A Look at Stoppard's Influences in 'Rosencrantz and Guilden'
A Look at Stoppard's Influences in 'Rosencrantz and Guilden'
Although Tom Stoppard established his reputation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when it was first produced in 1966, the playwright often appears reluctant to talk about his second play. Stoppard, who most critics report to be a very private person, repeatedly offers his interviewers only cryptic responses to their questions about the meaning of the piece. When asked whether or not Rosencrantz and Guildenstern embodies any particular philosophy, Stoppard replied that the play does not reveal any profound theories or metaphysical insights "on a conscious level, but one is a victim and beneficiary of one's subconscious all the time and, obviously, one is making choices all the time . It's difficult for me to endorse or discourage particular theories I personally think that anybody's set of ideas which grows out of the play has its own validity." Stoppard, like many renowned playwrights before him, seems almost to delight in adopting such an equivocal stance. As he tells Rodger Hudson, Catherine Itzin, and Simon Trussler--the editors of Theatre Quarterly-- in a frequently cited interview, "insofar as it's possible for me to look at my own work objectively at all, the element which I find most valuable is the one that other people are put off by--that is, that there is very often no single, clear statement in my plays." 1 Similarly, in an interview with Jon Bradshaw, Stoppard explains, "the play had no substance beyond its own terms, beyond its apparent situation. It was about two courtiers in a Danish castle. Two nonentities surrounded by intrigue, given very little information and much of that false. It had nothing to do with the condition of modern man or the decline of metaphysics. One wasn't thinking, 'Life is an anteroom in which one has to kill time.' Or I wasn't, at any rate. God help us, what a play that would have been. But Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wasn't about that at all. It was about two blokes, right?" 2
Despite Stoppard's coy evasions regarding the play's more trenchant themes (according to the playwright, the drama was chiefly "calculated to entertain a roomful of people" 3 ), critics have confidently posited several popular theories regarding the philosophical influences inherent in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and, rather than view the play as a piece written to please more than to instruct, have suggested that the play is...