汤姆·斯托帕德的《君臣人子小命呜呼》：伦理学批评及其他视角

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内容摘要

汤姆·斯托帕德突破性的戏剧《君臣人子小命呜呼》于 1966 年 8 月在爱丁堡边缘艺术节初次公演，1967 年 4 月在老维克国家剧院开演。该剧后来被奉为经典，在世界各地公演无数次。出乎寻常的是评论界对此连篇累牍地加以关注，集中追问的就是该剧究竟陈述了什么。作者汤姆·斯托帕德闭口不谈，被问时，他只说“该剧写的是两位埃尔西诺的朝廷大员。”他认为“每一个主观反应都有道理：不用认可或拒绝任何解读。”不可避免的是，迄今为止有关《君臣人子小命呜呼》的批评解读可谓众说纷纭，但一个显而易见的疏漏就是聂珍钊的文学伦理学批评学说。本文采用聂珍钊的主要概念，将斯托帕德的突破性的剧作作为一个历史时代的表述及伦理困境的分解进行审视。先结合莎士比亚的《哈姆雷特》探讨聂珍钊的中心思想，然后将其应用到对斯托帕德剧作的分析之中，并希望聂自己日后会用这些思想来研读其他剧作，包括《君臣人子小命呜呼》。

关键词

斯托帕德；《君臣人子小命呜呼》；解读；文学伦理学批评；聂珍钊

作者简介

威廉·贝克，杭州师范大学钱塘江特聘教授，北伊利诺尔大学杰出荣休教授，独立或与他人共同撰写、编辑了 175 篇期刊论文和 30 部著作，包括《上下文中的威尔吉·考林斯》（2023）、《犹太写作：英国犹太写作参考和批评指南》（2019）和《品特的世界：关系、痴迷及艺术尝试》（2018）。他也是《英文研究的年度作品》和《风格》的共同编辑。

Title

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Ethical Criticism and Other Perspectives

Abstract

Tom Stoppard’s breakthrough drama, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 1966.  It opened at the National Theatre at the Old Vic in April 1967. Subsequently, it has achieved classic status, being performed innumerable times worldwide. Not unsurprisingly, much critical ink has been spent on it largely devoted to the question of what the play is all about. Its author, Tom Stoppard, has stood firm on it. When asked, he responds, “It’s about two courtiers at Elsinore.” He believes “that every subjective response has its validity: no interpretations endorsed, none denied.” Inevitably, there have been diverse critical interpretations of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Nie Zhenzhao’s ideas of Ethical Literary Criticism are a notable omission from these. This article utilizes Nie Zhenzhao’s key concepts to examine Stoppard’s breakthrough drama as an expression of a historical period, of an unpacking of ethical dilemmas. A discussion of Nie’s central ideas with reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet is followed by an application to Stoppard’s play in the hope that he will himself apply them to other dramatic texts, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Key words

Stoppard; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; interpretation; Ethical Literary Criticism; Nie Zhenzhao

Author

William Baker is Distinguished Chair Qiantang River Professor, Hangzhou Normal University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Northern Illinois University. He is the author/co-author and editor of over one hundred and seventy-five refereed journal articles, and thirty books, including Jewish Writing: A Reference and Critical Guide to Jewish Writing in the UK (2019), Pinter’s World: Relationships, Obsessions, and Artistic Endeavors (2018) and Wilkie Collins in Context (2023). He co-edits The Year’s Work in English Studies and Style.

Email: [e-mail]

    There have been deconstructionist, existentialist, and absurdist readings of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The play has been approached from an interdisciplinary perspective, as a lesson in moral responsibility and, to mention just one other, as a postmodern narrative. ① Unless I am mistaken, the play hasn’t been discussed from the perspective of Nie Zhenzhao’s theory of ethical criticism as expressed in his various discourses on the subject.

01

Ethical Criticism: Expression of a Historical Period

According to Nie Zhenzhao ② in his “Towards an Ethical Literary Criticism,” “literature is a unique expression of ethics and morality within a certain historical period” (83). So, it is not inappropriate to begin with the very first response to Stoppard’s text as submitted to his publishers. Frank Pike, Stoppard’s editor at Faber for nearly forty years and one of the first readers of Stoppard’s drama, comments on looking at the script that “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern become the central characters of Hamlet desperately in search of their identities.” According to Pike, “All they know about themselves is what they can gleam from the scenes in Shakespeare’s play in which they appear and these scenes are part of the present play. Hamlet, Ophelia, Polonius, etc., sweep on and off as if they were the enigmatic minor characters R & G normally are.” Pike adds, “It’s a brilliant idea brilliantly carried out, and often very funny and most readable.”  ③

