Preying upon the Theatrical Parasite

This short farce centers around the messengers's appointment with the English King who happens to be Lear. It had nothing to do with the condition of modern man or the decline of metaphysics. Their dependence on the script to give them directions and provide them with a purpose is similar to the six characters' plight in Pirandello's play. Lee makes reference to this passage and notes that Guil's final explanation "is statistically accurate, and presents us with a world of total unreliability--an amazing combination of phenomena simply cannot be made to yield either a sequence or a precedent. Normand Berlin called the play "derivative" and argued that Stoppard's obvious dependence on Shakespeare, Beckett and Pirandello causes the play to "think" too much which results in a lack of feeling "or [the] union of thought and emotion that we associate with Waiting for Godot and Hamlet. One metaphor, however, that has been neglected reveals Stoppard's skillful incorporation of mathematical theory in addition to Shakespearean rhetoric. One wasn't thinking, 'Life is an anteroom in which one has to kill time. As Guil suggests later in Act I, Stoppard introduces the mathematical theory of probability to help explain Ros and Guil's "absurd" predicament. After the eighty-ninth flip, Guil begins to ponder this seeming anomaly in an attempt to explain how such a phenomenon could occur. Facts remain isolated, refuse to form chains, and explanations remain forever 'possible,' the nature of circumstances determining the run being beyond our comprehension. While Stoppard was interested in this idea, he quickly abandoned it in favor of focusing on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's situation at Elsinore. The Theatre of the Absurd, according to Esslin, refers to a body of dramatic work by post WW2 playwrights whose plays are all colored or patterned by an existentialist ideology. Based in large part upon the theories of Albert Camus and John Paul Sartre, existentialism addresses the feelings of "Absurdity" [the absence of purpose or meaning] humanity encounters in a world of shattered beliefs--a world where millions of people are killed in concentration camps and whole cities are annihilated by atomic bombs. Ros and Guil's reality (a condition Guil refers to as "thin the name we give to the common experience" in Act I) is not something which they can definitively establish but is continually altered as new information is provided by the playwright who controls their destiny.