Hamlet Mortality Essay

1006 Words3 Pages

Mortality
Prior to reading Tom Stoppard’s play, the audience knows the outcome of the two main characters...they die. Whether this knowledge comes from the title itself, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, or their reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the readers are given the ending events of this play. This allows for Stoppard to be creative and give the rest of the play deeper meaning because the audience isn’t focused on the ending events but on the bigger idea of existentialism he is trying to convey. Stoppard’s focus throughout the play is based on existentialism and meaning behind life, however the idea of life can just as easily be related to death. The idea of death is a reoccurring theme throughout this play portraying how the unknowingness of death is unsettling. In the beginning of the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are flipping coins, the coin always lands on heads, at first this appears to only relate to the idea of chance however it can also be related to death. It has been suggested that the coin …show more content…

He believes that a death on stage is more convincing than a real death and that death is a easy and logical way to end a pay as well as a life. He believes his whole life is a play that he is acting through and that his life will end in death, as do many actors in a play. During the play within a play he refers to it as a “slaughterhouse,” in which Guildenstern responds that the actors know nothing about death. This is where the Player defends his argument with his opinion being that “their talent is dying” and that death in stage is the only death that people can understand. Stoppard intentionally used this language to create questions within the readers about whether they can understand death, both on and off stage. He uses this as another place where little is know about death and it is meant to create fear in

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