Blog 1: response to January 30th
Posted on February 1, 2007
One thing to keep in mind about tragedy: there is no one single model that unlocks its "true" meaning; that is, there is no reason to think that there is ONE, and only one, correct theory of tragedy (though you may be more inclined to one over another ... or you may create your own).
That said, a simple, fairly inclusive, definition of tragedy might go something like this: tragedies are stories that deal with the limits of human experience and the catastophes that ensue when such limits are either ignored or recognized too late ... but this definition leaves a lot of room for different sorts of theories.
Aristotle's theory of the tragic plot is tempting because its ethical vision essentially corresponds to moderners' sense of freedom, moral responsibility, and the fundamental intelligibility of experience on a human plane ... that is, a world-view that limits the supernatural and privileges instead the rational or scientific (in short, a Western world-view). Of course, even in the "modern West" (that is, European culture as that exists in Europe and in Europe-influenced cultures like the US and Canada), we find residual religious elements (often quite dominant, as in American politics). And, for better or worse, these religious elements often critique Western rationality itself. Moreover, modern tragedies (whether Memento, Chinatown, Angel Heart, Jacob's ladder, etc) are often directed precisely at the limits of moral rationality, and to this end they often, but don't always, incorporate some sense of the supernatural--that "something beyond" Frye mentions; this can mean a religious sphere of experience, in which some supernatural force (God, gods, fate) sets some sort of limit upon human action (forcing us to act or preventing us from acting).
In that context, it's worth asking if what Eaton calls the "unredeemable" in Chinatown is a manifestation of a supra-human realm ... an "evil" that pervades our experience but for which humans are not solely responsible. That is, does Polanski (the film's director) see the "evil" of the story simply as the "natural" perversity of the human or as something more "mysterious," inexplicable, fundamentally unintelligible? Keep in mind that Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, was killed by Charles Manson: is Manson's evil merely human or is it part of the mystery of things that a Szondi or a Nietzsche sees in cosmic terms? (We haven't done Girard properly yet--that's my fault--but when we do finally get to him we'll see that he sees the "gods" as a projection of the human; so, in a sense, Girard inverts Szondi and Nietzsche ... but we'll have to wait a bit to get back to his theory of the "sacrificial crisis.") END
Blog 2: response to February 1st
Posted on February 2, 2007
We went through Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy too quickly to get a full sense of his argument (we'll come back to it) . But it should be clear that his very radical notion of what constituted the heart of Greek paganism--the doctrines of suffering / a notion of the divinity as a primal force of creation and destruction, etc.-- infiltrates his sense of what made Greek tragedy great (and that, he argues, has very little to do with the moral vision of human conduct promoted by Aristotle). The passage I read in class about King Midas' encounter with the demi-god Silenus (companion of Dionysos) gives you a flavor of what Nietzsche is interested in (pp. 21-22 of our text), that is, what he believes is distinctive about archaic Greek religion.
One of the concepts Nietzsche wants to assert is the notion that suffering is a cosmic principle (even the gods suffer, and this is most especially embodied in Dionysos): see variously pp. 40, 44, 45, 48. And he seems also to believe that humans share in the tragic by sharing in suffering (which strongly suggests that the suffering that is at the heart of the tragic is NOT divine punishment; it is a condition of existence itself). So, for example, Nietzsche writes on p. 40: "... the archetype of man, the expression of his highest and most intense emotions, an inspired reveller enraptured by the closeness of his god, a sympathetic companion in whom the gods suffering is repeated ..." Please note that this notion of the human as "sympathetic" (feeling pity towards) the tragic victim / hero is at once like AND unlike the "empathy" or pity that Aristotle claims as one of the central tragic emotions (recall that Aristotle believes the tragic plot culminating in catharsis powerfully evokes our empathy or compassion for the hero who is essentially innocent of the tragic deeds and yet still feels deep remorse, even a kind of accountability [because of the hamartia that set the tragic sequence in motion ... even if this "mistake" was done unwittingly]). Nietzsche isn't totally rejecting this Aristotelian compassion for the one who suffers, but he seems to suggest that this sort of suffering is the condition of ALL who exist (humans and gods alike), so the empathetic connection to the tragic hero is really a sort of generalized recognition of what he has earlier called the "horror of existence" (p. 22 ... and elsewhere, "the horror and absurdity of existence" p. 40), that is, terrible for everyone and not just for the particular tragic hero. For a rich if enigmatic statement of how and why humans and gods share in this condition (a very different notion from Szondi's sense of the human-divine gap), see his brief statement about "Aeschylus' view of the world" on p. 48 (he refers there to "the power of both suffering worlds [human AND divine] compelling reconciliation, metaphysical unity").
