Stoppard’s work brims with playful stylistic techniques. Riffing off a formidable literary classic, it holds its Shakespearean counterpart in teasing conversation and presents a vibrant assortment of styles. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead interpolates excerpts from Hamlet, referring verbatim to scenes from the play. But it also gives free rein to a colloquial vocabulary that cuts sharp contrast against Shakespeare’s high, formal style.

Shakespeare’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern plot against Hamlet; Stoppard’s pair wages bets with rowdy Tragedians and bumbles around the stage. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern toggle between the high and lowbrow, the lofty and everyday, creating two selves—the Shakespearean and the Stoppardian—in the process. This duality contributes to the sense of performance that permeates the work. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern act not only for the reader, but before Shakespeare’s version of King Claudius and Gertrude. Stoppard stages a play within the work itself.

Through this stylistic pastiche, Stoppard probes the limits of expression. Guildenstern tells Rosencrantz that words are “all that we have to go on”—a remark that applies equally well to those within the play at large. The play parades its absurdity partly through language that nearly devolves into nonsense, like this moment in Act I:

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 the un- , sub- or supernatural forces.

But words also fashion moments of fleeting, transcendent clarity. They grasp at the essence of life, as when Rosencrantz—barely able to remember his own name at points—breaks out into an aching reflection:

There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on for ever. It must have been shattering—stamped into one’s memory. And yet I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. What does one make of that? We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it, before we know that there are words, out we come bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.

As with its literary styles, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern explores narrative structure. The time “is out of joint”—literally so, within this play. Stoppard makes notable revisions to Hamlet itself. In his telling, Hamlet rejects Ophelia during the dumbshow rather than before. The work also recasts the events in maddeningly disorienting fashion, switching from one scene to the next with little narrative structure. Where Shakespeare bound his play in neat coincidences, Stoppard designs his play in their absence. Guildenstern and Rosencrantz get whisked to Elsinore Castle, ship decks, and into Hamlet scenes barely realizing it. The play’s haphazard narrative structure creates a disorienting experience that draws attention to life’s own loose ends.