Bridge to
History
When examining Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, it is vital that we place it into historical perspective. Stoppard wrote the play in 1967, in the height of the Cold War. This was a time period during which a handful of people had the ability to destroy the civilized world with nuclear weapons and were threatening to do so. This single fact gave the world a sense of futility, which is reflected in the play. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern point out that they have no direction in life. They move forward on their journey in whichever direction they happen to be facing. They claim that life is nice on a boat because they never have to worry about where they are headed. This mirrors how the world's direction during the Cold War was in the hands of a select few, rather than the average person. It was as if the world was a ship that most people could not steer: what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern liked in life. The Cold War time period gave birth to the absurdist movement, which concentrated on the absurdity of human life. Our fellow students have created much more thorough pages on absurdism than we could ever hope to present, so when these pages are up, we plan to provide links to them.
As we point out in our biography section, Stoppard was a refugee of World War II. He barely made it out of the grasp of Nazism and Communism. We can easily see how Stoppard could gain an absurd view of life through looking at the atrocities that he could have possibly experienced. He lost family members to Nazi Germany. When compared to the logic of Hitler's propoganda, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem intelligent.
The space race also came about during Stoppard's time. In a sense, the planet has been shrinking ever since. We have become a meaningless, tiny ball in the vast emptiness of space. What better to give a sense of absurdity of existence? Much like Hamlet, nations were fighting and spending to capture tiny pieces of land in countries that most people had never heard of, like Vietnam. Even while leaving the planet, we could not transcend it, for we threw billions of dollars at capturing the desolate moon. Perhaps some of this came into Stoppard's inspiration to reconstruct Shakespeare's plays in the contemporary age.