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The Play-Life Metaphor in Shakespeare and Stoppard WILLIAM BABULA SCRIPT IS DESTINY. For Ros and Guil in Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead destiny lies in the plot of an Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Stoppard's play owes much to the techniques developed by the absurdists, and particularly to the devices employed in Waiting for Godot. C. J. Gianakaris has demonstrated the "innumerable ... parallels" that "reveal how consciously Stoppard has mined Beckett's seminal drama."ยท Like Beckett's hobos, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wonder "what are they to do without adequate instructions in their blank context.,,2 Gianakaris continues: "Guildenstern speaks archetypal words for all those caught in the modern universal dilemma ..."3 Yet their context is not blank; it is Hamlet. If the two men are caught in a universal dilemma, they are also trapped in a script. They are not "escapees from Shakespeare's tragedy," but victims, as Hamlet is a victim, of the story-line.4 It i,s difficult, and probably impossible, to locate the metaphorical center of Hamlet. But close to that theoretical center is the play's concern with conscious theatricality. The tragedy abounds with references to acting, plays within plays, advice to actors, and reminders to the audience (as when Hamlet teases the "old mole" in the "cellarage") that they are watching a play. As Maynard Mack has shown, words that need not be associated with the theatre, "play," "perform," "act," become fraught with theatrical overtones in the dramatically self-conscious world of the play.5 The life-play metaphor has its implications. Mark Rose points out that the standard Elizabethan avenger role "is thrust upon Hamlet" and Hamlet finds it "a limited, hackneyed, and debasing role."6 What follows is an aesthetic struggle with Hamlet fighting the tendency of the revenger to become a ranting monster like Laertes. Yet, by the end of the play, "[Hamlet] has ceased to struggle for absolute freedom in his role, ceased to 279 280 WILLIAM BABULA insist that he alone must be the artist who, in all senses of the term, shapes his life.,,7 From here it is a short step to the Hamlet of: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends,/ Rough-hew them how we will" {V.iLI0-l1).8 The actor has raised his role to a style he can accept, but he is still limited by the form. Like life, the play imposes and restricts. It is this metaphor that Stoppard has borrowed in his transposition of Hamlet - the Elizabethan noble hero - into Ros and Guil - the modern nonentities. If Hamlet finds his role in bad aesthetic taste, Ros and Guil, to put it baldly, find their roles baffling. They are minor characters who have been sent for. Once they go, and there are suggestions that they don't have to, they enter the world and script of Hamlet. Their intellectual difficulties, their confusion, is in the absurdist vein. But the overwhelming sense that the audience has is that their groping does not matter. After all, the title tells us that they "are dead." All that they must do is speak their lines like puppets. Yet they do struggle against the roles they must play. But unlike Hamlet, who manages to achieve some dignity within the limits of his role, Ros and Guil succumb to the play-life metaphor, still limited in their minor roles. Early in the play Guil is talking about that special providence that Hamlet only turns to after the struggle against the confines of his role: There's a logic at work - it's all done for you, don't worry. Enjoy it. Relax. To be taken in hand and led, like being a child again ... (p.40)9 But the script has them being led to death. Or as Ros says later, using the language of the theatre: "All right! We don't question, we don't doubt. We perform" (p. 108). The play's the thing, and Ros and Guil have their parts. The metaphor is resolved similarly in both dramas. Having accepted the notion that life is like a play, all three characters agree not to change the plot. Yet there are moments...

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