ASPECTS OF REALITY IN TOM STOPPARD’S ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDEN

The problem is usually generated by changes, new, revolutionary thoughts and ideas that shake the dominant world model, that undermine the associated ruling ideology, that threat the established power relations. In such uncertain periods we talk of an “epistemological crisis” because the knowledge we believed to be truth and the only one turns out to be false and misleading. This was the case with the medieval world model, characterized by order, by high semioticity when it slowly ch

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead brings into the picture such and similar philosophical (epistemological) questions as through the topics it deals with so through the techniques it applies. The metadrama technique makes the audience experience the confusion and the uncertainty. “All the world is a stage”, we all play in different acts of an endless play (most probably tragedy), shows us Stoppard very clearly. Someone get role on the stage and someone has a role in the box as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are only spectators, they have no influence on the development of the play, they are not important. We can see them entering a play inside which there is another play and in this there is an other again. In the scene when the actor-king and the actor-queen are watching the puppet show they are transformed into Claudius and Gertrude erasing the division line that was supposed to exist between theater and reality. After this point we can not be sure that such thing as “reality”, the real world Rosencrantz and Guildensern were riding from when they met the Player exists at all. It could just as well be a different play. The protagonists’ actions and attitudes also stress the idea of uncertainty that dominates the play. They do not understand anything from the very beginning of their journey. The first confusing event is the heads or tails game in which the coin happens to be heads more than a hundred times what is quite “embarrassing”. “It starts to be boring”, says Rosencrantz. Guildenstern is not satisfied and asks about fear and suspense. It is very unusual to see probability working in such a strange way. Theoretically, every single throw has equal chance to be either heads or tales, so, according to this point of view, it can be normal to be heads almost two hundred times in a sequence. The possibility of choice starts to disappear; the two men fear it will fall on head

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