Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Because I was ill on and off, I missed much of the early part of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, and a few sections in the middle. I still need to catch up on what I know to be a very quick and thoroughly entertaining read and plan to do so tonight or tomorrow. But from our readings in class and my brief explorations of the novel, I’ve gained certain insights about the play by Stoppard that have greatly contributed to my enjoyment of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
For one, I know that the format of a play means that there will be fewer physical or personal descriptions of the characters, but it seemed to me that Stopard deliberately refrains from characterizing either Rosencrantz or Guildenstern as individual people. This is referred to directly and humorously when the King can’t bother to tell the difference between the two. I feel that this lack of physical characterization sets up the two as representations of humanity as a whole, which makes their ponderings about life, death, and the meaning of either especially significant.
I also loved the way that the play was weaved throughout its predecessor, Hamlet. Stoppard lifts a few lines and adds his own in a manner that, had another writer attempted it, could have ended disastrously but instead fits in quite well with the rest of the play. The fact that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spend so much time wandering in a state of confusion creates a cloudy tone and atmosphere in the play that allows for a certain degree of believability, especially in the integration of original Hamlet portions. I found their lack of clarity of mind amusing, especially when we watched the film adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which the actors perfectly encapsulated the humor of the play. I thought that the cloudiness of their lives, demonstrated by the scene with coin-tossing that demonstrated how random life is and also by the occasionally unintelligible speeches of some characters, was a darker indication of how random and arguably purposeless our lives are.
It then was a natural move for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to mirror Hamlet’s existential, almost nihilistic point of view and question why they even exist. They question fate, by wondering if it’s possible to throw a peg in fate’s plan (in the play Hamlet’s plan, in this case). I feel that the playwright, through his characters, brings across the point that life and the universe are chaos in which people wander blindly, searching for meaning. Some find their own meaning (and they vary in levels of delusion?) in this mess of randomness and chance and others simply balk at the abyss (just. like. GRENDEL!) and find themselves unable to function with clarity, like Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet.
I’ve enjoyed the bits of the play I’ve read to an enormous extent, and even thinking about the themes in the play make me excited about reading it more thoroughly as soon as possible. I’m eager to consider the novel’s themes more deeply and also to rent the movie adaptation through Netflix to compare the text with the film adaptation.