Shakespeare waits to see how Stoppard chooses to end what he has begun. As he waits, as he watches, he sees things that escaped him earlier. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not quite the pair of identical zeds—unnecessary letters—he first took them to be. Rosencrantz has no real notion anything is wrong. Guildenstern sometimes does, but he cannot see what his troubles are or do anything about them. Which is the worse, the baser, futility? One more thing to ponder.
And, whenever the action calls for them, both Danes fall back into Hamlet’s story, in which they are trapped like flies in sticky pine sap. Their diction and manner change. They have sudden purpose—Shakespeare’s purpose. But, although they are Hamlet’s schoolmates and thus longtime acquaintances, he is no more sure which is which than was his uncle before him.
The tragedians and their spokesman also flutter on the fringes of the plot. They have more self-knowledge than Guildenstern or Rosencrantz: they know what they do. They know it from the inside out, too. Some of the words the playwright puts in the spokesman’s mouth . . .
“You don’t understand the humiliation of it—to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable—that somebody is watching. . . .” he howls. After a confused response (what else?) from Rosencrantz, he adds, “Don’t you see?! We’re actors—we’re the opposite of people!”
Shakespeare starts laughing and finds he can’t stop. The woman crunching nutmeats edges away from him. So do the pockmarked man and his ladylove Lucy. They don’t think it’s funny. They think he’s funny, and in no good fashion. He feels sorry for them. They must never have performed.
As Rosencrantz and Guildenstern likewise recoil, the spokesman dons calm like a mantle. And, as with a mantle, who knows what that calm conceals? “Think, in your head, now, think of the most . . . private . . . secret . . . intimate thing you have ever done secure in the knowledge of its privacy. . . .”
He waits. Rosencrantz looks guilty. Shakespeare no doubt looks guilty, too. So do most of the groundlings around him. Who wouldn’t, thinking of something like that? A born innocent, maybe. Or a born liar.
“Are you thinking of it?” the spokesman asks softly. He springs at Rosencrantz like a lion. “Well, I saw you do it!”
“You never! It’s a lie!” Rosencrantz says, but his voice is hopeless, doom-filled. He staggers away. Only when the spokesman pursues no farther does he realize the other man couldn’t have. He giggles in relief.
So does half the crowd. Shakespeare would, but his mouth has gaped into a new O of admiration. How many players has he sent up on stage to love, to rage, to sin? Perhaps worst of all, to plot sins yet uncommitted? How many tens of thousands of eyes watched them feign both passions and solitude?
Once or twice, he has played with this. As You Like It, with boys pretending to be maidens pretending to be youths . . . But, most of the time, while he writes he acts as if what is happening inside the audience isn’t layered so closely with what happens up on the stage.
Meanwhile, this play goes on. “We only know what we’re told, and that’s little enough,” Guildenstern protests. “And for all we know it isn’t even true.”
The spokesman only shrugs. “For all anyone knows, nothing is.” One more line to set the Master of the Revels’ teeth on edge!
As the tragedians begin to rehearse the play with which Hamlet hopes to catch the conscience of the king, Guildenstern asks, “What is this dumbshow for?”
“It makes the action that follows more or less comprehensible,” the spokesman explains. “You understand, we are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.”
Beside Shakespeare, the woman with the bottomless sack of nutmeats screws up her face. “What’s that?” she says, as if the air will tell her. He quite likes the double mockery with the more than doubled deprecation. It is not his language, even if it is English—the intrusion of his language into this different one makes that plain. But, as the players can manage with his speech, so he can with theirs. And Tom Stoppard knows all its tricks.
The tragedians’ pantomime includes two spies sailing off to England. Because of a letter, they meet their deaths at the hands of the English king. This fails to register fully on Guildenstern or Rosencrantz, though Rosencrantz wonders. What did he say early on? How do I know? We haven’t got there yet.
But they will.
And they do. They begin the third act (which will plainly be the last—strange structure, thinks Shakespeare, who is used to plays with five) on a ship. Hamlet is with them, too, as he must be—asleep, at the moment.
Guildenstern comes as close to understanding as he ever does: “Free to move, speak, extemporise, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact—that we, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bearing a letter from one king to another, are taking Hamlet to England.”
Everything he says is true. None of it does him any good. He is trapped in the drama. Does he remember the tragedians’ pantomime, now when remembering might save him? He does not, nor will he and his comrade be saved.
Sure as sure, he and Rosencrantz sleep. Sure as sure, Hamlet lifts their letter and substitutes his own. Sure as sure, the tragedians and their spokesman emerge from barrels by the rail. They are playing the tune they used when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern first met them. Shakespeare nods—a pretty touch, that.
“Incidents! All we get is incidents!” Rosencrantz cries. “Dear God, is it too much to expect a little sustained action?!”
At which, of course, the pirates attack. There is a mad scramble, people screeching and running and fighting and jumping in and out of barrels. Some of it sets the groundlings howling with laughter. Will Kempe would play well in such buffoonery, Shakespeare thinks. Kempe has left the craft, though, and fallen on hard times. He was a great name in London theatre. He is . . . nobody. It can happen to anyone.
The pirates are beaten back. Hamlet goes missing—as he must, for his place in the remaining action lies in Elsinore. Is he any freer than Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, or only better written?
Without Hamlet, but still with that letter, his hapless schoolmates struggle on. Guildenstern opens the letter. He discovers, to no one’s surprise but Rosencrantz’s and his own, that it means their deaths, not Hamlet’s.
“But why? Was it all for this?” He turns to, and on, the tragedians’ spokesman. “Who are we?”
“You are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. That’s enough.”
Guildenstern stabs the spokesman, who dies, horribly. Even Shakespeare is impressed. Then, to the tragedians’ applause, the fellow revives. The prop knife—any company will have one—is revealed for what it is.
“We’ve done nothing wrong. We didn’t harm anyone,” Rosencrantz says desperately. “Did we?”
“I can’t remember,” Guildenstern says.
Rosencrantz gathers himself. “All right, then. I don’t care. I’ve had enough. To tell you the truth, I’m relieved.” He falls through a trap door and is gone.
“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, when we could have said—no. But somehow we missed it.” Guildenstern looks around. He stands all alone on the front of the stage. “Rosen—? Guil—?” Like Rosencrantz before him, he prepares for the inevitable. “Well, we’ll know better next time. Now you see me, now you—” A different trap opens beneath him. He too disappears.