rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead by tom stoppard

Guildenstern's frequent critiques of staged deaths makes even the gracefully subtle portrayal of his and Rosencrantz' deaths at play's end – a gore-free, sudden disappearance – seem unsatisfying, questionable, eerily incomplete.

The play's running meta-theatrical commentary (comments about plays made within a play) keeps the audience hyper-aware of this fact.

All the deaths on stage, after all, are staged, be they performances of plays-within-the-play (such as those that occur during the Tragedians' play and the fatal stabbing enacted by the Player) or supposedly 'real' action (such as Polonius' corpse, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's deaths at play's end, or the corpse-strewn final stage). Impossible to recognize, death thus remains elusive even as the play never stops dreading its inevitability. 'What do you know about death?' Guildenstern demands of the Player and, when the Player replies that dying is 'what the actors do best,' Guildenstern insists death can't be acted because 'he fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen-it's not gasps and blood and falling about.' Indeed, the Player recounts that the time he arranged for one of his actors to actually be hung on stage, the audience booed it as a subpar performance. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern argue with the Player and Tragedians about what 'real' death looks like. In fact, it seems impossible even to describe it properly. As inevitable as it is, it seems impossible to accept death. Death itself may be a given, but the human acceptance of death is no given, and the characters struggle against death even in the face of its 100% probability. Yet while death is a sure thing, the play casts it in a fresh, unsettling light. By building his play around these characters, Stoppard is thus able to exaggerate the fatedness and inevitability of death. Everyone in the audience knows exactly how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will die from the first moment of Stoppard's play. As characters drawn from another play, the details of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's deaths are already scripted by Shakespeare's play before Stoppard's play even begins. But the protagonists' deaths are a foregone conclusion even apart from the title, which is in fact a line from Hamlet. Most obviously, the title – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - states the death of its protagonists. 'Life is a gamble, at terrible odds' the Player explains, '-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.' Above all, this is a play about death. Yet, as the play goes on, it becomes clear that there's nothing really odd about those odds: they represent the probability of human life. The odds of the coin toss that opens Act One – an 100-long streak of 'heads' – at first seem impossible, the sure sign of a make-believe world.

Rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead by tom stoppard