    The world premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern took place at Cranston Street Hall, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe on August 24, 1966. In the programme, its author observed that the play began as an idea to write about these two characters in England - to where Shakespeare’s play sends them and where they meet their deaths. However, it became necessary to establish them first within the context of Hamlet, and this establishing process drove them further and further back into the action of Hamlet until - somewhat to the author’s surprise - they emerged out of the other end, i.e., before they entered into Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are a curious and rather appealing couple, customarily thought of as “unsympathetic,” as spies and accessories to the evil plot against Hamlet. However, nothing in the play indicates a shared guilt with the King; they are told little, they obey orders, and are somewhat bewildered, having been thrust into a situation which has nothing to do with them and which they hardly understand. Because of this, they had the air of occupying a level above the action, at different levels of reality … Wilde (in De Profundis) [“from the depths”] refers to them as immortal characters whose reported death is merely a part of the play’s mechanics; they march on.  ④

    For the Faber Modern Classics 50th anniversary edition of the play in 2017, Stoppard wrote, not without a tinge of his characteristic irony, that the play is “about Hamlet’s ‘excellent good friends.’” Stoppard added, “for fifty years, now, on being asked what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is about, I have stood pat on ‘It’s about two courtiers at Elsinore.’ I wasn’t insensitive to more suggestive possibilities.” Stoppard “took the view that every subjective response has its validity: no interpretation endorsed, none denied. The one I liked best, however, was by Fleet Street journalist who was at the first night. ‘I get it,’ he said, ‘It’s two reporters on a story that doesn’t stand up’” (vi).

    From such perspectives, the play inhabits its own world rather than the wider one of early and mid-1960s Britain, the external environment from which it emerged. Yet it should not be forgotten that the audience for which Stoppard wrote were those who were going to plays by Samuel Beckett, notably his by-then classic Waiting for Godot, premièred in 1952, and its English version in 1955. His techniques were echoed by Pinter in The Birthday Party (1960). In the mode of Beckett and Pinter, self-consciously avant-garde comedy routines are found in the early 1960s, theatrical satirizing modern life, and offering funny nonsense. The highly successful Beyond the Fringe, part of the Edinburgh Festival in 1960, ran in London from 1962 to 1966, in New York from 1962 to 1964, and was also televised by the BBC. Beyond the Fringe, akin to Beckett and Pinter, drew upon comic dialogues between a straight man and a fall guy: in other words, standard fare in provincial theatres and music halls and experienced in pantomime. So, in 1967, when Stoppard’s play was performed, an audience was ready to receive a play that poked fun at theatrical conventions and of course the iconic Shakespeare.

    Stoppard’s satire too was appropriate to the mode of “pop culture,” to the obsession with “The Beatles,” in literature and the theatre with the “Angry Young Men” and “Kitchen Sink” drama that dealt with a class previously excluded from theatrical depiction. Placed in such a historical framework, Stoppard’s play reflects the immediate post-war generation with a nation emerging out of rationing, its economy in reasonable shape, beginning to shed its colonies, and questioning its place in the world. ⑤

02

Unpacking: The Ethical Knot

Here is an account of the plot. In Stoppard’s play, Hamlet plays a very small part and rarely speaks. When he does, he only speaks Shakespeare’s lines. The central “ethical knot” - to use an expression from Nie (Baker and Shang 15) - is that of the two attendant lords. The three central components of Stoppard’s drama consist of “the collision of the three language-worlds-Shakespeare’s tragedy, the Player’s disillusioned oratory, and the two men’s local hesitations, deviations and repetitions -… clicked into place” (Lee 132). Two men who have previously travelled together start on a journey without knowing where or why. The audience or the readers encounter them stopping on their way “tossing coins, with results that break all the laws of probability: heads, seventy-six times running! Ninety-two times running!” (Lee 132-133). The two appear to be stuck in a time vacuum or outside of time. The two encounter a Player with a troupe of performing actors. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern leave them in the middle of performing and find themselves at the Court of Elsinore. The plot and characters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet kick in. Both are given conflicting instructions and commands that they don’t know how to react to.

    It should be said now that reactions to the performance of the play in the theatre are much more positive than those of academic criticism. The latter have pulled up short when they realize that the play has been an outstanding theatrical success, continually drawing worldwide audiences into the theatre since 1966. ⑥ 

    Stoppard’s play received considerable critical attention in the years after 1966, with critics often expressing intellectual reservations whilst noting that the play had become highly successful, playing to packed audiences.