All this begs the question: if tragedy is so horrible, why then do we often feel exhilirated by it? This goes to the core issue of the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's notion that the fusion of the Apollonian with the Dionysian perspective (or order with chaos, beauty with terror) permitted the aestheticization of suffering (see pp. 23-26): in other words, our tragic condition became, if not precisely intelligible, at least a work of art. This seems to be the meaning of his very cryptic statement that "the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon" (p. 8; NOT, that is, a moral or intelligible phenomenon); later he expands this slightly: "we can ... assume for our own part that we are images and artistic projections for the true creator of the world, and that our highest dignity lies in the meaning of works of art--for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified" (p. 32 ... read this whole page). And then again on p. 39: The chorus of Greek tragedy "was a consolation to the Hellene [that is, to the Greek mind], thoughtful and uniquely susceptible as he was to the tenderest and deepest suffering, whose piercing gaze has seen to the core of the terrible destructions of world history and nature's cruelty ... He is saved by art, and through art has saved him for itself."
Nietzsche likes to use the world "redemption" of this saving possibility. And to the extent he also speaks of how the god who "suffers" is also "exalted," one might be inclined to read back into this notion some Christian understanding of Jesus of the cross, the son of God who dies in agony. And we might even extend that notion to the Christian sense that true devotion means that we should share in that suffering or "passion" (see p. 44). That would be wrong only in the sense that Nietzsche so clearly despises traditional Christian doctrine; and indeed, Jesus' suffering is meant, ultimately, as a gateway beyond suffering to "glory," "salvation," communion with God, goodness, love, etc. (just as Nirvana is, for Buddhists, a "space" beyond all suffering). It might be more to the point to say that, for Nietzsche, to the extent the Christian "myth" of suffering has any authenticity, it is only because Jesus' passion replicates the archetypal suffering: that of Dionysos himself. I would say that Nietzsche believes that the Christians (at least the ones who came to dominate the Roman Catholic Church--like St. Augustine, who was a Greek scholar--and these same Christians destroyed the more mystical Eastern / Egyptian Christianity of the Gnostics and other mystery cults) failed to understand the radical nature of Jesus' suffering. And in place of the "aesthetic" Jesus, they created the moral "obedient" Jesus, who submits or resigns himself to suffering (on p. 10 Nietzsche dismisses the notion of resignation). What he wants instead is a triumphant celebration of suffering as the meaning of existence itself, and he feels that Christianity ultimately avoids that confrontation and so ultimately despises life itself: "From the start Christianity was, essentially and fundamentally, the embodiment of disgust and antipathy for life" (pp. 8-9); and it is not surprising, then, that he also believes that Christianity "relegates ... all art ... to the realm of falsehood" [p. 8]).
One final note. There are times when Nietzsche seems to be suggesting a certain sort of affinity between Greek paganism and Judeo-Christianity: see pp. 49-50 for example. But in the end he seems to believe that the Jewish and later Christian (and certainly now Muslim) notion of "evil" fundamentally separates the two religious traditions. You will have a chance to comment on this (if you want) in the discussion questions for February 6th ... if you dare!
Blog 3: response to Feb. 8th
Posted on February 8, 2007
Although the precise relation to our interest in tragedy might be unclear, I hope I have impressed upon you that readers and audiences of Hamlet have always been confused as to why Hamlet delays in killing Claudius. Shakespeare makes important changes to the source that really emphasize this "problem" within the story: Hamlet doesn't kill Claudius in III.iii when he has the perfect opportunity; he berates himself for not getting on with it; the Ghost chides in III.iv and must "whet his almost blunted purpose" (though if the Ghost here is a hallucination then this is just Hamlet chiding himself); Shakespeare on two occasions has Hamlet declare he is more than ready to kill Claudius, and then he doesn't; when he does kill (Polonius), he must know that it cannot be Claudius (so he IS capable of killing, just not Claudius). Eliot says that the "delay" is unexplained, but what he means is that the delay functions powerfully as a centerpiece of the plot (as important as the movement of revenge itself), and that something seems to be "blunting" the motive of revenge (that is, dulling the desire for vengeance so that the emotional energies are dissipated elsewhere). Whether or not you agree that the play is an "artistic failure" for that reason--that is, because Shakespeare cannot structure an intelligible design for the delay into his larger story (essentially Eliot's point)--you can at least acknowledge what he's addressing.
