Lecture 08: “two sides of the same coin”

Lecture 8: “two sides
of the same coin”*
PATRICK MOONEY, M.A.
ENGLISH 10, SUMMER SESSION A
2 JULY 2105
* Stoppard 23

GUIL: It could have been—it didn’t have to be
obscene. . . .      It could have been—a bird out of season,
dropping bright-feathered on my shoulder. . . . It could     
have been a tongueless dwarf standing by the road
to point the way. . . . I was      prepared. But it’s this, is it?
No enigma, no dignity, nothing classical, portentous,
only this—a comic pornographer and a rabble of
prostitutes. . . . (27)     
GUIL [to ROS] (jumps up savagely): You don’t have to flog
it to death! (71)
Metatheater

PLAYER: You don’t understand the humiliation of it—to be
tricked out of the single assumption which makes our
existence viable—that somebody is watching. . . . The plot   
was two corpses gone before we caught sight of ourselves,
stripped naked in the middle of nowhere and pouring
ourselves down a bottomless well. (63)
PLAYER: There we were—demented children mincing about in
clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever
spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing
each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith
hurled after empty promises of vengeance—and every
gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air.
We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the
uncomprehending birds listened. (He rounds on them.) Don’t
you see?! We’re actors—we’re the opposite of people! (63)

GUIL: What is the dumbshow for?
PLAYER: We’ll, it’s a device, really—it makes the action
that follows more or less comprehensible; you
understand, we are tied down to a language which
makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style. (77)
PLAYER: Do you call that an ending?—with practically
everyone on his feet? My goodness no—over your
dead body. (79)
He does not quite understand why the coats are
familiar. ROS stands close, touches the coat,
thoughtfully. . . . (82)

ROS: To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are
his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the
corpse cold before his young brother popped onto his
throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal
and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving
in this extraordinary manner? (51)
PLAYER: Lucianus, nephew to the king . . . usurped by his   
uncle and shattered by his mother’s incestuous
marriage . . . loses as he alternates between bitter   
melancholy and unrestricted lunacy . . . staggering from   
the suicidal (a pose) to the homicidal (here he kills
“POLONIUS”) […] (81)
… and the metatheatrical summary

GUIL: And a syllogism: One, he has never known
anything like it. Two, he has never known anything to
write home about. Three, it is nothing to write home
about. . . . Home . . . What’s the first thing you       
remember? (Stoppard 16)
‧ No things I have known are things like this.
‧ No things I have known are things to write home about.
∴ This thing is not a thing to write home about.
Theoretical discourse

GUIL: The scientific approach to the examination of
phenomena is a defense against the pure emotion of fear.
Keep tight hold and continue while there’s time. Now—
counter to the previous syllogism: tricky one, follow me
carefully, it may prove a comfort. If we postulate, and we
just have, that within un-, sub- or supernatural forces the
probability is that the law of probability will not operate as
a factor, then we must accept that the probability of the
first part will not operate as a factor, in which case the law
of probability will operate as a factor within un-, sub- or
supernatural forces. And since it obviously hasn’t been
doing so, we can take it that we are not held within un-,
sub- or supernatural forces after all; in all probability, that
is. Which is a great relief to me personally. (Small pause.)
Which is all very well, except that―

GUIL: (Small pause.) Which is all very well, except that (― He
continues with tight hysteria, under control.) We have been
spinning coins together since I don’t know when, and in all that
time (if it is all that time) I don’t suppose either of us was more
than a couple of gold pieces up or down. I hope that doesn’t
sound surprising because its very unsurprisingness is
something I am trying to keep hold of. The equanimity your
average tosser of coins depends upon a law, or rather a
tendency, or let us say a probability, or at any rate a
mathematically calculable chance, which ensures that he will
not upset himself by losing too much more upset his opponent
by winning too often. This made for a kind of harmony and a
kind of confidence. It related the fortuitous and the ordained
into a reassuring union which we recognized as nature. The sun
came up about as often as it went down, in the long run, and a
coin showed heads about as often as it showed tails. (17–18)

GUIL: Practically starting from scratch. . . . An   
awakening, a man standing on his saddle to
bang on the shutters, our names shouted in a
certain dawn, a message, a summons. . . A new   
record for heads and tails. We have not been . . .   
picked out . . . simply to be abandoned . . . set       
loose to find our own way. . . . We are entitled to   
some direction. . . . I would have thought. (20)   
Fate

ROS: We don’t owe anything to anyone.
GUIL: We’ve been caught up. Your smallest action sets off
another somewhere else, and is set off by it. Keep an eye
open, an ear cocked. Tread warily, follow instructions.
We’ll be all right.
ROS: For how long?
GUIL: Till events have played themselves out. There’s a logic
at work—it’s all done for you, don’t worry. Enjoy it. Relax.
To be taken in hand and led, like being a child again, even
without the innocence, a child—it’s like being given a
prize, an extra slice of childhood when you least expect it,
as a prize for being good, or compensation for never
having had one. . . . Do I contradict myself? (39-40)

ROS: Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their
own pace, to which we are . . . condemned. Each move is   
dictated by the previous one—that is the meaning of order.
If we start being arbitrary it’ll just be a shambles: at least, let
us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to
discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of
their order, we’d know that we were lost. (60)
GUIL: But for God’s sake what are we supposed to do?!
PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That’s what people do. You can’t go
through life questioning your situation at every turn. (66)

PLAYER: It never varies—we aim at the point where
everyone who is marked for death dies.
GUIL: Marked?
PLAYER: Between “just desserts” and “tragic irony” we are
given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent.
Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as
they can possibly go when things have got about as
bad as they reasonably get. (He switches on a smile.)
GUIL: Who decides?
PLAYER (switching off his smile): Decides? It is written. (80)

GUIL: Free to move, speak, extemporise, and yet.
We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is
defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents
merely a slight change of angle to it: we may
seize the moment, toss it around while the
moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration
there, but we are brought round full circle to face
again the single immutable fact—that we,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bearing a letter
from one king to another, are taking Hamlet to
England. (101)

Epistemological doubt
GUIL: You did, the trouble is, each of them is . . .   
plausible, without being instinctive. All your life you
live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in
the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it
into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
A man standing in his saddle in the half-lit half-alive
dawn banged on the shutters and called two names.
He was just a hat and a cloak levitating in the grey
plume of his own breath, but when he called we
came. That much is certain—we came. (38-39)

GUIL: Rosencrantz . . .   
ROS (absently, still listening): What?
(Pause, short.)
GUIL (gently wry): Guildenstern . . .   
ROS (irritated by the repetition): What?
GUIL: Don’t you discriminate at all?
ROS (turning dumbly): Wha’? (51)
GUIL (angrily): Then what do you expect? (Unhappily.) We
act on scraps of information . . . sifting half-remembered   
directions that we can hardly separate from instinct. (102)

GUIL: We only know what we’re told, and that’s little
enough. And for all we know it isn’t even true.
PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to
be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be
true. It’s the currency of living. There may be nothing
behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as
it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you
assume? (66-67)
GUIL: But why? Was it all for this? Who are we that so much
should converge on our little deaths? […] Who are we?
PLAYER: You are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. That’s
enough. (122)

Lecture 08: “two sides of the same coin”

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Lecture 08: “two sides of the same coin”