Intro
Shakespeare's Hamlet is one of the most famous plays in the history of literature. We all know the story, even if we haven't read the play. The same may not be true about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard, but his retelling of two of the minor characters of Shakespeare's play is worth a glance, especially from a Formalist lens.
But first, in case you've been living under a rock in a graveyard, a bit about the original Hamlet. The main dude is a Danish prince named Hamlet who's pretty sure that his uncle killed his dad to snatch the throne and the queen, but for some reason Hammy can't get his act together and just kill the guy. He keeps procrastinating, and procrastinating, and procrastinating. And you thought studying for tests was hard.
So Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They're Hamlet's childhood friends. And Hamlet's uncle sends them to spy on Hamlet to figure out what his deal is. But Hamlet finds out, tricks his former buddies, and they end up dead in Shakespeare's play. Uncle aside, at least he got a couple murders right (even if it was like, not really his fault with those guys).
In the 1960s, when Shakespeare himself was already long gone, Tom Stoppard got the idea of writing a play that would take place mostly on the sidelines of Shakespeare's Hamlet. That is, when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are offstage in Shakespeare's Hamlet, we see them onstage in Stoppard's play. Every now and again the major characters from Shakespeare's play (including the hammy man himself) show up in Stoppard's play, and bits of Shakepeare's Hamlet are sometimes incorporated. Overall, though, it's a whole different ballgame.
Stoppard's play is a pretty big deal from a Formalist point of view because it's a great example of this big idea that the Formalists were keen on: that a work of literature is defined by its relationship to the works that came before it. If Shakespeare hadn't written Hamlet, Stoppard wouldn't have written Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. So in order to understand Stoppard's play, we need to understand its relationship to Hamlet. And you thought the Formalists didn't care about context!
Here's a section from Act Two of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It begins with a section of Shakespeare's Hamlet when the little prince is making fun of Polonius, the father of his betrothed, Ophelia, while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are trying to find out what's going on with Hamlet, as instructed by Claudius. Enough going on for ya? Anyway, the former buddies aren't having much success.
Quote
HAMLET (to ROS) Mark you, Guildenstern (uncertainly to GUIL) and you too; at each ear a hearer. That great baby [Polonius] you see there is not yet out of swaddling clouts...
He takes ROS upstage with him, talking together.
POLONIUS My Lord! I have news to tell you.
HAMLET (releasing ROS and mimicking) My lord, I have news to tell you... When Rocius was an actor in Rome...
ROS comes down to re-join GUIL.
POLONIUS (as he follows HAMLET out) The actors are come hither my lord.
HAMLET Buzz, buzz.
Exeunt HAMLET and POLONIUS.
ROS and GUIL ponder. Each reluctant to speak first.
GUIL Hm?
ROS Yes?
GUIL What?
ROS I thought you...
GUIL No.
ROS Ah.
Pause.
GUIL I think we can say we made some headway.
ROS You think so?
GUIL I think we can say that.
ROS I think we can say he made us look ridiculous.
GUIL We played it close to the chest of course.
ROS (derisively) "Question and answer. Old ways are the best ways!" He was scoring off us all down the line.
GUIL He caught us on the wrong foot once or twice, perhaps, but I thought we gained some ground.
ROS (simply) He murdered us.
GUIL He might have had the edge.
ROS (roused) Twenty-seven to three, and you think he might have had the edge?! He murdered us.
Analysis
Foreshadowing, anyone?
Sure, we get a sense that Rosencrantz's metaphorical "He murdered us" might become a tad more literal in the near future. But we wouldn't know that if we didn't have some familiarity with Shakespeare's Hamlet. And that's what makes this scene (and the play as a whole, pretty much) so Formalistically innovative.
Remember, in the original play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are these two minor characters we don't pay much attention to. But in the scene above—and in Stoppard's whole play, in fact—they get the spotlight. Hamlet's onstage only for a little while in the above scene, and the rest of it is taken up with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (who aren't the smartest guys around, as you can probably tell).
So Stoppard's play is doing a whole bunch of things. By giving the spotlight to the little guys, Stoppard is inverting Shakespeare's focus on the "tragic hero" (that's right, Hamlet). He's telling the story of the "minor" characters. And aren't most of us minor characters in real life, just like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? I mean, we're all individual beautiful shmoopiful snowflakes, but not all of us can be a Danish prince with such a soap opera of a life story.
Also, there's a lot of comedy in Stoppard's play, like in the dialogue between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern above. Shakespeare's play is pretty dark stuff. It's tragedy, after all. Stoppard's play is funny, even though we know Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are going to die. Whereas Shakespeare is doing tragedy, Stoppard is doing tragicomedy. We can laugh at Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but we can also cry for them. So Stoppard is also challenging the idea that comic characters can't be tragic.
By looking at how Stoppard's play relates to Shakespeare's Hamlet, we understand Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead so much better. And we understand Shakespeare's Hamlet a little better, too. This is the sort of analysis that Formalists would tell us to go for—even though their focus is on the text and not on the author or the political context or whatever, they still say you can learn a whole lot from looking at the relationship between works to understand them.
So in case you haven't got the gist yet—To defamiliarize or not to defamiliarize, that is the question!