Kirstiecat | Blog

Everyone should read this. It’s so short it will take you an hour-maybe an hour and a half if you have a headache and you are in the middle of a Princess Bride scene and have to fight off shrieking eels or rodents of unusual size. Just a rough estimate.

Okay, admittedly I am a big fan of Shakespeare. And Hamlet is in my top three. King Lear is first definitely and I have a fondness for Macbeth as well. And if you don’t get Shakespeare, don’t worry. I didn’t get it either until I really studied it and spent multiple sleepless nights memorizing entire soliloquies, letting them sink into me.

And the funny thing is that Stoppard really brings the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to life and at the same time, as in Hamlet, they are intermixable and so similar they don’t have consistent individual identities. But we get to see some things we don’t see in Hamlet, the way they feel about this letter they are taking to England for one which calls for Hamlet’s death and also more just the way they interpret Hamlet’s behavior. I had seen this film several times and felt that the film was a worthwhile and honorable adaptation. My main impression while watching the film is that Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are stuck in a perpetual purgatory-like afterlife in which they will never escape. They will always be flipping the same coin, following Hamlet around, reading the letter meant for the King of England. It will never end. It’s like a play that keeps on going, infinitely repeating itself forever and, in this way, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will experience a certain strange hell.

There’s a few things that lead me to this conclusion:

p.71: Rosencrantz: “Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering-stamped into one’s memory. And yet I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all…”

108: Rosencrantz: “We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?”
Guil: “No no no…death is…not. Death isn’t. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not be on a boat.”
Ros: “I’ve frequently not been on boats.”

124: Guildenstern: “Death is not anything…death is not…It’s the absence of presence, nothing more…the endless time of never coming back…a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound.”

There’s some great insights into mortality here but also within these pages, as in the deph of Shakespeare’s works, are some real insights into madness and insanity. Here is my favorite, which involves Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pondering over Hamlet’s mental state.

67-68

Ros: “He talks to himself, which might be madness.”
Guil: “If he didn’t talk sense, which he does.”
Ros: “Which suggests the opposite”
Player: “Of What?”
(small pause)
Guil: “I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself.”
Ros: “Or just as mad.”
Guil: “Or just as mad.”
Ros: “And he does both.”
Guil: “So there you are.”
Ros: “Stark raving sane.”

On a personal note, I used to have a couple of friends in high school, easily mixed up, that I regarded as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in my mind. They looked very alike, until you were actually looking at them. And they both sounded rather alike while you were listening. You could never remember when thinking back to conversations who said what. They both maintained this philisophocal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead crossed with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot sort of feel with meandering ponderings about the nature of life. I have a picture of these two that I took at a party about six years ago and I am actually proud of myself for being able to tell them apart, even though they have different haircuts and different facial structures. I have to say, I always wondered what it would be like to date one of them but I couldn’t even consider making a move. It would be like dating two men simultaneously at the exact same time and all of our conversations, although fascinating, would probably have gone nowhere. Last I heard, one of them had fallen for a girl that liked to garden. I hope that worked out for him.

(now playing: The Go Betweens: Oceans Apart)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 27th, 2005 at 1:11 am and is filed under books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.