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I was a bit morose that this fforum hadn't had a lot of hits lately so I thought I'd ask a couple of stupid questions:
1. Sometimes Ros and Guil are onstage during 'Hamlet', but when offstage during Shakespeare they are onstage during Stoppard's 'Ros and Guil are Dead'. When do they get their tea break?
2. If Hamlet is such a procrastinator, how is it that he decides to make such a radical decision as to leave Elsinore?
3. Is there a Yorick acting out a backstory somewhere?
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are onstage continuously until the final moments of R & G are Dead. For them, it's the theatrical equivalent of a first person narrative.
(It's funny that I didn't pick up on that until I reread the play just now -- they sort of make a point of it. That's what's great about rereading things: something different pops out at you every time.)
1. They have generics stand in for them from time to time.
2. The C of G sent him away, so he never made a decision himself.
3. That would be a rather distant backstory, don't you think? Seems easier to just construct a skull and build in the memory.
Posted by: Anonymous User (---.static.internode.on.net)
Date: March 01, 2006 12:57AM
It's not very well known that the generic who played Yorick's skull lobbied for a more of a role for 100's of years....and was FINALLY given a minor part in a Daphne Farquitt self-published novel from the 1930's......alas!
I saw a comic dance version of the "Yorrick" scene and I understood it (in a complete sense, I suppose) for the first time in my life.
The dancers/ actors bounced a balloon around for a while, completely fell over themselves about Yorrick; so that when Ophelia arrived the jolt into the reality of death was actually frightening for the audience because we, too, had been laughing about it, in what we had thought to be a solely 'clowning' episode.