    According to T. Bareham, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is an essentially theatrical play” (Bareham 14), but John Weightman, writing in 1967, had already expressed caveats: Stoppard’s idea “is brilliant, and produces a certain amount of fun, but … it is [not] worked out with complete success.” For Weightman, “the action is not a legitimate extension of the minimal identity that Shakespeare gives Rosencrantz in Hamlet, and so Stoppard’s play operates at an uncomfortable tangent to Shakespeare’s” (39). Walter Kerr wrote of the New York production that “the play is … yet one more document in the unreasoning existentialist catalogue. If I have anything against it, apart from its somewhat crushing overlength, it is that … Stoppard himself is watching too closely, is too much with us.” Kerr added that Stoppard’s “two principal figures are not baffled and lost in their own ways. They are baffled and lost in his [Stoppard’s], speaking his words for him, replicating his thoughts. Thus, there is a steady barrage of philosophical finger-pointing” (The New York Times, October 29, 1967, 53).

    Clive Barnes, reviewing the Broadway revival three years later, observed that the play had been characterized “as a snob hit” by people who, in common with the majority Broadway audience, couldn’t understand it. For Barnes, it was “a marvelous, mind-boggling play” that “combines Hamlet with Waiting for Godot”: its two central characters “are the greatest patsies in drama.” While recognizing the play’s flaws, Barnes concluded that “the play remains fun, it teases the mind, it offers a load of belly laughs, and when everything is over you realize that this is a very complex play being sympathetically given” (The New York Times, November 19, 1970, 39).

    Normand Berlin, writing in the academic journal, Modern Drama, described the play as the “theatre of criticism.” For Berlin, “Stoppard is an artist-critic writing for audience-critics, a dramatist least effective when he points his finger directly at the existential dilemma – ‘What does it all add up to?’” He suggests that the “play cannot be called satirical, for it makes no attempt to encourage the audience into any kind of action, as do Brecht’s plays, or to cause the audience to change the way things are” (cited Contemporary Literary Criticism, 399). Stoppard’s utilization of metatheatrical trickery from other playwrights led to his dismissal by Robert Brustein as a “theatrical parasite” (Brustein). However, the play occasioned interesting critical commentary on its relationship with Beckett (for instance in Joseph E. Duncan’s “Godot Comes”), and Pirandello (Hunter 51). In the play’s defence, Kenneth Tynan wrote that “despite its multiple sources [it] is a genuine original, one of a kind” (cited Fleming 49). For Richard Corballis, the play “presents life as a ‘mystery’ which can neither be understood nor controlled; and that death, far from being imbued with romance and significance, is mere negation-the absence of existence” (40). While for Michael Billington, “philosophically” Stoppard’s play “belongs to the tradition of the Theatre of the Absurd” (Stoppard the Playwright 35), absurdist and existential interpretations have often been challenged. Jim Hunter argues that if the play is “allegorical of human life, then it is allegory not of existentialism, materialism, or chance, but of a fixed purpose, a logic beyond and outside of us which we cannot visualize” (Hunter 170).

    John Fleming succinctly accounts for a broad strain in the criticism of the play: “a recurrent point of debate in discussions of [its]thematic significance is the extent to which it is or is not existential in its worldview, and there are viable arguments for both sides” (50). According to Lewis Funke, “Stoppard’s main objection to the existentialist label seems to be that it connotes a despairing, nihilistic view of life as meaningless”. However, Funke writes that “Stoppard feels that his characters make continuous attempts to master the situation and comprehend it with the assumption that there is something to comprehend, which would be nearer the position that [Stoppard himself] would take” (221; qtd. in Fleming 265). For Fleming, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “is a text that is contradictory and expensive, one that raises many questions as it offers tentative answers” (50). This relativist approach is echoed by William W. Demastes, for whom Stoppard in this play and elsewhere “puts forward numerous ideas with certain degrees of conviction and then submits alternatives which in themselves contain comparable degrees of validity. What is left is the suggestion that the process of argument and rebuttal is itself a way of living life amid uncertainty” (50).

    Amongst the myriad of critical opinions on the play expressed since the turn of the present century, mention should be made of, amongst others, Michael Vanden Heuvel, who comments that “it has often been discussed as work of postmodernism, but the absurdist anxiety underlying the frenzied activities of the two courtiers would seem to distinguish the play from a viable embodiment of postmodern ideas and desires”. For Vanden Heuvel, “the play… stands as an early example of a writer attempting to come to terms with the loss of centers (in this case the authoritative text of Shakespeare’s play) while at the same time intuiting a post-absurdist response to such a lack, but a response nevertheless which cannot yet make the leap to affirming [Derrida’s] idea of the ‘non-center otherwise than as the loss of center’” (Kelly 223, citing Derrida, Writing and Difference, 292). In his contribution to Tom Stoppard in Context, William Baker observes that Stoppard’s “preoccupation with Hamlet, a play dominated by a lost father and the desire for revenge, is evident. However, the emphasis in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is not on revenge but on fate and chance, on the toss of a coin” and that nothing can be done to change the fate of the two central characters (8). In short, the general academic assessment of the play today is that it is a classic of the modern theatre, one that also throws considerable light on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the play that justifiably established its author Tom Stoppard as a major late-twentieth-century dramatist.