One of the discussion questions you'll have for Feb. 13th (our last day on Hamlet) asks simply: why do you think Hamlet delays? You can give any answer you want, or you can summarize the views of others, or try to extrapolate from views of Greek tragedy. But what we covered in class on Thursday, Feb. 8th was the "Freudian" explanation offered by Freud's disciple, Ernest Jones. The problem with Jones' reading--which I'll summarize in a moment--is that it is TOO good; that is, it accounts for the main action of the play (and many of its smaller details) so effectively that it has the curious effect of making this grand if difficult play seem much smaller. In other words, it seems like a reductive theory BECAUSE its explanatory power is so high. So what, again, is that theory?
The main issue for Jones is that Hamlet is "motivated" (if we can call it that) not so much by his desire for vengeance against the man who killed his father as by his unconscious desire to "have" what Claudius now has: sexual possession of Gertrude. It's odd in a way that Eliot is able to point out that Hamlet's obsession with Gertrude blunts the vengeance without also seeing that Hamlet has an unhealthy sexual obsession with his mother (which Zeffirelli exploits in his film). Perhaps Eliot doesn't want to consider this possibility because he has an unhealthy sexual obsession towards HIS mother (I wouldn't put anything past Eliot!). That said, Jones' theory of sexual desire (the Oedipus complex, from the fact that Oedipus has sex with his own mother) does explain what Eliot finds so perplexing in the play: Hamlet's madness is something more that a mere put-on, even if he's not totally insane; Hamlet is out of control enough that he ends up calling attention to his knowledge of the murder when he should be keeping this a secret. AND, most significantly, Jones' theory explains why Hamlet delays in killing Claudius (as well as why Hamlet is finally able to kill Claudius): he delays because "the more vigorously he denounces his uncle the more powerfully he stimulates to activity his own unconscious and 'repressed' complexes. He is therefore in a dilemma between on the one hand allowing his natural detestation of his uncle to have free reign, a consummation which would stir still further his own horrible wishes, and on the other hand ignoring the imperative call for the vengeance that his obvious duty demands. His own 'evil' [that is, his forbidden desire for his mother] prevents him from completely denouncing his uncle's, and in continuing to repress the former he must strive to ignore, to condone, and if possible even to forget the latter" (Norton Hamlet, 205; Jones has a number of similar remarks on 205-06). In sum, Hamlet delays because to do what he wants (kill Claudius) brings him too close to a desire (to have his mother sexually) that he cannot bear to admit into his consciousness. So the delay is a way of acting out this struggle to repress a desire his conscious mind finds abhorrent.
Besides the delay in the killing, this reading explains many other details of the play. Jones reads this vexed sexual obsession back into Hamlet's (mis)treatment of Ophelia, for example. It also explains why Hamlet can finally kill Claudius: because once Gertrude is dead, the repression is lifted and he can fulfill the demand of duty to avenge his murdered father (or even to avenge himself since he is now dying at Claudius' instigation). And, perhaps most tellingly, the theory helps explain why Hamlet inadvertently tips his hand to Claudius during the Mousetrap: it is the nephew rather than the brother who aims to kill the king in the play, and when Hamlet says (almost yelling in the BBC version) "you shall see ... how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago's wife," we could take this to mean NOT a threat to Claudius (I will kill you) but a revelation of his unconscious desire (I will get my mother's love, and body, which you now have), a revelation that might be directed as much to Gertrude as to Claudius (after all, throughout the scene Hamlet is more concerned to provoke Gertrude than to provoke Claudius: he wants HER attention).
Whether this is "tragedy" or not, it is certainly a story about suffering--psychic tribulation. But Stephen Greenblatt ("Speaking with the Dead") and Robert Watson ("Giving up the Ghost") have very different readings of the prime locus of that tribulation--that struggle in Hamlet's mind. And that is where we will finish up.
