Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Arcadia

ROS inadvertently shows that both are empty. ROS laughs as GUIL turns upstage. ROS stops laughing, looks around his feet, pats his clothes, puzzled. POLONIUS breaks that up by entering upstage followed by the TRAGEDIANS and HAMLET .

POLONIUS ( entering): Come sirs.

HAMLET: Follow him, friends. We'll hear a play tomorrow. ( Aside to the PLAYER , who is the last of the TRAGEDIANS) Dost thou hear me, old friend? Can you play The Murder of Gonzago?

PLAYER: Ay, my lord.

HAMLET: We'll ha't tomorrow night. You could for a need study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down and insert in't, could you not?

PLAYER: Ay, my lord.

HAMLET: Very well. Follow that lord, and look you mock him not.

The PLAYER crossing downstage, notes ROS and GUIL . Stops. HAMLET crossing downstage addresses them without pause.

HAMLET: My good friends, I'll leave you till tonight. You are welcome to Elsinore.

ROS: Good, my lord.

HAMLET goes.

GUIL: So you've caught up.

PLAYER ( coldly): Not yet, sir.

GUIL: Now mind your tongue, or we'll have it out and throw the rest of you away, like a nightingale at a Roman feast.

ROS: Took the very words out of my mouth.

GUIL: You'd be lost for words.

ROS: You'd be tongue-tied.

GUIL: Like a mute in a monologue.

ROS: Like a nightingale at a Roman feast.

GUIL: Your diction will go to pieces.

ROS: Your lines will be cut.

GUIL: To dumbshows.

ROS: And dramatic pauses.

GUIL: You'll never find your tongue.

ROS: Lick your lips.

GUIL: Taste your tears.

ROS: Your breakfast.

GUIL: You won't know the difference.

ROS: There won't be any.

GUIL: We'll take the very words out of your mouth.

ROS: So you've caught on.

GUIL: So you've caught up.

PLAYER ( tops): Not yet! ( Bitterly. ) You left us.

GUIL: Ah! I'd forgotten---you performed a dramatic spectacle on the way. Yes, I'm sorry we had to miss it.

PLAYER ( bursts out): We can't look each other in the face! ( Pau more in control. ) You don't understand the humiliation of --to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes of it existence viable---that somebody is watching... The plot was two corpses gone before we caught sight of ourselves, stripped naked in the middle of nowhere and pouring ourselves down a bottomless well.

ROS: Is that thirty-eight?

PLAYER ( lost): There we were---demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance --- and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. ( He rounds on them. ) Don't you see?! We're actors--- we're the opposite of people! ( They recoil nonplussed, his voice calms. ) Think, in your head, now, think of the most... private... secret... intimate thing you have ever done secure in the knowledge of its privacy... ( He gives them---and the audience---a good pause. ROS takes on a shifty look. ) Are you thinking of it? ( He strikes with his voice and his head. ) Well, I saw you do it!

ROS leaps up, dissembling madly.

ROS: You never! It's a lie! ( He catches himself with a giggle in a vacuum and sits down again. )

PLAYER: We're actors... We pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade, that someone would be watching. And then, gradually, no one was. We were caught, high and dry. It was not until the murderer's long soliloquy that we were able to look around; frozen as we were in profile, our eyes searched you out, first confidently, then hesitantly, then desperately as each patch of turf, each log, every exposed corner in every direction proved uninhabited, and all the while the murderous King addressed the horizon with his dreary interminable guilt... Our heads began to move, wary as lizards, the corpse of unsullied Rosalinda peeped through his fingers, and the King faltered.

Even then, habit and a stubborn trust that our audience spied upon us from behind the nearest bush, forced our bodies to blunder on long after they had emptied of meaning, until like runaway carts they dragged to a halt. No one came forward. No one shouted at us. The silence was unbreakable, it imposed itself upon us; it was obscene. We took off our crowns and swords and cloth of gold and moved silent on the road to Elsinore.

Silence. Then GUIL claps solo with slow measured irony.

GUIL: Brilliantly re-created---if these eyes could weep!... Rather strong on metaphor, mind you. No criticism---only a matter of taste. And so here you are---with a vengeance.

That's a figure of speech... isn't it? Well let's say we've made up for it, for you may have no doubt whom to thank for your performance at the court

ROS: We are counting on you to take him out of himself. You are the pleasures which we draw him on to---( he escapes a fractional giggle but recovers immediately) and by that I don't mean your usual filth; you can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires. They know nothing of that and you know nothing of them, to your mutual survival. So give him a good clean show suitable for all the family, or you can rest assured you'll be playing the tavern tonight.

GUIL: Or the night after.

ROS: Or not.

PLAYER: We already have an entry here. And always have had

GUIL: You've played for him before?

PLAYER: Yes, sir.

ROS: And what's his bent?

PLAYER: Classical.

ROS: Saucy!

GUIL: What will you play?

PLAYER: The Murder of Gonzago.

GUIL: Full of fine cadence and corpses.

PLAYER: Pirated from the Italian...

ROS: What is it about?

PLAYER: It's about a King and Queen. .