Two minor characters from Hamlet wait in the wings, play word games, wonder why they were summoned, and move inexorably toward the deaths announced in the title. Stoppard's play made him famous at twenty-nine. It is at once a comedy, a meditation on fate and free will, and an existentialist drama that owes much to Beckett. The jokes are brilliant; the philosophy is real. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cannot escape the script they do not know they are in. Neither can we. The play stages what it means to be a minor character in someone else's story.