from
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
by
Tom Stoppard

Rosencrantz:
Heads.

Heads.

Heads.

Heads.

Heads.

Guildenstern:
There is an art to the building up of suspense.

Rosencrantz:
Heads.

Guildenstern:
Though it can be done by luck alone.

Rosencrantz:
Heads.

Guildenstern:
If that’s the word I’m after.

Rosencrantz:
Seventy-six—love.

Heads.

Guildenstern:
A weaker man might be moved to re-examine his faith, if in nothing else at least in the law of probability.

Rosencrantz:
Heads.

Guildenstern, examining the confines of the stage, flips over two more coins as he does so, one by one of course. Rosencrantz announces each of them as “heads.”

Guildenstern:
The law of probability, it has been oddly asserted, is something to do with the proposition that if six monkeys .  . if six monkeys were . . .

Rosencrantz:
Game?

Guildenstern:
Were they?

Rosencrantz:
Are you?

Guildenstern:
Game. The law of averages, if I have got this right, means that if six monkeys were thrown up in the air for long enough they would land on their tails about as often as they would land on their——

Rosencrantz:
Heads.

Guildenstern:
Which even at first glance does not strike one as a particularly rewarding speculation, in either sense, even without the monkeys. I mean you wouldn’t bet on it. I mean I would, but you wouldn’t. . . .

Rosencrantz:
Heads.

Guildenstern:
Would you?

Rosencrantz:
Heads.

Heads. Getting a bit of a bore, isn’t it?

Guildenstern:
A bore?

Rosencrantz:
Well . . .

Guildenstern:
What about the suspense?

Rosencrantz:
What suspense?

Guildenstern:
[...] Syllogism the second: One, probability is a factor which operates within natural forces. Two, probability is not operating as a factor. Three, we are now within un-, sub- or supernatural forces. Discuss. Not too heatedly.

Rosencrantz:
I’m sorry I—What’s the matter with you?

Guildenstern:
The scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear. Keep tight hold and continue while there’s time. Now—counter to the previous syllogism: tricky one, follow me carefully, it may prove a comfort. If we postulate, and we just have, that within un-, sub- or supernatural forces the probability is that the law of probability will not operate as a factor, then we must accept that the probability of the first part will not operate as a factor, in which case the law of probability will operate as a factor within un-, sub- or supernatural forces. And since it obviously hasn’t been doing so, we can take it that we are not held within un-, sub- or supernatural forces after all; in all probability, that is. Which is a great relief to me personally. Which is all very well, except that—— We have been spinning coins together since I don’t know when, and in all that time (if it is all that time) I don’t suppose either of us was more than a couple of gold pieces up or down. I hope that doesn’t sound surprising because its very unsurprisingness is something I am trying to keep hold of. The equanimity of your average tosser of coins depends upon a law, or rather a tendency, or let us say a probability, or at any rate a mathematically calculable chance, which ensures that he will not upset himself by losing too much nor upset his opponent by winning too often. This made for a kind of harmony and a kind of confidence. It related the fortuitous and the ordained into a reassuring union which we recognized as nature. The sun came up about as often as it went down, in the long run, and a coin showed heads about as often as it showed tails.

Rosencrantz:
I can hear—I thought I heard—music.

Guildenstern:
Yes?

Rosencrantz:
Like a band. It sounded like—a band. Drums.

Guildenstern:
Yes.

Rosencrantz:
It couldn’t have been real.

Guildenstern:
“The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody”—demolish.

Rosencrantz:
It must have been thunder. Like drums.

Guildenstern:
A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until—“My God,” says a second man, “I must be dreaming. I thought I saw a unicorn.” At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience. . . . “Look, look!” recites the crowd. “A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.”

Rosencrantz:
I knew all along it was a band.

Guildenstern:
He knew all along it was a band.

Rosencrantz:
Here they come!

Guildenstern:
I’m sorry it wasn’t a unicorn. It would have been nice to have unicorns.

Rosencrantz:
My name is Guildenstern, and this is Rosencrantz.

I’m sorry—his name’s Guildenstern, and I’m Rosencrantz.

Player:
A pleasure. We’ve played to bigger, of course, but quality counts for something. I recognized you at once——

Rosencrantz:
And who are we?

Player:
—as fellow artists.

Rosencrantz:
I thought we were gentlemen.

Player:
For some of us it is performance, for others, patronage. They are two sides of the same coin, or, let us say, being as there are so many of us, the same side of two coins. Don’t clap too loudly—it’s a very old world.

Guildenstern:
It was chance, then?

Player:
Chance?

Guildenstern:
You found us.

Player:
Oh yes.

Guildenstern:
You were looking?

Player:
Oh no.

Guildenstern:
Chance, then.

Player:
Or fate.

Guildenstern:
Yours or ours?

Player:
It could hardly be one without the other.

Guildenstern:
It could have been—it didn’t have to be obscene. . . . It could have been—a bird out of season, dropping bright-feathered on my shoulder. . . . It could have been a tongueless dwarf standing by the road to point the way. . . . I was prepared. But it’s this, is it? No enigma, no dignity, nothing classical, portentous, only this—a comic pornographer and a rabble of prostitutes. . . .

