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Synopsis

The play concerns the misadventures and musings of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters from William Shakespeare's Hamlet who are childhood friends of the Prince, focusing on their actions with the events of Hamlet as background. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is structured as the inverse of Hamlet; the title characters are the leads, not supporting players, and Hamlet himself has only a small part. The duo appears on stage here when they are off-stage in Shakespeare's play, with the exception of a few short scenes in which the dramatic events of both plays coincide. In Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are used by the King in an attempt to discover Hamlet's motives and to plot against him. Hamlet, however, mocks them derisively and outwits them, so that they, rather than he, are killed in the end. Thus, from Rosencrantz's and Guildenstern's perspective, the action in Hamlet is largely nonsensically comical.

The two characters, brought into being within the puzzling universe of Stoppard's play by an act of the playwright's creation, often confuse their names, as they have generally interchangeable, yet periodically unique, identities. They are portrayed as two clowns or fools in a world that is beyond their understanding; they cannot identify any reliable feature or the significance in words or events. Their own memories are not reliable or complete and they misunderstand each other as they stumble through philosophical arguments while not realizing the implications to themselves. They often state deep philosophical truths during their nonsensical ramblings, yet they depart from these ideas as quickly as they come to them. At times Guildenstern appears to be more enlightened than Rosencrantz; at times both of them appear to be equally confounded by the events occurring around them.

After the two characters witness a performance of The Murder of Gonzago - the story within a story in the play Hamlet - they find themselves on a boat taking prince Hamlet to England with the troupe that staged the performance. During the voyage, they are ambushed by pirates and lose their prisoner, Hamlet, before resigning themselves to their fate.

Major themes of the play include existentialism, free will vs. determinism, the search for value, and the impossibility of certainty. As with many of Tom Stoppard's works, the play has a love for cleverness and language. It treats language as a confounding system fraught with ambiguity.