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Themes Of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead

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The play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” by Tom Stoppard has many themes of existentialism hidden cleverly throughout it’s contents. One of these themes is the contrast of Fate and Choice. Throughout the play we see that Stoppard uses various scenes to depict this theme. Some of these include flipping the coins, the fake play, and when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not replace the letter to avoid being killed. This theme of Fate versus Choice makes us ask, to what degree does fate control our lives? One of the first scenes we see in the play depicts this famous theme of Fate versus Choice. In this scene Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are flipping coins as a way to relax. They end up flipping the coin multiple times and each time it …show more content…
But we cannot tell whether this choice was made by Guildenstern or it was made by Shakespeare, and it is Guildenstern’s fate to not want to delve deeper into what is going on around him. In this scene, and almost every other scene, we can begin to see Shakespeare as sort of like God. Shakespeare can be compared to God in this play because he has decided the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern before the play had begun. Even the title of the play is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which means that Stoppard followed what happened to them in Shakespeare 's Hamlet. By doing so, Stoppard confined the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to a determined end, or fate, which they can never escape. This ties in with one of the main ideas of existentialism which is fate is inescapable no matter how many choices you make or how many times you try to avoid it, fate will find you. So why Guildenstern chooses to not want to know anything about what is going on around him is fate or choice, no one …show more content…
This ultimate fate is the fake play told to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by the Player. In this play 8 people die and it is about a King who was murdered by his brother who then took his wife and stole the throne from his son. Obviously the play that the Player is referring to is Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two out of the eight people that died in it. The blatant fate for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is laid before them but they still do not have a clue about it. Stoppard is trying to show us that we all have a fate. Sometimes our fate is blurry and we cannot see it. But other times our fate is laid out for us right before our eyes and we still choose to not believe it. That’s exactly what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern did. They saw their fate but either did not know or they could not accept it. Stoppard makes another connection to existentialism here because in existentialism we all have a definite fate that is sealed upon the day we are born. Even though we will not know that fate for a long time, it is immutable. Stoppard is trying to show us, the readers, that now matter what they do, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are unable to escape their fate just like we are destined to not escape

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