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=//Hamlet// and //Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead// Comparison/Contrast=

Death

 * What is death?
 * What is it to die?

Certainty

 * The need to know
 * Who am I?
 * What am I doing here?


 * **SUBJECT** || **//HAMLET//** || **//R & G ARE DEAD//** ||
 * **What is death?** || Ghost: I am thy father’s spirit, / Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away (1.5)—**portrays his afterlife as purgatory, awful, a “prison house” whose secrets are horrific and “must not be / To ears of flesh and blood” (1.5)**

Claudius to Hamlet: Your father lost a father, that father lost, lost his (1.2)—**death just kind of happens!**

Gertrude: All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity (1.2)—**ditto**

Hamlet: To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub… //…the undiscovered country (3.1)—**death as dream, unknown**

Hamlet: Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away (5.1)—**EVERYONE ends up dead**

Hamlet: Had I but time, as this fell sergeant, death, / Is strict in his arrest, O! I could tell you— / But let it be. Horatio, I am dead (5.2)--**death as sergeant making an arrest (grim humor?)**


 * __Summary__: Hamlet broods on death, on the afterlife--what specifically happens after death--orthodox Christian view vs. "undiscovered country"--death is something that Hamlet wants, that he fears, and eventually that he accepts.**
 * .** || Ros: It’s silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead…which should make all the difference…shouldn’t it? I mean, you’d never know you were in a box, would you? It would be just like being asleep in a box. (70)--**perhaps the most specific either R or G gets when talking about what death is**

Ros: Eternity is a terrible thought. (71)

Guil: It’s just a man failing to reappear. (84)

Guil: Death’s death, isn’t it? (89)

Guil: Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. (108)

Guil: But no one get up after death—there is no applause—there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that’s—death— (123)

Guil: If we have a destiny, then so had he (**123, right after he stabs Player**)

Guil: Dying is not romantic…Death is not anything… death is not (124)—**arguing with Player**


 * __Summary__: R&G treat death as an unavoidable fact--not concerned with religious/spiritual aspects of death, not much discussion about an afterlife except in an absurd sense (Ros talking about being in a box, above). Guil sees death as a negative, "not-being," the opposite of being alive.** ||
 * **What is it to die?** || Hamlet: Why, what should be the fear? I do not set my life at a pin’s fee (1.4)—**willing to risk death**

Ghost: And a most instant tetter barked about, / Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust / All my smooth body. / Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand / Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched, / Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin… (1.5.71-75)

To die, to sleep, no more (3.1)—to end the heartaches and the thousand natural shocks, etc. (**death as escape/release**)

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will (5.2)--**our "ends" refers to dying, and while we "rough-hew" those ends, they are all eventually shaped by a "divinity"** || Player: It’s what the actors do best… They can die heroically, comically, ironically, slowly, suddenly disgustingly, charmingly, or from a great height. (83)

Guil: 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?

Ros: If we stop breathing, we vanish. (112)

Guil: I’m talking about death—and you’ve never experienced that (etc…123)—you can’t act it! (**and then the Player disproves that immediately**)

Guil: Good God! I hope more tears are shed for us! (86)—**to die is to be forgotten**

Guil: An exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death (84)

Player: So there’s an end to that—it’s commonplace: light goes with life, and in the winter of your years the dark comes early… (124) . ||
 * **The need to know** || Act 1 Scene 2 (lines 211-213):

Horatio: The Apparition comes. I knew your father, These hands are not more like. Hamlet: But were was this? Marcellus: My lord upon the platform where we watched. Hamlet: Did you not speak to it?

Act 1 Scene 4 (lines 51-57)

Hamlet: What may this mean, That thou, dead corse, gain in complete steel Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature So horridly to shake our disposition With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls? Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?

Act 2 Scene 1 (lines 72-74)

Polonius: How now Ophelia, what’s the mater? Ophelia: Oh, my lord, I have been so affrighted Polonius: With what, i’th’ name of God

(lines 83-85):

Polonius: Mad for thy love? Ophelia: My lord I do not know, But truly I do fear it.