Blog 4: response to February 13th
Posted on February 13, 2007
To the extent that Hamlet is not completely insane (as Ophelia clearly is late in the play), the issue of whether he hallucinates in I.v is only important to the extent it helps explain that inexplicable plot detail: why does he delay in killing Claudius? T. S. Eliot and Stephen Greenblatt both note that in altering his sources on this point, Shakespeare bends, breaks, distorts a simple revenge story in such a way that a) the path of the story becomes convoluted (even at the end it isn't clear why Hamlet finally kills Claudius since he was unable to do so earlier) and b) the tension of the story shifts to Shakespeare's representation of what Greenblatt calls "tormented inwardness." As I noted in class today, this way of representing the tragic hero will become the hallmark of Shakespearean tragedy. A character like Jake in Chinatown might ultimately be tormented by guilt (certainly, the "catharsis" suggests that), but we don't see a that torment built into the story itself; it is really something we infer from the structure of the plot. And I should also observe again (I noted this in class as well) that while there are similarities between Shakespeare's depiction of character and Aristotle's notion of "ethos," Shakespeare does not attempt to convey character strictly in terms of the moral accountability that Aristotle imagines; Shakespeare's tragic heroes struggle with sanity, with deep mental conflict, but intelligible moral choice is usually only one small part of what Shakespeare aims to depict in his central characters. And Shakespeare typically embodies the mental struggle of his heroes in those famous soliloquies (like the "to be or not to be" speech; obviously, there's nothing equivalent in Chinatown). I would add as well that much of what Shakespeare depicts goes to unconscious drives, feelings, and needs as opposed to conscious and rational choices about how to conduct ourselves in the world. (Note, for example, that Hamlet's deep feelings of depression or disillusionment--whatever you want to call it--precede his encounter with the Ghost and therefore have little to do with the specific charge to avenge his father's murder: see I.ii and Greenblatt's discussion on pp. 306-07 of his essay "Speaking with the Dead.")
I noted today that the simplest answer to the question of why Hamlet delays (which isn't much of an answer) is that something more than revenge is involved here; that is, Shakespeare borrowed the plot structure of revenge-drama (very popular in the 1590s on the London stage), but in the end he produced a story who structuring motivation became something other than revenge, something that we might understand best through Psychoanalysis (grief, mourning, loss, perverse sexuality ... something). We considered Jones' Oedipal / sexual reading, a reading very much supported by the play and that, in turn, helps to explain much in the play (see Blog 3). Greenblatt and Robert Watson ("Giving up the Ghost" ... and we'll return to this reading the last class before Spring Break) agree that the torment of Hamlet--which is also the torment of Shakespeare--has something to do with the crisis of mourning that came upon Shakespeare in the wake of his son Hamnet's death in 1596 and in relation to the imminent death of John Shakespeare (our playwright's father). Watson eventually takes this argument in a new direction, but, like Greenblatt, Watson feels that the very writing of revenge-tragedy in Shakespeare's England was a kind of psycho-social attempt to supply an outlet for grief that had been shut off by the Reformation: suddently the Catholic "cult of the dead" (Greenblatt's term) which had helped maintain a sense of contact with the deceased loved one and to create a bridge between this world and the afterlife (and thus with some sense of our ultimate "purpose") was disbanded by the emergence of new Protestant ritual and theological habits. Certainly, Shakespeare's play is very concerned with what seems to be the maimed rites of mourning (Greenblatt refers to "damaged rituals"): Hamlet and Laertes both complain that what is provided as a way of commemorating the dead is insufficient (indeed, this is the explict reason that Hamlet is so angry with Gertrude: that in remarrying, she has failed in her obligation to mourn adequately; she has moved on from grief too quickly, and this anger precedes the Ghost's command to vengeance). Does Hamlet delay because he cannot see a clear relationship between mourning and murder? Certainly, he could honor his father by killing his father's killer, but is that the best way to remember the dead? to maintain contact with the dead? Hamlet never really avenges his father's murder (he seems to kill Claudius for different reasons), so we can imagine that he never feels that he can properly remember his father--mourn his father's passing--by killing (though, paradoxically, his resistance to killing his father's murderer leads directly to the deaths of seven other people: Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet himself ... and only Claudius as an extension of those other deaths). And the final irony is that in destroying the Danish Royal Court Hamlet unwittingly permits Fortinbras to take over (the son of King Hamlet's great enemy); in other words, by resisting the call to vengeance, Hamlet becomes the means of dishonoring the achievements of his father--his ends up remembering his father by dishonoring his legacy. Somewhere in there lie the seeds of tragedy.
