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... m another play (Hamlet) find themselves in an "un-, sub- or supernatural" world where they are forced to adopt a role or embrace a fate which has been sealed by their author (Shakespeare). Ros and Guil's reality (a condition Guil refers to as "thin the name we give to the common experience" in Act I) is not something which they can definitively establish but is continually altered as new information is provided by the playwright who controls their destiny. Stoppard denies any conscious "quoting" of Pirandello's work in his play, however; he states, "As for Pirandello, I know very little about him, I'm afraid. I've seen very little and I really wasn't aware of that as an influence. " 7 Because Stoppard so often denies that the play is a largely derivative work, many critics have looked for analytical tools within the text itself to unlock the secrets behind the play's meaning. One metaphor, however, that has been neglected reveals Stoppard's skillful incorporation of mathematical theory in addition to Shakespearean rhetoric.
A central image that runs throughout the play is the game of chance. Ros and Guil begin the play by flipping a coin only to discover that heads are produced consecutively. After the eighty-ninth flip, Guil begins to ponder this seeming anomaly in an attempt to explain how such a phenomenon could occur. "List of possible explanations. One: I'm willing it. Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for an unremembered past.
Two: time has stopped dead, and the single experience of one coin being spun once has been repeated ninety-times. On the whole, doubtful. Three: divine intervention. Four: a spectacular vindication of the principle that each individual coin spun individually is as likely to come down heads as tails and therefore should cause no surprise each individual time it does. " 8 In his article "The Circle and its Tangent" R. H. Lee makes reference to this passage and notes that Guil's final explanation "is statistically accurate, and presents us with a world of total unreliability -- an amazing combination of phenomena simply cannot be made to yield either a sequence or a precedent.
The eighty-sixth spin is totally undetermined by the previous eighty-five. Facts remain isolated, refuse to form chains, and explanations remain forever 'possible, ' the nature of circumstances determining the run being beyond our comprehension. " 9 While most critics, like Lee, interpret this coin flipping as an indication to Guil that he and Ros are within an irrational world devoid of logic and reason, Stoppard actually presents a much more complicated metaphor here. As Guil suggests later in Act I, Stoppard introduces the mathematical theory of probability to help explain Ros and Guil's "absurd" predicament. Contemporary mathematicians create and employ statistical theories to explain the seeming paradox of chance. Casinos do not gamble but are consistently profitable just as lotteries provide a dependable source of income for state governments. The reason that such enterprises are lucrative depends upon the mathematical concept of randomness.
Contrary to the connotative meaning of the word, a statistician defines the term random as an order that can be created only over long-term observation of phenomena. This description of randomness comprises the theory of probability for "probability describes the predictable long-run patterns of random outcomes. " 10 The coin toss is a basic example used to illustrate this theory because while one might reason that the coin is balanced equally and therefore will come down heads half the time and tails half the time, contemporary mathematicians explain that this personal opinion does not exactly correspond with observed data. Mathematicians have found that coin tosses only yielded a. 5 probability after ten thousand times. A graph created to explain this example shows that the outcome for the first four hundred or so tosses was surprisingly unpredictable because as Guil says "each individual coin spun individually is as likely to come down heads as tails and therefore should cause no surprise each individual time it does. " In other words, the short-term outcome of the coin toss yielded a result that did not ultimately reflect the long-run probability: Ros' experience of flipping coins was not statistically inaccurate or technically improbable.
The theory of probability serves as an excellent metaphor for the play because Stoppard suggests that Guil's initial response to the unorthodox results of the coin toss are a bit more complicated than critics have made it seem. Guil, who knows the theory of probability, uses mathematical principles to mitigate his fear about the kind of world he and Ros now inhabit (a place where they have no memory prior to their summons, where illusion and reality are indiscernible, and where a supernatural force of some kind seems to be controlling their destiny without regard to their individual will); "The scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defense against the pure emotion of fear. " 11 What Guil fears most, however, is not that he and Ros exist in a world of, as Lee says, "total unreliability" but that he is in a world governed paradoxically by the theory of probability, a world where initial events seem "random" but where the end is irrevocably fixed or determined (ie. death for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). By employing the theory of probability, Stoppard actually enhances Ros and Guil's sense of frustration with their circumstances -- a sense of frustration that could be interpreted as "absurd. " 1 Tom Stoppard, interview, "Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas, " Theatre Quarterly 4. 14 (May 1974) as quoted in Tom Stoppard in Conversation, ed. Paul Delaney (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) 58. 2 Tom Stoppard, interview, "Tom Stoppard Nonstop: Word Games with a Hit Playwright, " New York, 10 January 1977, as quoted in Tom Stoppard in Conversation, ed. Paul Delaney (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) 95. 3 "Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas, " Delaney, 57. 4 Normand Berlin, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: Theatre of Criticism, " in Modern Drama 16: 3 (December 1973): 271. 5 Richard Andretta, Tom Stoppard: An Analytical Study of His Plays (New Delhi: Vikas Pub. , 1992) 23. 6 Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd. 1961 (New York: Peregrine Inc. , 1987) 23 - 24. 7 Tom Stoppard, interview.
Transatlantic Review 29 (Summer 1968) as quoted in Delaney, 21. 8 Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (New York: Grove Press, 1967) 16. 9 R. H. Lee, "The Circle and its Tangent, " Theory 33 (Oct. 1969): 41. 10 Lynn A. Steen, For All Practical Purposes: Introduction to Contemporary Mathematics (New York: W. H. Freeman and Co. , 1994. 11 Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 17.
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Research essay sample on Guildenstern Are Dead Coin Toss