Player:
You should have caught us in better times. We were purists then.

Player:
We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. 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.

Guildenstern:
I thought you said you were actors.

Player:
Oh. Oh well, we are. We are. But there hasn’t been much call——

Guildenstern:
You lost. Well then—one of the Greeks, perhaps? You’re familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics? Matri, patri, fratri, sorrori, uxori and it goes without saying——

Rosencrantz:
Saucy——

Guildenstern:
—Suicidal—hm? Maidens aspiring to godheads——

Rosencrantz:
And vice versa——

Guildenstern:
Your kind of thing, is it?

Player:
Well, no, I can’t say it is, really. We’re more of the blood, love and rhetoric school.

Guildenstern:
Well, I’ll leave the choice to you, if there is anything to choose between them.

Player:
They’re hardly divisible, sire—well, I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory—they’re all blood, you see.

Guildenstern:
Is that what people want?

Player:
It’s what we do.

Rosencrantz:
I remember when there were no questions.

Guildenstern:
There were always questions. To exchange one set for another is no great matter.

Rosencrantz:
Answers, yes. There were answers to everything.

Guildenstern:
You’ve forgotten.

Rosencrantz:
I haven’t forgotten—how I used to remember my own name—and yours, oh yes! There were answers everywhere you looked. There was no question about it—people knew who I was and if they didn’t they asked and I told them.

Guildenstern:
You did, the trouble is, each of them is . . . plausible, without being instinctive. All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.

Rosencrantz:
Shouldn’t we be doing something—constructive?

Guildenstern:
What did you have in mind? . . . A short, blunt human pyramid . . . ?

Guildenstern:
I’m trying to establish the direction of the wind.

Rosencrantz:
There isn’t any wind. Draught, yes.

Guildenstern:
In that case, the origin. Trace it to its source and it might give us a rough idea of the way we came in—which might give us a rough idea of south, for further reference.

Rosencrantz:
It’s coming up through the floor. That can’t be south, can it?

Guildenstern:
That’s not a direction. Lick your toe and wave it around a bit.

Rosencrantz:
No, I think you’d have to lick it for me.

  Pause.

Guildenstern:
I’m prepared to let the whole matter drop.

Guildenstern:
Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are . . . condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one—that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it’ll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we’d know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T’ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.

Player:
We can’t look each other in the face! You don’t understand the humiliation of it—to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable—that somebody is watching. . . . The plot was two corpses gone before we caught sight of ourselves, stripped naked in the middle of nowhere and pouring ourselves down a bottomless well.

Rosencrantz:
Is that thirty-eight?

Player:
There we were—demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance—and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don’t you see?! We’re actors—we’re the opposite of people! Think, in your head, now, think of the most . . . private . . . secret . . . intimate thing you have ever done secure in the knowledge of its privacy. . . . Are you thinking of it? Well, I saw you do it!

Guildenstern:
We only know what we’re told, and that’s little enough. And for all we know it isn’t even true.

Player:
For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honoured.

Rosencrantz:
He talks to himself, which might be madness.

Guildenstern:
If he didn’t talk sense, which he does.

Rosencrantz:
Which suggests the opposite.

Player:
Of what?

Guildenstern:
I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself.

Rosencrantz:
Or just as mad.

Guildenstern:
Or just as mad.

Rosencrantz:
And he does both.

Guildenstern:
So there you are.

Rosencrantz:
Stark raving sane.

Rosencrantz:
[...] Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on for ever. It must have been shattering—stamped into one’s memory. And yet I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. What does one make of that? We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it, before we know that there are words, out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Guildenstern:
Wasn’t that the end?

Player:
Do you call that an ending?—with practically everyone on his feet? My goodness no—over your dead body.

Guildenstern:
How am I supposed to take that?

Player:
Lying down. There’s a design at work in all art—surely you know that? Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion.

Guildenstern:
And what’s that, in this case?

Player:
It never varies—we aim at the point where everyone who is marked for death dies.

Guildenstern:
Marked?

Player:
Between “just deserts” and “tragic irony” we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get.

Guildenstern:
Who decides?

Player:
Decides? It is written.

Guildenstern:
Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn’t death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees, but it doesn’t bring death home to anyone—it doesn’t catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says—“One day you are going to die.” You die so many times; how can you expect them to believe in your death?

Player:
On the contrary, it’s the only kind they do believe. They’re conditioned to it. I had an actor once who was condemned to hang for stealing a sheep—or a lamb, I forget which—so I got permission to have him hanged in the middle of a play—had to change the plot a bit but I thought it would be effective, you know—and you wouldn’t believe it, he just wasn’t convincing!

Rosencrantz:
We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?

Guildenstern:
No, no, no . . . Death is . . . not. Death isn’t. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not-be on a boat.

Rosencrantz:
I’ve frequently not been on boats.

Guildenstern:
No, no, no—what you’ve been is not on boats.