Rosencrantz Quotes & Sayings

Watching Hamlet embarrassing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by showing them he knows they're liars and spies, Max was thinking, Hamlet cares only about the truth, or only he cares about the truth, and it's so hard to find, too hard for anyone to find. Where is it? — Lucy Beckett

Do you take me for a sponge, my lord? hamlet: Ay, sir; that soaks up the king's countenance, his rewards, his authorities. But such officers do the king best service in the end: he keeps them, like an ape, in the corner of his jaw; first mouthed, to be last swallowed: when he needs what you have gleaned, it is but squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry again. rosencrantz: I understand you not, my lord. hamlet: I am glad of it: a knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear. — William Shakespeare

Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something
constructive?
Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid ... ? — Tom Stoppard

More than any other contemporary British playwright, Tom Stoppard populates his plays
from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to The Invention of Love (his portrait of the poet and scholar A. E. Housman)
with characters from life and literature. But one cannot always tell the difference between those who are real and those who are imaginary. — Mel Gussow

When Rosencrantz asks Hamlet, "Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your grief to your friends"(III, ii, 844-846), Hamlet responds, "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me." (III,ii, 371-380) — William Shakespeare

Guildenstern: What's the first thing you remember?
Rosencrantz: [thinks] No, it's no good. It was a long time ago.
Guildenstern: No, you don't take my meaning. What's the first thing you remember after all the things you've forgotten?
Rosencrantz: Oh, I see... I've forgotten the question. — Tom Stoppard

What Hamlet suffers from is a lack of zombies. Let us say Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show up - Ho-HO! Now you've got something that stirs the, um, something that stirs things that are stirrable. BOOM! A pack of ravenous flesh-eaters breaks open their heads and sucks out their eyeballs. No need for iambic pentameter because they are grunting, groaning annihilators of humanity with no time for meter. You're not asleep in the back of English class anymore, are you? This is what I'm talking about. Zombies. Learn it, live it, love it. — Libba Bray

Tom Stoppard was refreshingly candid when, after the successful premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he was asked what the play was about: It's about to make me a lot of money. — Clive James

Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: England.
Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then? — Tom Stoppard

Hamlet is to Macbeth somewhat as the Ghost is to the Witches. Revenge, or ambition, in its inception may have a lofty, even a majestic countenance, but when it has "coupled hell" and become crime, it grows increasingly foul and sordid. We love and admire Hamlet so much at the beginning that we tend to forget that he is as hot-blooded as the earlier Macbeth when he kills Polonius and the King, cold-blooded as the later Macbeth or Iago when he sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to death. — Harold Clarke Goddard

Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion. — Oscar Wilde

Tom Stoppard's other work includes: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, After Magritte, The Real Thing, Enter A Free Man, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink (a stage adaptation of his own play, In the Native State) and The Invention of Love. Arcadia — Tom Stoppard

ROSENCRANTZ My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king.
HAMLET The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing -
GUILDENSTERN A thing my lord?
HAMLET Of nothing. Bring me to him. Hide fox, and all after! — William Shakespeare

Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no ... Death is ... not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.
Guildenstern: No, no, no
what you've been is not on boats. — Tom Stoppard

People are arguing whether Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ" is anti-semitic. Well, whether it is or it isn't, it doesn't matter, because I've been in touch with his accounting firm, Rosencrantz, Levy and Stern, and they're screwing him out of his profits. — Joan Rivers

ROS (mournfully): Not even England. I don't believe in it anyway.
GUIL: What?
ROS: England.
GUIL: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, you mean. — Tom Stoppard