Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Act I

Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for an unremembered past.

(He wheels at ROS and raps out): Syllogism the second: One, probability is a factor which operates within natural forces.

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.

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.

It related the fortuitous and the ordained into a reassuring union which we recognized as nature.

GUIL (bemused): The toenails never grow at all?

(He looks around, laughs embarrassedly, expiating himself.)

Deaths and disclosures, universal and particular, denouements both unexpected and inexorable, transvestite melodrama on all levels including the suggestive.

Deaths and disclosures, universal and particular, denouements both unexpected and inexorable, transvestite melodrama on all levels including the suggestive.

No enigma, no dignity, nothing classical, portentous, only this—a comic pornographer and a rabble of prostitutes.

The PLAYER has moved down, to remonstrate with ALFRED.

They are both mute, HAMLET, with his doublet all unbraced, no hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, ungartered and down-gyved to his ankle, pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other ... and with a look so piteous, he takes her by the wrist and holds her hard, then he goes to the length of his arm, and with his other hand over his brow, falls to such perusal of her face as he would draw it....

I entreat you both that, being of so young days brought up with him and since so neighboured to his youth and 'haviour that you vouchsafe your rest here in our court some little time, so by your companies to draw him on to pleasures, and to gather so much as from occasion you may glean...

But we are comparatively fortunate; we might have been left to sift the whole field of human nomenclature, like two blind men looting a bazaar for their own portraits.

He is immediately crestfallen, GUIL is disgusted.