What is Tom Stoppard's view of Hamlet in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"?

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Hamlet plays a much smaller role. This is, as it is intended to be, the exact opposite of Shakespeare's original. Here, it is Hamlet's former school chums who are the main characters, not the brooding student prince. As Hamlet is such a minor character, his behavior comes across as even more puzzling, his endless vacillations all the more incomprehensible. From the perspective of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet appears an absurd, self-absorbed figure whose actions make little or no sense. That's precisely how many feel about Hamlet in the Shakespeare play itself, so Stoppard is simply taking things one stage further in his portrayal of this most beguiling of characters.

Although Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the central characters in Stoppard's play, they're still small pawns in a much bigger drama, one even bigger than Shakespeare's original. They are tiny fragments in a gigantic cosmic order, tossed about here and there by the winds of fortune. They are not masters of their own fate, nor can they ever be; on the contrary, they are the plaything of fate, as much as they are pawns cynically manipulated by Claudius as part of his wicked game.

In the world of art which they inhabit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are center stage; in the real world, however, they are nothing. Hamlet, for all his brooding, for all his ceaseless vacillation and put-on madness, dominates both worlds. Even though he has relatively little stage time in Stoppard's reconstruction of events, he still dominates; a brooding presence haunting every word and every deed of the two lead characters. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cannot escape the frantic twists and turns of the real world, no matter how hard they try. Hamlet can come and go as he pleases, moving freely between art and life; they, however, cannot.

Although Hamlet is presented by Stoppard as a somewhat absurd figure, there's method to his absurdity, and he still retains the capacity to act, albeit in ways that still don't make a whole lot of sense to his former school friends. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, however, remain trapped in a world which is absurd by its very nature. As such, they are always on the periphery, never gaining more than a glimpse of what is real. And it is reality, as represented in all its manifest dangers by the character of Hamlet, that ultimately comes to destroy them.