Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Hamlet Doesn't Look Too Good

Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead belongs to a genre of drama that challenges the notion of traditional realistic and instructive theater by presenting a universe that is absurd, stripped of all pretensions of order and purpose. Stoppard's play presents a universe that understands that Hamlet's melodramatic play-within-a-play The Mousetrap can no more hold the answer to the psychological secrets of Claudius than Shakespeare's play Hamlet itself can hold the answer to the psychological secrets of any of its readers. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead rejects the idea that a meaningful psychoanalytical realism can be constructed from the fictive world of Hamlet by reducing the so-called greatest play ever written to an absurdist histrionic melodrama high in blood but low in comprehensible rhetoric that allows for much profound relevance.