Why do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear in Hamlet? What (if anything) do they add to the play? It is to answer these questions in part that Tom Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. But while Shakespeare's characters are ciphers, introduced merely to move the plot along briefly and then to be bumped off as inconvenient supernumeraries, in Stoppard's play we are forced to confront them as individuals with their own lives. They are not Everymen, but individuals who must constantly fight to be recognized for their own merits and deficiencies.
In Hamlet, the two are introduced to as former schoolmates of the title character. Because they can use their past connections with the prince to become intimates once again with Hamlet, they are commissioned by King Claudius to spy on Hamlet. In Shakespeare's play, Hamlet sends them to their death by altering a letter that they are carrying. The original letter called for Hamlet's death; the substitute letter calls for their own death and calls into question Hamlet's moral standing. His willingness to let two innocents (and two friends) be killed, like his treatment of Ophelia, suggest a man who is concerned only with his own fate and oblivious to the worth of others. Shakespeare lessens Hamlet's guilt in the eyes of the audience, at least to some extent, by giving us such a very brief glimpse of the two: We cannot mourn properly for them (or blame Hamlet fully for them) because we know so little about them.
But all of this changes in Stoppard's play, where the pair are fully articulated characters. They tell jokes to each other, and to us, play games to pass away the idle hours, engage themselves and us with philosophical questions - all to pass the time between the scenes in which they appear in Shakespeare's play. In some sense, Stoppard's play is therefore a commentary on the nature of being an actor, for whom there may be "no small roles" but rather roles in which one g...