Act Three

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern find themselves on a ship that has already set sail. The pair seems to have no knowledge of how they got there. At first, they try to determine whether they are still alive, before they recognize that they are not dead and are on board a boat. They remember that Claudius has given them a letter to deliver to England. After some brief confusion over who actually has the letter, they find it and eventually open it. They realize that Claudius has asked for Hamlet to be killed. While Rosencrantz seems hesitant to follow their orders now, Guildenstern convinces him that they are not worthy of interfering with fate and the plans of kings. The stage darkens and, presumably, the characters go to sleep. Hamlet switches the letter with one he has written himself, an act which takes place offstage in Hamlet.

The pair discovers that the Tragedians are hidden ("impossibly", according to the stage directions) in several barrels on deck. They are fleeing Denmark because their play offended Claudius. When Rosencrantz complains that there is not enough action, pirates attack. Hamlet, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and the Player all hide in separate barrels. The lights dim.

When the lights come on again, Hamlet has vanished (in Hamlet it is reported that he was kidnapped by pirates from the ship). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern panic, then re-read the letter to find that it now calls for them to be put to death instead of the prince. Guildenstern cannot understand why he and Rosencrantz are so important as to necessitate their executions.

The Player tells Guildenstern that all paths end in death. Guildenstern snaps and draws the Player's dagger from his belt, shouting that his portrayals of death do not do justice to the real thing. He stabs the Player and the Player appears to die. Guildenstern fully believes that he has killed the Player. Seconds later, the Tragedians begin to clap and the Player stands up and bows, revealing the knife to be a theatrical one with a retractable blade. The Tragedians then act out the deaths from the final scene of Hamlet.

The lighting shifts so that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear alone. Rosencrantz still does not understand why they must die, yet he resigns himself to his fate and he disappears. Guildenstern wonders when he passed the point where he could have stopped the series of events that has brought him to this point. He disappears as well. The final scene features the last few lines from Shakespeare's Hamlet, as the Ambassador from England announces that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

Absurdity

Stoppard emphasizes the randomness of the world. In the beginning of Act One, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern bet on coin flips and Rosencrantz wins with heads ninety-two times in a row. Guildenstern creates a series of syllogisms in order to interpret this phenomenon, but nothing truly coincides with probability theory.[5]

Art vs. reality

The players help demonstrate the conflict between art and reality. The world in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern live lacks order, but art allows people to create artificial order. As the Player says, "There's a design at work in all art." Art and the real world are in conflict. In order to reach out to the only reality he can be sure of, Guildenstern exclaims, "No one gets up after death—there is no applause—there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death."[6] Stoppard also uses his characters to comment on the believability of theatre. While Guildenstern criticises the Player for his portrayal of death, he believes the Player's performance when Guildenstern thinks he has stabbed him with a knife. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern believe exactly what the actors want them to believe.

Metatheatre is a central structural element of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Scenes that are staged as plays, dumb shows, or commentaries on dramatic theory and practice are prominent in both Stoppard's play and Shakespeare's original tragedy Hamlet.[7] In Hamlet, metatheatrical elements include the Player's speech (2.2), Hamlet's advice to the Players (3.2), and the meta-play "The Mousetrap" (3.3). Since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are characters from Hamlet itself, Stoppard's entire play can be considered a piece of metatheatre. Bernardina da Silveira Pinheiro observes that Stoppard uses metatheatrical devices to produce a "parody" of the key elements of Shakespeare's Hamlet that includes foregrounding two minor characters considered "nonentities" in the original tragedy.[8]

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with a whole world dedicated to staring at a rump

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for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

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And your children will be wanderers in the waste land for forty years, undergoing punishment for your false ways, till your bodies become dust in the waste land.

Then let a man who is clean take the dust of the burned cow and put it outside the tent-circle in a clean place, where it is to be kept for the children of Israel and used in making the water which takes away what is unclean: it is a sin-offering.

And he who takes up the dust of the burned cow is to have his clothing washed with water and be unclean till evening: this is to be a law for ever, for the children of Israel as well as for the man from another country who is living among them.>>19092606

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And for the unclean, they are to take the dust of the burning of the sin-offering, and put flowing water on it in a vessel:

And I took your sin, the calf which ye had made, and burnt it with fire, and stamped it, and ground it very small, even until it was as small as dust: and I cast the dust thereof into the brook that descended out of the mount.

And Joshua rent his clothes, and fell to the earth upon his face before the ark until the eventide, he and the elders of Israel, and put dust upon their heads.

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And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice, and wept; and they rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven.

How much less in them that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth?

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Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground;

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

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Her left hand reached for the tent peg, her right hand for the workmen's hammer. She "hammered" Sisera, she shattered his skull, she smashed his head, she drove the tent peg through his temple.

When they arrived at the place called The Skull, they crucified Him there, along with the criminals, one on the right and one on the left.

So they, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into Sheol: and the earth closed upon them, and they perished from among the assembly.

For a fire is kindled in mine anger, And burneth unto the lowest Sheol, And devoureth the earth with its increase, And setteth on fire the foundations of the mountains.

They are appointed as a flock for Sheol; Death shall be their shepherd; And the upright shall have dominion over them in the morning; And their beauty shall be for Sheol to consume, That there be no habitation for it.