art to mirror life, they are all "In the same boat" in the sense that they are all searching for identity, and we know that the Player was correct in recognizing them as fellow artists — but then, he’d been through it all before, in the same costume, more or less. The events repeat themselves cyclically, with an occasional change in characters. The importance of human love is emphasized throughout the work, and we know that it is only through the full embodiment of the spectator and the performer, the master and the slave, the theist and the atheist, and the child and the grandmaster, that true human intimacy and self discovery can occur.

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