Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor fictional characters from William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. They are also major characters in Tom Stoppard's Waiting for Godot/Hamlet pastiche, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.
In Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern attempt to place themselves in the confidence of the title character, their childhood friend. In reality, however, they are serving as informants for the corrupt King Claudius, Hamlet's uncle, who usurped the throne and constantly attempts to check his nephew.
As the protagonists of the play and movie Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, they are confused by the events of Hamlet and seem unaware of their role in the larger drama. The play is primarily a comedy, but they often stumble upon deep philosophical truths through their nonsensical ramblings. In the movie, Rosencrantz invents the hamburger, and re-discovers gravity and volume displacement, among other things. The characters depart from their epiphanies as quickly as they come to them. At times, one appears to be more enlightened than the other; however this light is traded off throughout the course of the drama. Stoppard also littered his play with jokes referring to the common thespian tendency to swap Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the midst of the play, because the characters are basically identical. He does this by making Rosencrantz and Guildenstern unsure of who is who, as well as having the other players (Claudius, Hamlet, Gertrude) refer to them frequently by the wrong names. Because of Dead's similarity to Waiting for Godot, Rosencrantz is sometimes compared with Estragon (one of the tramps who was "waiting" for Godot), who shares his dim perception of reality, while Guildenstern parallels Vladimir, who shares his analytical perception.
[edit] Other uses
- In the CBS and CTV TV show, Due South, two troublesome FBI agents are referred to as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by one of the characters.
- Keiji Inafune, creator of the popular Capcom-based Onimusha series, routinely adopts the names of Shakespeare's fictional characters, particularly the villainous ones, as both main and sub-villains in all his works (e.g. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). A character named Guildenstern in the Onimusha games as a mad genma/demon scientist who tries to obliterate humans. Rosencrantz from the same series appears as a giant Genma fly scientist who possesses Luis Frois.
- Both names are also used as characters in video-games such as Vagrant Story, where Guildenstern is the primary villain.
- "Rosencrantz Guildenstern" is the name of a fictional theatre critic mentioned by Shakespearean actor Edwin Blackgaard in an episode of Adventures in Odyssey.
- In The Simpsons episode Tales from the Public Domain, the characters Carl and Lenny have their names altered to Rosencarl and Guildenlenny as part of a Hamlet pastiche.
- The characters Rosenberg and Goldstein in Harold and Kumar Go to the White Castle are a reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This was done with the intent to create an alternate film with these characters that takes place in the same time period much like the way that the play "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" takes place in the same time period as "Hamlet".
- In the 1981 movie Cutter's Way, starring Jeff Bridges and John Heard, Heard's character (Alex Cutter) introduces (to Bridges' character) two people he meets in a bar as "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern".
- The Spin Doctors song "How Could You Want Him (When You Know You Could Have Me?)" begins with the lines "I'm quite contented to take my Chances / against the Guildensterns and Rosencrantzes".
- In She-Hulk comics Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the names of two goldfish owned by the main character Jennifer Walters. First mentioned in She-Hulk #9, both die in She-Hulk #11 due to Titania wasting Jennifer Walters` apartment.
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern serve as the inspriation for the Tag and Bink comic series set in the Star Wars universe.
- The characters of Royce and Aldo in the Doctor Who serial Warriors' Gate are based on Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
[edit] Background of names
These names were present in Shakespeare's era (late 16th century and early 17th century) in the court and nobility of Denmark-Norway, and the author of Hamlet placed them several centuries into the past, into Hamlet's time. King Frederick I of Denmark had decreed that all nobles shall have surnames, and most of them had then taken theirs from the figures in their escutcheon. Noble families Rosenkrantz (escutcheon: garland of roses) and Gyldenstierne (escutcheon: golden star) were originally Jutlander armiger families, not among the highest nor the noblest of Scandinavia, which happened to became very numerous in early modern centuries, and were surnames of plenty of courtiers and officers of the Dano-Norwegian king in Shakespeare's lifetime. Those names were thus familiar as "Danish" ones to Englishmen having some contact with Denmark-Norway. Because in Shakespeare's era there existed a number of gentlemen named Gyldenstierne and a number of gentlemen named Rosenkrantz, it cannot be said whether Hamlet's author desired to refer to any real individual, or just to make an implication to contemporary Denmark. The probably most famous Gyldenstierne ever was Christina Gyllenstierna, wife and widow of Sten Sture the Younger, Sweden's regent.
