ThAct: CS - Hamlet

 This blog is written as part of the Thinking Activity given by Dilip Barad Sir, 

The task explores how Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead represent power, ideology, and marginalization — from royal courts to modern corporate systems.

                                            

Introduction

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is more than a tragedy of revenge and madness — it is a powerful study of hierarchy, control, and ideological dominance.

Through the minor characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Shakespeare reveals how individuals at the margins of authority are used, manipulated, and finally erased from both narrative and memory.

Tom Stoppard’s reinterpretation, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, reimagines these forgotten figures at the center of the story. Stoppard transforms their silence into a philosophical and cultural commentary on the condition of modern humanity.

Viewed through the lens of Cultural Studies, both plays uncover how power defines identity, whether in royal courts or modern workplaces.

Marginalization in Hamlet

In Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern serve as loyal courtiers, carrying out the King’s orders without understanding their moral cost.When Hamlet calls them “sponges” who soak up the King’s countenance, he exposes their position as tools of authority. Once their purpose is served, they are discarded — obedient yet invisible.

Through Louis Althusser’s concept of the Ideological State Apparatus, we can see that these characters are not acting freely; they are products of a system that conditions their loyalty.Their tragic end symbolizes how people at the lower levels of hierarchy become footnotes in the stories written by power.

Modern Parallels to Corporate Power (From Elsinore to the Corporate World)

The court of Denmark mirrors today’s corporate offices.

Just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern serve the King, modern employees often serve unseen hierarchies of management, market, and capital.

In a globalized economy, when companies downsize or outsource, workers lose not only jobs but also identity and meaning.Antonio Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony helps explain this modern condition — people accept their subordination as natural, mistaking compliance for stability.Whether under monarchy or capitalism, power sustains itself through ideology rather than open force.

Existential Question in Stoppard's Re-Interpretation (Stoppard’s Reimagining: The Theatre of Powerlessness)

In Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the two characters become aware of their confusion but remain powerless to escape it.

They question, joke, and reflect, but cannot grasp the world that dictates their fate.This reflects Michel Foucault’s theory of power — invisible, internalized, and operating through everyday norms.Stoppard’s absurd world becomes a metaphor for modern existence, where people perform predetermined roles without understanding the larger system controlling them.

Their endless waiting, mistaken identities, and circular dialogues express the existential anxiety of the modern worker, trapped within institutions that define meaning and control.

Cultural and  Economic Power Structures (Theoretical Insights)

Both Shakespeare and Stoppard reveal that power is not only political — it is cultural.

Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning shows how individuals shape themselves according to social expectations.Raymond Williams, in his Marxist cultural theory, reminds us that literature both reflects and reproduces class structures.

Through these perspectives, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern become more than minor courtiers — they become symbols of the modern powerless, those whose lives are shaped by systems they cannot resist or comprehend.

Their story is timeless because culture itself functions as a tool of control, maintaining hierarchies through obedience, loyalty, and fear.

Reflection

Every individual, at some point, experiences marginalization — moments when our agency feels limited by larger structures like institutions, workplaces, or traditions.By comparing Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, we learn how the mechanisms of power repeat across history:those in authority remain central, while others fade into the background.

Cultural Studies encourages us to read literature as a mirror of social dynamics, revealing how culture, ideology, and power continue to shape human existence.

Conclusion

From Shakespeare’s court to Stoppard’s stage, the journey of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern demonstrates how the marginalized can illuminate the system that erases them.

Both plays question a world that values hierarchy over humanity, obedience over thought, and function over identity.Their tragedy is not just death — it is the silence of the ordinary in the grand narrative of power.

To understand Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is to recognize the unseen systems of control that continue to define our modern world.

References:

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Project Gutenberg, 1999.

Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Grove Press, 1967.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 1971.

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Pantheon, 1980.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 1971.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Williams, Raymond. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” New Left Review, 1973.