Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Act III

Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact—that we, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bearing a letter from one king to another, are taking Hamlet to England.

GUIL (leaping up): What a shambles!

Just a conspiracy of cartographers, you mean?

I try to picture us arriving, a little harbour perhaps . . . roads ... inhabitants to point the way ... horses on the road . . . riding for a day or a fortnight and then a palace and the English king.

Or to look at it another way—we are little men, we don’t know the ins and outs of the matter, there are wheels within wheels, etcetera—it would be presumptuous of us to interfere with the designs of fate or even of kings.

His face and his hands indicate his incredulity.

Tactless, really.

A compulsion towards philosophical introspection is his chief characteristic, if I may put it like that.

Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother, that sort of thing;

intimations of suicide, forgoing of exercise

hints of claustrophobia not to say delusions of imprisonment

riddles, quibbles and evasions; amnesia, paranoia, myopia; day-dreaming, hallucinations; stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover, and appearing hatless in public

The PLAYER is phlegmatic.

Deaths by suspension, convulsion, consumption, incision, execution, asphyxiation and malnutrition—!

But since, so jump upon this bloody question, you from the Polack wars, and you from England, are here arrived, give order that these bodies high on a stage be placed to the view; and let me speak to the yet unknowing world how these things came about: so shall you hear of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts, of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, and, in this upshot, purposes mistook fallen on the inventors’ heads: all this can I truly deliver.