We pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade that someone would be watching. ROS takes 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. (He gives them - and the audience - a good pause. thing you have ever done secure in the knowledge of its privacy. (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. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. ROSENCRANTZ: Is that thirty eight? PLAYER (lost): There we are - 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. 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. (The PLAYER, progressively aggrieved, now bursts out.) PLAYER: We can't look each other in the face! (Pause, more in control.) You don't understand the humiliation of it - to be tricked out of a single assumption, which makes our existence viable - that somebody is watching.

I hope you didn't leave anything out - I'd be furious to think I didn't miss all of it. How did yours compare as an impromptu? PLAYER: Badly - neither witnessed nor reported. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966) Act Two GUILDENSTERN: Ah! I'd forgotten - you performed a dramatic spectacle by the wayside - a thing much thought of in the New Testament.

Write a commentary of the following passage, paying particular attention to its main themes and to dramatic form.

Tom stoppard 1966 play