This blog is part of a Thinking Activity assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad, The task explores marginalization and modern identity through a creative reimagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The activity encourages critical engagement, creative expression, and reflective comparison between Elizabethan tragedy and postmodern absurdity, viewed through the lens of contemporary corporate culture.
Monologue: Guildenstern in the Corporate Kingdom
[Scene: A gray-walled corporate office. The clock ticks past midnight. Guildenstern, wearing a wrinkled blazer and holding a coffee cup, speaks to himself in a half-lit cubicle.]
GUILDENSTERN:You know, sometimes I wonder if the boss even remembers my name.We get copied on emails—never addressed.We sit in meetings—never spoken to.Our job title? “Analyst.” What does that even mean?Analyze what? The numbers? The silence? Or our own irrelevance?Every decision is “above our pay grade.”Every mistake somehow—ours.We’re told to align our objectives with the company’s vision.But the vision’s blurred, the mission’s invisible,and the only strategy is survival.Hamlet—the CEO’s golden boy—gets the spotlight.The rest of us? Collateral employees.Disposable names in a spreadsheet of corporate casualties.Sometimes I dream of resigning. But then—where would I go?Another firm, another PowerPoint prison.Another king, another court.Maybe the problem isn’t the system.Maybe it’s the story we’re trapped in.He pauses, looks at the clock.Another hour closer to my performance review.Another step toward being “dead.”Funny, isn’t it?We’ve been dead since our first day at work—only the payroll keeps pretending otherwise.(Lights fade. Guildenstern stares into the computer screen as the sound of typing echoes.)
Critical Analysis: Marginalization, Absurdity, and the Modern Worker
1. Marginalization in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
In Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are marginal characters—friends summoned by the king to spy on the Prince. Their purpose is utilitarian; they exist to serve authority and advance power structures. They are neither villains nor heroes but instruments. Shakespeare’s text allows them little interiority; their deaths are reported, not mourned:
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.” (Hamlet, Act V, Scene ii)
Their fate reflects the Elizabethan worldview of hierarchy—where individuals at the margins are dispensable in the service of monarchy and political order. They symbolize how power consumes loyalty without recognition.
2. Stoppard’s Postmodern Reinterpretation
Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) reclaims these shadows, making them the center of absurd inquiry. Yet, even as protagonists, they remain powerless. Stoppard transforms them into existential victims—trapped in a play where they have no script of their own, echoing the postmodern anxiety of meaninglessness.
The line “We’re actors in someone else’s play” captures their disempowerment. Stoppard exposes the illusion of agency—even when given the stage, they cannot control the narrative. Their dialogue circles around questions like “Who are we?” and “What are we doing here?”—reflecting modern alienation.
3. The Corporate Parallel
In the modern corporate world, employees like Guildenstern mirror this existential marginalization. Titles, roles, and hierarchies often obscure individuality. The corporate system functions like the royal court of Elsinore—decisions are centralized, communication is top-down, and employees are expected to conform to abstract “visions.”
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Hamlet = the privileged leader (creative visionary or executive figure).
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Rosencrantz & Guildenstern = mid-level workers executing orders without understanding the larger design.
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Claudius = corporate authority manipulating loyalty for profit.
Thus, the monologue modernizes Stoppard’s existential theatre into a posthuman corporate landscape, where human emotions are replaced by “performance metrics,” and identity dissolves into “work profiles.”
Postmodern Themes in the Monologue
A. Loss of Identity
Guildenstern’s voice reflects the dissolution of self—a recurring postmodern motif. Just as Stoppard’s characters cannot remember who is who, today’s workers are reduced to interchangeable “resources.” The question “Do they even remember my name?” is both literal and symbolic.
B. Bureaucratic Alienation
The phrase “align our objectives with the company’s vision” echoes corporate doublespeak. It mirrors language as control, a theme central to both Stoppard and Foucault’s ideas of discursive power. Words like “alignment,” “performance,” and “strategy” mask exploitation beneath professionalism.
C. Absurdity and Meaninglessness
The monologue’s repetition of “Another hour… another step” resonates with Camus’ absurdism—the endless cycle of meaningless work. It recalls Stoppard’s coin-tossing motif, where fate and chance replace purpose.
D. Determinism and Fatalism
Just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cannot escape their scripted death, corporate Guildenstern realizes his resignation or death is equally meaningless—a metaphor for existential entrapment. The play’s fatal ending finds new resonance in the 21st-century capitalist determinism—the idea that systems, not souls, dictate destiny.
Use of Evidence
Stoppard’s play explicitly connects to Shakespeare’s Hamlet through dialogue and structure. For example:
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In Hamlet, Claudius commands:
“I entreat you both / To draw him on to pleasures…” (II.ii.10–11)
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In Stoppard’s reinterpretation, Guildenstern questions the command:
“We’re taking orders from Hamlet now?”
This shift from obedience to confusion marks the evolution of marginalization—from political to philosophical, and in our modern version, corporate.
By reimagining Guildenstern as an office worker, the monologue literalizes the absurd repetition of meaningless labor that Marx and later theorists like Herbert Marcuse describe as alienation under capitalism.
Depth of Reflection
The monologue is more than creative pastiche—it’s a mirror for modern consciousness. Both in Hamlet and Stoppard’s play, the protagonists are crushed by systems they cannot influence. Translating that into the corporate world reveals how postmodern disempowerment has migrated from the stage to the workplace.
The cubicle replaces the stage, and emails replace dialogue—but the sense of being “spoken for” rather than “speaking” persists. This modern recontextualization demonstrates the timelessness of marginalization, proving that whether under monarchy, absurdism, or capitalism, the human voice still struggles for agency.
🧾 Conclusion: The Tragicomedy of Modern Work
Guildenstern’s monologue stands as a modern tragicomedy of labor—a reflection on invisibility, powerlessness, and the search for selfhood in systems built for efficiency, not empathy.
From Elsinore’s corridors to today’s office cubicles, the marginalized voice remains the same: unheard, replaceable, and painfully self-aware. Stoppard reimagined Shakespeare’s tragedy as a comedy of consciousness; this modern version extends it into the digital age, where spreadsheets and surveillance have become the new theatre of absurdity.
Ultimately, the blog reveals that marginalization is not merely historical or literary—it is institutional, structural, and existential. The modern Guildenstern reminds us that even as technology and corporations evolve, the human struggle for recognition, meaning, and agency remains hauntingly unchanged.
References :
Barad, Dilip. (2024). Thinking Activity: Exploring Marginalization in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. 10.13140/RG.2.2.25871.80807.
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