Tom Stoppard's entire play, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, is intended to provide a "stupid spectacle" for its audience. A dumbshow, as defined by the Player, is a “device” which “makes the action that follows more or less comprehensible” (77). In this case, the action to follow is the rest of the audience's lives. The play challenges the audience's very perception and understanding of existence and reality itself. If Stoppard were to get what he wanted, a person entering a theater containing any amount of arrogance would have to crawl out; limbs broken by the violent accident and the return to earth, laughing madly all the way. The play is a brutally honest reflection of our own lives and the world we appear in – stunned and gullible, and bombarded with “truths” (best guesses, opinions, and whatever scientific data has accumulated so far) on which form our basic understanding. We are reminded that everyone, to varying degrees, must face an environment that is impossible to truly understand. Babies may be fed without any knowledge of farms, while elderly people may wander the corridors of nursing homes, gradually forgetting the family who left them there. Every path and every decision we laboriously choose, our environment and everything in it, our entire existence itself, is due to circumstances far beyond our control or understanding, forged from elements the origins of which we have no power to reveal. Perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that no matter how hard we try, we will eventually die. Like the clumsy tools of royalty Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, all our questions, thoughts and laments will disappear with our bodies as we reach our fatal ends. In order to achieve the creation of such power...... middle of paper ......fortunately, it is too late for him. Even though we feel like he's about to end up at the beginning of the story, we also have to assume that he won't retain any of this knowledge and is doomed to repeat everything. This serves as a warning to the public, who still have time to realize their flaws and adapt. They can open their eyes to see things more clearly and work to observe what really matters, to improve the results needed for even better observation, understanding and communication. The work itself is a giant step in this direction, and it would probably be impossible to convey the author's complete picture so effectively by other means. Even the reading of the play lacks an important dimension that only the stage can offer, because we are all "linked to a language which composes in obscurity what it lacks in style ».” (77).