The significance of the Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead Isabel Sebode 12th Grade

“Player: We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.” (I: 19)

As a paragon of the Theatre of the Absurd, the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard transcends the reliable dramatic bounds. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (hereafter Ros and Guil) find themselves in a world that is concurrently infinite and absent, in which laws of probability do not hold true and nothing except death can be regarded as certain, or even probable. Within this limbo between existence and non-existence, Stoppard uses the protagonists of the play to question major philosophical questions concerning meaning, death and free will. Yet, whilst Ros and Guil seem perplexed by their inescapable situation, one character seems to possess an awareness of his surroundings that the protagonists desire anxiously: The Player. Leading the troupe of Tragedians that act in the famous play-within-a-play in Hamlet, the Player reappears in various moments throughout Stoppard’s play. He provides guidance to the two minor characters in Hamlet, which feel overwhelmed in being protagonists of their own play. The player primarily acts as the voice of...