(lines 154-157)

Polonius: Take this from this, if this be otherwise. If circumstances lead me, I will find where truth is hid, thought it were hid indeed Within the centre. Claudius: How may we try it further?


 * Central question for Hamlet—did Claudius kill his dad, or not? Is the Ghost honest, or not?** || Guil: A weaker man might be moved to re-examine his faith…(12)

Guil: List of possible explanations. See pg. 16 for rest of quote. (16)

Guil: The scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defense against the pure emotion of fear. (17)

Guil: Chance, then. Player: Or fate. Guil: Yours or ours? Player: It could hardly be one without the other. (25)

Ros: I want to go home. Which way did we come in? I’ve lost my sense of direction. (39)

Guil: He’s not himself. Ros: He’s changed. Guil: I could see that. Glean what afflicts him. (46) See pgs 47-49 for the rest of the conversation about uncertainty surrounding Hamlet.

Guil: You seem to have no conception of where we stand! You won’t find the answer written down for you in the bowl of a compass—I can tell you that. Besides, you can never tell this far north—it’s probably dark out there. (58-59)

Conversation on pg 65.

Guil: But we don’t know what’s going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don’t know how to act. (66)

Player: Uncertainty is the normal state. You’re nobody special. (He makes to leave again. GUIL loses his cool. Guil: But for God’s sake what are we supposed to do?! Player: Relax. Respond. That’s what people do. You can’t go through life questioning your situation at every turn. Guil: But we don’t know what’s going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don’t know how to act. Player: Act natural. You know why you’re here at least. Guil: 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 currecncy of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honored. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume? (67)

Player: It doesn’t seem to be coming. We are not getting it at all. What did you think? Guil: What was I supposed to think? (79)

Guil: I like to know where I am. Even if I don’t know where I am, I like to know that. If we go, there’s no knowing. (95)

Ros: Now that we have found it, why were we looking for it? Guil: We thought it was lost. (107)

Guil: Well, where has that got us? Through Guil: That seems to be it. (117)

Guil: What’s it all about? (121)

Guil: The only beginning is birth and the only end is death—if you can’t count on that, what can you count on? (39)

Guil: There’s a logic at work—it’s all done for you, don’t worry. (40) (**is this hopeful/hopeless thinking?**) ||
 * **Who am I?** || Ghost: I am thy father’s spirit (1.5)

Hamlet: O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams (2.2)

Hamlet: O what a rogue and peasant slave am I? (2.2)

Hamlet: Am I a coward? (2.2) || Ros: And who are we? I thought we were gentlemen (23)

Ros: I haven’t forgotten – how I used to remember my own name – and yours, oh yes! (38) (51) (86) (121)

Player: We’re actors…We pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade, that someone would be watching. (64)

Guil: What was I supposed to think? (79)

Ros: Is that you? Guil: Yes Ros: How do you know? (97)

Guil: Who are we? (122) . ||
 * **What am I doing here?** || Hamlet: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me…” (2.2.286-291 p. 83)

Hamlet: “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I! / Is it not monstrous that this player here, / But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, / Could force his soul in his own conceit / That from her working all his visage waned…” (2.2 p. 95)

Hamlet: To be, or not to be: that is the question (3.1)

Hamlet: “For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, / Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, / the pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay, / The insolence of office, and the spurns / That patient merit of th’unworthy takes, / When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin?” (3.1.70-76 p. 105)

Hamlet: “What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all…” (3.1.124-125 p. 107)

Hamlet: If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come – the readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be (5.2) || Player: “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.” (33)

Guildenstern: “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.” (Page 39)

Guildenstern: “The only beginning is birth and the only end is death – if you can’t count on that, what can you count on?” (Page 39)

Guildenstern: “To be taken in hand and led, like being a child again, even without innocence, a child – it’s like being given a prize, an extra slice of childhood when you least expect it, as a prize for being good, or compensation for never having had one…” (Page 40)

Rosencrantz: “Immortality is all I seek…” (Page 45)

Player: “For all anyone knows, nothing is [true]. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is to be taken true. It’s the currency of living.” (Page 67)

Guildenstern: “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…” (Page 101) ||