Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: Act I

In the first act, there is an obsession with coin tossing, probability, chance and fate. Towards the beginning, Guildenstern suggests that perhaps the law of probability have been suspended, explaining why the coin perpetually lands heads-up. I think that we speculated in class that perhaps the law of probability has been suspended because time has stopped. I would go further and reason that time has stopped. The only real time in the play is the portion that comes directly from Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern did not really exist before the messenger summoned them. Furthermore, in between times where they are involved in the play Hamlet, they are just waiting and whiling away time until time becomes “real” again. If the play was in black-and-white and in color, only the parts which are taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet would be in color, the rest would be in black and white…or rather, different shades of gray. When Guildenstern and the Player are betting on the coin, it finally lands tails-up and immediately afterward, the play Hamlet commences…or resumes. This change signifies the resumption of time. All the while that the coin showed heads, time was suspended; now it continues. All this ties into the postmodern concept of questioning reality as well as the concept of intertextuality.

After the Hamlet characters walk off the stage and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are left alone again in their time warp (by the way, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern never exist without someone else to validate their existence since in Hamlet they never appear alone; they are supporting characters that must be supported=> postmodern emphasis on community and socially constructed identities), they become confused about their identity. This is disorder, transience, and even existentialism when Guildenstern says “The only beginning is birth and the only end is death—if you can’t count on that, what can you count on? …Your smallest action sets off another somewhere else, and is set off by it.”

Furthermore, Guildenstern comments later, “Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.” This is a very small thing to base anything off of especially when you are postmodern and words mean nothing, as demonstrated by Rosencrantz’s lines “—over my step over my head body!—I tell you it’s all stopping to a death, it’s boding to a depth, stepping to a head, it’s all heading to a dead stop—“.