One can read this play as a play more about a crisis of mourning disguised as a revenge story (mourning both at a personal level and at a social level). The torment over how to grieve, how to remember, blunts the plot drive for vengeance. In a sense, the play is more about a crisis of identity itself than about revenge. To put it another way, the loss of a cultural ritual of mourning leads to a self (Hamlet's self / Shakespeare's self) unprotected in grief, lost, isolated, unredeemed. Greenblatt's most direct statement of this situation is the following: "something interferes with the straightforward plan [for revenge, what we get in the sources], an interference whose emblem is the feigned madness that makes no sense in the plot" (318). And he concludes (320) that the sense of uncertainty in Hamlet the person and Hamlet the play and the feeling that Hamlet and Shakespeare are both groping for their story are "linked to a broader sense of doubt and disorientation in a play where the whole ritual structure for dealing with loss has been fatally damaged."
The compensation for this torment might have been the deepening of Shakespeare's artistic abililty to represent the complexities of states of mind at times of crisis: suffering goes inside the head. In this, as I suggested earlier, Shakespeare takes tragedy in a new direction: it now resides at the site of an interior struggle with the very nature of meaning in our lives, with unconscious forces that shape us. We have a supernatural figure in the Ghost, but Hamlet does not, on the surface, appear to be about fate in the same way that Greek tragedy often was (though Macbeth might represent a move back toward Greek religion). Despite the Ghost, the action of Hamlet mainly appears on a human plane, but the story is not morally rational in the way Aristotle thought a tragedy should be. And, broadly speaking, in Shakespearean tragedy, the conflict between rational and irrational thought, a condition of self-consciousness that is almost pathological (though beautifully expressed in the cadences of Shakepeare's poetry), takes center stage. For Shakespeare, tragedy is about the suffering that occurs in the mind of the protagonist yet bursts forth in poetic utterance.
Robert Watson has a related reading, but it takes the crisis of mourning as a sign of a sort of tragedy that returns us to the paganism of the ancient Greeks--as Nietzsche analyzes that in The Birth of Tragedy. We will come back to the reading on March 8th (I think).
Blog 5: response to February 22nd
Posted on February 22, 2007
Stoppard's lines are often very funny, but many (whether funny or not) have special meaning when viewed from the end of the play. Here's one exchange (p. 66):
Guil: You're obviously a man who knows his way around.
Player: I've been here before.
Guil: We're still finding our feet.
Player: I should concentrate on not losing your heads.
Guil: Do you speak from knowledge.
Player: Precedent.
Guil: You've been here before.
Player: And I know which way the wind is blowing.
To the extent the whole play is understood as characters who exist within a play (one already written ... perhaps by Shakespeare, perhaps by Stoppard, perhaps by the passive voice: "it is written" ... is that fate?) it is difficult to see the story as achieving the "logical and human end" that Katharine Anne Porter speaks of: it may be logical but how can it be human if the human "characters" are really just "characters in a play"? Of course, that is part of what surrealism is (this is NOT a realistic work). More to the point, the condition of characters who only toward the end fully realize that they are characters in a play they cannot escape--a play which ends with the almost bland announcement of their deaths (off stage, only barely registering in the blood bath that ends Hamlet) is clearly meant as some kind of image, symbol, or metaphor for real--tragic--experience. The notion that our lives are like inhabiting a play that has already been written (by someone or something else: the gods, fate, destiny) and about which we really know nothing except that we will / must die (though for reasons we cannot explain) becomes a means of representing an “existential” condition (see the handout). And while one might think that a story playing out to its logical conclusion follows the basic parameters of Aristotelian thought (the choices of the characters govern the action, and those choices, within the story, are freely made), keep in mind that this way of telling story is a bit of an illusion or artist's trick: what a reader or audience experiences as characters' freedom and moral choice is FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF CHARACTERS no choice at all; characters simply do what they are written to do. The logical plausibility of what a character does only seems like a generalized form of “probability”; but what happens "must" happen because an author has written in one way and not another.