    As said previously, there have been deconstructionist readings, existentialist readings, and absurdist ones amongst a myriad of others. The play has been approached from an interdisciplinary perspective, as a lesson in moral responsibility, as an illustration of Metatheatre with an emphasis on the use in the text and play in the performance of direct address to the audience, especially in its use of soliloquies, and of theatrical asides. In addition, the play has been studied as a postmodern narrative and analyzed from the perspective of mathematical theory. ⑦

    I encountered the last perspective recently when Stephen Abbott’s The Proof Stage: How Theater Reveals the Human Truth of Mathematics appeared for review in the mail. According to Abbott, “In the history of mathematics, the reflexive arrangement of having some object (e.g., a set, a function, a logical sentence) contain or refer to itself has led to powerful new constructions and as many controversies.” Stoppard’s play reflects “an intriguing artistic translation of this phenomenon. While the play - [the] within-a-play device is a familiar theatrical trope, the more distinctive play-within-itself structure that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “inherits from Hamlet is what enables Stoppard’s play to toggle back-and-forth between a music hall slapstick and an exegesis on the human condition” (36-37). In short, much more can and will besaid concerning the significance of Stoppard’s use of mathematics and the sciences generally in his work.

03

Nie’s Views Amplified

Unless I am mistaken, the play hasn’t been discussed from the perspective of Nie’s ideas of ethical criticism as expressed in his various discourses on the subject. Let me apply some of the observations Nie makes in his “Towards an Ethical Literary Criticism” (2015) on the play on which Stoppard’s drama is based, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In this “there are at least two ethical lines…: Hamlet’s revenge being one, and Claudius’s covering up of the truth being the other. Along each of the two ethical lines, there are a set of ethical knots.” According to Nie, “Along the ethical line of Hamlet’s revenge, there are such ethical knots as the secret-revealing scene involving the ghost, the play within the play directed by Hamlet, the love affairbetween Hamlet and Ophelia, Laertes and Ophelia’s hatred of Hamlet for his accidental killing of their father.” The knots also encompass “Hamlet’s journey to England, and the fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes.” Some of these “knots” appear indirectly in Stoppard’s play but are not the central focus of attention. “Hamlet’s journey to England” does appear but is not the central focus: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s journey is. For Nie, “Hamlet’s mother marrying Claudius is the dominant ethical knot of the whole play, which affects Hamlet’s thoughts and actions throughout the text.” This surely does not apply to Stoppard’s re-enactment, in which the central focus is, to repeat, not on Hamlet who makes fleeting appearances but on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern whose thoughts, actions, and non-actions are central (93).

    In an interview with Charles Ross, “A Conceptual Map of Ethical Literary Criticism: An Interview with Nie Zhenzhao,” Nie is asked to clarify some of his central ideas and concepts: “Can you give us a literary example that illustrates [the] moment of transition from natural to ethical selection?” For Nie, the former “natural selection is the process of evolving from ape to man” (11). Furthermore, “Shakespeare’s Hamlet offers a good illustration. Why does Hamlet become too hesitant to revenge on his dead father? It is the self-confirmation of his ethical identity as the son of Claudius because of his marriage with Gertrude” (13). Now, unless I am missing something, Hamlet’s hesitation, although mentioned in Stoppard’s play, is not the play’s primary concern. Towards the conclusion of the first act, Rosencrantz says to Guildenstern:

    To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, and you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his younger brother popped onto his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. (42)

04

The Central Ethical Knot

In Stoppard’s play, both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern speculate on why Hamlet is behaving as he is: the focus is on them, not Hamlet, and there is considerable chronological switching. There is, if you will, a central ethical knot: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and their response or non-response to their situation. The implications of the stage directions with Stoppard directing the whole operation affecting them act as the controlling force.

    By applying issues raised by Nie to Stoppard’s play, we see that they illuminate it. To recap what the specific issues and concerns are. Firstly, as stated, the central focus is not on Hamlet who makes fleeting appearances but on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern whose thoughts, actions, and non-actions are the central focus. Secondly, Hamlet’s hesitancy is not a major focus of Stoppard’s play. Thirdly, the main ethical knots are to repeat Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and their situation and how their fate is determined by the stage directions.

