Preying upon the Theatrical Parasite
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 oth
er 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 Like Beckett (and Hamlet), Pirandello also addresses humanity's sense of isolation in the universe but is more preoccupied with the concept of illusion and reality. Pirandello argued that truth was something that could not be fixed or ultimately determined by any person or persons but was variable, in a constant state of flux and dependent upon one's particular point of view. The nature of reality therefore was mercurial; individuals were perpetually creating new realities for themselves--a Pirandellean verity that was best exemplified through a theatrical (and therefore ephemeral) medium. Stoppard's supposed reference to the dramaturgy of Pirandello--specifically Six Characters-- emerges in the basic premise of his play: two characters from another play (Hamlet ) find themselves in an "un-, sub- or supernatural" world where they are forced to adopt a role or embrace a fate which has been sealed by their author (Shakespeare). Ros and Guil's reality (a condition Guil refers to as "thin the name we give to the common experience" in Act I) is not something which they can definitively establish but is continually altered as new information is provided by the playwright who controls their destiny. Stoppard denies any conscious "quoting" of Pirandello's work in his play, however; he states, "As for Pirandello, I know very little about him, I'm afraid. I've seen very little and I really wasn't aware of that as an influence." 7 Because Stoppard so often denies that the play is a largely derivative work, many critics have looked for analytical tools within the text itself to unlock the secrets behind the play's meaning. One metaphor, however, that has been neglected reveals Stoppard's skillful incorporation of mathematical theory in addition to Shakespearean rhetoric. A central image that runs throughout the play is the game of chance. Ros and Guil begin the play by flipping a coin only to discover that heads are produced consecutively. After the eighty-ninth flip, Guil begins to ponder this seeming anomaly in an attempt to explain how such a phenomenon could occur. "List of possible explanations. One: I'm willing it. Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for an unremembere
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Approximate Word count = 2013
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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