There's another way in which the representation of action as though it were a play serves as a metaphor of an existential condition: the sense of abandonment in the world (no gods even to punish us). Look at the Player's speech on p. 64: "We pledge our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade, that someone would be watching..... [But at the end of our play,] no one came forward. No one shouted at us. The silence was unbreakable, it imposed itself upon us." That "silence"--which seems to be Stoppard's adaptation of Hamlet's last line ("The rest is silence")--becomes a marker of an existence that, while without any real freedom (Stoppard is not quite like Sartre in his existentialism), yet has no connection to some higher force or power ... and death cannot reveal such a force or power even in judgment against us. So the "silence" comes up again at the end when Guildenstern says: "I'm talking about death--and you've [the Players] never experienced that.... Because even as you die you know that you will come back in a different hat. But no one gets up after death--there is no applause--there is only silence" (p. 123).
These two passages suggest contradictory things: that the players' experience is akin to the experience of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and by extension like ALL human experience) vs. the notion that, in this play at least, the players experience things differently (as a chorus, as the gods, as fate, as simply what "is"). For the most part, the play shows the players as different, inhabiting a different sort of reality (while admitting that all reality in the play is surreal). But the players only "function," if we can use that term, is to inhabit the eternal now of the play's performance: they never do anything but perform Hamlet, even though they seem to be able to come and go as they please. But because all they do is perform the same play forever, they know exactly what happens (and so can speak of knowing things by "precedent"). They embody necessity as a sort of tragic condition, nothing akin to the "logical necessity" Aristotle imagines in the great plot. Now, necessity is the experience of limit and not the experience of moral freedom (Aristotle had equated the logical necessity of plot with the plausibility of character so as to represent a condition of human freedom). For Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, by contrast, necessity means they "must" die (indeed, they are already, or always already, dead). There is no freedom here.
Peter Szondi saw this lack of freedom in Greek tragedies like Oedipus Rex, but Stoppard doesn't single out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: they must die as all people must die. For Szondi, the truly tragic is a sort of punishment meted out on those humans who strive for divine knowledge (through the oracles), and the gap between the human realm and the divine realm is what tragedy marks or laments. But, as I noted, it isn't clear that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are being punished by some supernatural force; they just fall into what "happens." Rosencrantz says, "They had it in for us, didn't they? Right from the beginning." But it's not clear who "they" refers to. Guildenstern--always the smart one--is closer to the truth in lamenting that they simply have no explanation; in this play, the deafening "silence" is that the gods don't speak even in punishment. There simply is no one to explain. The players might represent the Greek chorus, but they have no special knowledge. They can tell R & G that "it is written," but they have no idea who wrote it or why.
Finally, like Nietzsche, Stoppard seems to be suggesting that tragedy is about coming to terms with existence itself. For Nietzsche, existence includes death, destruction, suffering, but there's a glory and a grandeur to existence--it is a work of a creator-god-artist and, in tragic spectacle, we somehow participate in the Primal Oneness (a force that necessitates, even causes, our destruction, but which is astonishing and wonderful nonetheless). The cosmos might be horrible and absurd, but we can exult in it by facing up to its power and mystery. As I noted in class today, Nietzsche believes that even the gods suffer, and if we suffer then we too are godlike. And he believes that Greek tragedy had the courage to face that reality. The existentialist Stoppard, however, while not simply showing his characters resigned to their doom, doesn't posit a primal oneness that can make sense of it all. So we don't celebrate in wonder, though we might show good humor in response to our irrevocable condition (and the comic element of this play might be said to celebrate the absurdity of our condition; we are doomed to death and doomed not to know why we must die, but at least we can make jokes on our way to the gallows). Stoppard's characters experience fate without gods, not even the destroyer god of the Birth of Tragedy. (We mght say that Nietzsche shows a path to existentialism without going all the way there.) In Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stand in for the human condition, for us. Like them, we don't know why we are here and there's no one who can answer our questions. We cannot get off the boat, and, ultimately, we won't be able to choose NOT to deliver the letter to our executioner. As Rosencrantz bemoans--but humorously (and humor may be all we can salvage from this chilling and amazing play)--"Who'd have thought we were so important?" (p. 122). Who indeed?