    The play opens not with speech but with a lengthy stage direction with “Two Elizabethans passing the time in a place without any visible character.” We read about their dress, and the fact that they have “a large leather money bag” although Guildenstern’s bag “is nearly empty” and Rosencrantz’ “bag is nearly full.” The reason for this is given as “they are betting on the toss of a coin” and how they are betting is then described. The lack of surroundings helps to underpin the two central protagonists’ confinement and imprisonment to their function within Shakespeare’s play and adds to the props’ significance. The props in this instance are the flipped coin, the contemplation of which becomes a focal point for Guildenstern as his mind tries to come to terms with the void around him. Seen from this perspective, “the central tension of the play,” whether either of these two central figures, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, can avoid their fates, “revolves around their ability to step off the stage and escape the narrative” over which they have no control, except to try to free themselves from it. They “are prevented from doing so because they have nowhere else to go” (Dean 172).

05

Flipping a Coin

Rosencrantz has the first word in the play, “Heads” - a word repeated four times by him - until Guildenstern “flipping a coin” says, “there is an art to the building up of suspense.” Guildenstern is concerned with what is taking place much more so than Rosencrantz. The former is concerned about “the law of probability” with “the law of averages,” and “the law of diminishing returns” (2-3), issues that his creator Stoppard is to return to in a later play, such as The Hard Problem. Some other concerns which recur in subsequent plays are “self-interest,” and “fear” (5). Guildenstern seeks explanations for what is happening. Guildenstern describes himself as “the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for an unremembered past.” For him, “Time has stopped dead” (6) which leads to reflections on memory, happiness, and desires plus fear: all elements that reoccur in subsequent Stoppard plays.

    Here they appear, for instance, in Guildenstern’s lengthy monologue (7-8) and encompass “the scientific approach to the examination of phenomena” which, it is argued, “is a defence against the pure emotion of fear” - again, as stated, something that preoccupies Stoppard elsewhere, as does the “syllogism” - see, for instance, his early play Jumpers - “the law of probability” that Guildenstern explores more fully through his discourse on probabilities relating to the spinning of coins. This becomes transformed into something much more universal when he observes that “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.” This becomes a summary and a metaphor for their lives. Guildenstern adds: “Then a messenger arrived. We have been sent for. Nothing else happened. Ninety-two coins spun consecutively have come down heads ninety-two consecutive times… and for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute…”

    This seeming non sequitur is followed by a few short-clipped words from Rosencrantz who, while uttering them, is “cutting his fingernails” and responding - from the almost sublime to the ridiculous, a feature of the play: “Another curious scientific phenomenon is the fact that the fingernails grow after death, as does the beard” (8).

06

Conclusion: The Ethical Identities

Nie’s ideas, such as paying “particular attention to the ethical identities of characters, because when reading the text we find that most ethical issues are inextricably linked to the ethical identities of the character” (94), even to the significance of fingernails growing after death, illuminate Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Nie’s observations in his “Towards an Ethical Literary Criticism” have special pertinence for Stoppard’s play: “In some literary texts, the ethical knots take the form of ethical chaos or reconstruction of the ethical order.” There doesn’t seem to be any sign or indication of the latter in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, a drama which very much can be taken as an exposition of “ethical chaos” (94).

    Nie’s claim that “Ethical Literary Criticism reads, interprets, and analyzes literature from an ethical perspective,” and that “literature … is not just an art of language but rather an art of text” (83) certainly finds an echo in the Player’s quip to Guildenstern in the second act of Stoppard’s play. The Player tells him, “There’s a design at work in all art - surely you know that? Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral, and logical conclusion” (71).

    Remember that “Ethical Literary Criticism does not aim at making over-simplified judgment by determining whether it is good or bad. Instead, it attempts to unpack the ethical values of literature, and the truth about social life depicted in literature from an ethical perspective.” It should be reiterated, Nie adds, “that the ethical value of literature is historical, stable, and objective, regardless of the changes undertaken in today’s moral principles” (Nie 100).

    Although to my knowledge Nie has not written about Stoppard’s play, hopefully, this article will perhaps interest him, or others, to do so. Nie’s ideas have been applied to Greek tragedy, some of Shakespeare’s plays, contemporary modern largely British fiction, and theoretical discourse. Their significance and importance would be served well by further application to specific works, such as individual poems and drama, such as in the instance of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

责任编辑：张爱平

此文原载于《外国文学研究》2023年第4期

由于公众号篇幅所限，原文注解和引用文献省略

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