Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Summary
Theme: Stoppard suggests that there may be incomprehensible forces shaping our lives, making it impossible to control or understand them.
Summary:
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are flipping coins and the coins keep being heads. This makes them talk briefly about the laws of probability but they get confused and remember their journey, which is to travel to Elsinore. On the way they bump into The Player along with his entourage. He interrupts their game and offers to perform some...hm not so PG material...for a few guilders. It takes Ros&Guil a while to get this and while Guil is horrified, Ros is a little interested. The Player desperately wants to perform in front of them so he makes a bet; if the coin lands on heads, The Player loses, if tails, The Player wins. It lands on tails but The Player covers it so they have to perform, but Ros and Guil leave them to go to Elsinore. At Elsinore, they meet with the King and Queen who cannot tell them apart and then with Hamlet. Questions are a big deal here; they play the question game and they unsuccessfully try to interrogate Hamlet. Hamlet then kills Polonius and they are all on a boat to go to England. Ros and Guil are given a letter to give to the King of England but they accidentally open it and see that Hamlet is going to be killed. Because they love having a purpose and directions, they don't say anything. Ros and Guil then find themselves on the beach and can hear music playing, but it is muffled. The Player shows up and tells them how angry Claudius was at their play, which is now they are all in England. Ros and Guil jump into some barrels, Hamlet disappears, and the lights go down. When the light comes on the Player tells Guil and Ros about death, and the last scene of the play shows them all dead.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: This title is significant because Ros and Guil die at the end of the play, but what does that really mean? Every time the play is reenacted they are alive again so does death really matter?
Quotes:
"Give us this day our daily...week"
This is an incorrect repitition of the Bible quote "Give us this day our daily bread." It is uttered many times throughout the play,never correctly.
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ReplyDeleteHi Alice,
ReplyDeleteGood job on your summary of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. I like how you chose the quote "Give us this day our daily week." I think it is easy to remember and will be very useful if you were writing an essay on the AP exam. What do you think is the significance of the fact that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern never say this prayer correctly? What is the author trying to say? How does this quote fit in with some of the motifs from this play? Good job on your summary!
Alice,
ReplyDeleteNice job on your overall post on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. However I think your summary of the work would benefit greatly if you included some more details in your summary. For example I think it would help you formulate an essay in May if you included information about more of the later events of the work when they were on the pirate ship and things. Also including a small blip about the different characters in the play might be helpful. I think you chose some great quote to include in your post. It really attributes to the Stoppard’s point of how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are incompetent. What were some of your thoughts of the work as a whole?