Books in my Blood 4: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Strangely (for me), I have no idea what led me to this play by Tom Stoppard. I was always one for fiction or poetry, but not drama — not recreationally, anyway. Nonetheless, something possessed me to pick this slim volume off the shelf in Waldenbooks and take it home, thus introducing me to a terrific playwright, the concept of metafiction, and a life of questions.
R&G is a retelling of Hamlet from the perspective of two minor characters from the play, school friends of the dour prince. In Shakespeare they are utterly lacking in distinguishing characteristics, serving more as a plot mechanism than as living characters. They come on stage, advance the plot a bit, are cruelly used by Hamlet, and then sent away to die. In Stoppard's play, we experience the life of a minor character; while the original play remains intact as a force of destiny, we see these poor saps spend their off-stage moments trying to make sense of a world where they don't even get to know the plot.
As tragic as this sounds, along the way to the final curtain there is a lot of humor — traditional gags, physical comedy, and more subtle bits — all of it serving Stoppard's themes. The dialogue is quick and sharp, filled with multileveled puns even as Guildenstern tries to develop an internally consistent explanation of why eighty-five times in a row tossed coins have come up heads. There's music hall slapstick, sexual innuendo, and even a bit of cross-dressing — something for everyone!
And then there's the excursion into metafiction. The best example of metafiction — a concept new to me at that time — is in the character of the Player, who seems to know that he is in a play, and has seen it all before. The levels start to get deep here, as he is an actor playing the role of an actor who is playing the role of the Player who is an actor leading the troupe hired by Hamlet to perform at court. He knows where this will all end up, and yet he won't answer any questions for Rosencrantz or Guildenstern; he only drops hints and winks slyly at the audience.
Lastly, there's the ambiguity of it all. Ros and Guil never do get the answers to their questions, but the audience gets something more important: a better question. While Hamlet is the VIP of Shakespeare's play, he's only a minor character in Stoppard's version. Isn't it better to be the protagonist in your own story than a minor player in someone else's story? Or is it best of all to step outside the cycle entirely, and take the Player's role?
So with the witty writing and philosophical questions and metafiction and implication that everyone is the lead in their own story, I fell in love. I was so fascinated with this book that I started tracking down everything I could find by Stoppard, which led me to more great writing. I even decided to take a community college course in twentieth century drama.
Which brought me, as these things do, to a moment of personal weirdness. The class was good, and the instructor, though I can no longer recall his name, was quite sincere. I read Ionescue and Pinter and Ferlinghetti, discovered my own tendency was toward the absurd, and hung out with student actors for a few months. But the text we used didn't have Stoppard, a failing I brought to the attention on the professor.
"Oh, yes, that's a fine play, and a lot of fun to read. If it was in the book we'd discuss it in class."
At this point a normal person would resign themselves to their disappointment. I, on the other hand, scraped together what little savings I had and went on a quest to buy every copy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead available for sale in Broward county. It took three weeks and all of my money, but I managed to get twenty-two copies, one for each student in the class.
In hindsight, the professor must have been mortified when I came to class with a Publix sack full of books. He wasn't prepared to discuss the play, and even if he was doing so would have thrown his lesson plan all out of whack, this late in the term. So he asked to see me after class, mumbled some apologies, and offered to talk with me about Stoppard any time I might like to stop by his office.
He asked if I wanted the books back, the books I'd blown my savings on, but I declined. I told him to keep them, that I was donating them to the school. I don't know what happened to them; I never went back to class.
