Thinking Activity: Exploring Marginalization in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

This Blog is a Part of Cultural Studies on Exploring Marginalization in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead assigned by Prof. and Dr. Dilip Barad Sir, In this blog I examine the marginalization of minor characters in Hamlet and explore how this reflects broader themes of power and systemic exclusion, drawing parallels with hierarchical structures in contemporary corporate culture.

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Exploring Marginalization and Power: A Cultural Studies Perspective on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Introduction

Shakespeare’s Hamlet dramatizes not only royal ambition and revenge but also the silent suffering of those who exist at the margins of power. Characters such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, often overlooked, reveal the hidden mechanisms of hierarchy that operate within the play’s political structure. Their obedience, disposability, and eventual death serve as profound commentaries on systemic marginalization. Centuries later, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead reimagines these figures, shifting the focus from tragedy to existential absurdity. This reinterpretation exposes the deeper cultural and institutional forces that continue to shape human identity and power relations forces that are equally visible in modern corporate hierarchies. Through the lens of Cultural Studies, this blog explores how both Shakespeare and Stoppard critique systems of control and exclusion that persist from Renaissance courts to twenty-first-century boardrooms.

1. Marginalization in Hamlet

In Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern occupy a peripheral yet significant position within the play’s intricate hierarchy. They are summoned by Claudius and Gertrude not as friends but as instruments of surveillance a reminder that, in power structures, loyalty often replaces individuality. Hamlet’s description of Rosencrantz as a “sponge that soaks up the king’s countenance, his rewards, his authorities” vividly captures their condition: they absorb favor from those above only to be squeezed dry when no longer useful.

Louis Althusser’s theory of “Ideological State Apparatuses” explains how subjects are unconsciously shaped to sustain dominant power. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern represent this ideological subjection they serve the monarchy without questioning its authority, demonstrating how hierarchy reproduces obedience through internalized consent. Their marginalization, therefore, is not personal failure but structural necessity. Shakespeare exposes how the “little people” within systems of dominance exist merely to maintain the stability of those in control.

2. Modern Parallels to Corporate Power

The expendability of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern finds a striking echo in modern corporate culture. Today’s employees clerks, assistants, and lower-tier managers often face similar treatment, valued for function rather than individuality. In the era of globalization and automation, workers can be dismissed or replaced when profit margins demand it, much like Hamlet’s casual disposal of his childhood companions.

Raymond Williams, in “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory”, argues that culture reflects and reinforces material relations of power. The corporate system mirrors Shakespeare’s royal court: a hierarchical structure where decision-making is centralized, and those at the bottom remain voiceless. When multinational companies relocate or downsize, employees experience a modern version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s fate displacement without acknowledgment. Both contexts reveal how power treats individuals as assets, not as autonomous beings, underscoring the continuity between feudal subservience and capitalist exploitation.

3. Existential Questions in Stoppard’s Reinterpretation

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) elevates Shakespeare’s minor characters into central figures of existential uncertainty. Removed from the main plot of Hamlet, they inhabit a liminal space where meaning is elusive, and agency is absent. Their endless questioning “Who are we?” “What’s going on?” reflects the existential disorientation of modern individuals trapped within opaque systems of power.

Michel Foucault’s concept of “power/knowledge” is key to understanding this dynamic. The two courtiers lack access to the knowledge that defines their existence; they live inside a narrative written by others. Their ignorance is not mere folly it is structural, imposed by an order that withholds information to maintain control. Stoppard transforms their marginalization into a philosophical metaphor for the contemporary worker or citizen aware of existence yet powerless to influence its direction. Their eventual, unnoticed deaths dramatize what Jean-Paul Sartre described as “nausea”: the recognition of human insignificance within vast, indifferent systems.

4. Cultural and Economic Power Structures

Both Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead critique systems that marginalize “little people,” revealing how power operates across cultural and economic domains. Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony helps explain this continuity: dominant classes maintain authority not merely through coercion but by shaping ideology, convincing subordinates that their place in the hierarchy is natural. In Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern internalize obedience, believing service to the crown defines their worth. In modern capitalism, workers internalize productivity ethics and corporate loyalty as moral virtues, even when those ideals perpetuate exploitation.

Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) also illuminates this process. In the Renaissance, individuals constructed their identities through alignment with authority; in Stoppard’s modern world, self-fashioning collapses altogether, leaving the characters adrift in meaninglessness. Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993) extends this idea to the cultural domain, showing how literature reflects imperial and institutional power. Both Shakespeare and Stoppard thus reveal how art can expose systemic inequalities that shape society, from monarchy to multinational corporations.

5. Personal Reflection

The marginalization of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern continues to resonate in the modern experience of being seen as a dispensable “asset.” Their roles remind us that systems of power whether political, economic, or cultural depend on invisibility and compliance at the lower levels. In the workplace, this invisibility manifests in job insecurity, burnout, and alienation, as individuals strive to prove worth in structures designed to overlook them.

Through Cultural Studies, we learn to question these hierarchies rather than accept them as natural. Both Shakespeare and Stoppard challenge us to see the human cost of systemic power: how the machinery of success is built on silent sacrifice. Reflecting on their fate encourages us to reclaim agency to recognize that awareness of marginalization is the first step toward resistance. As students and thinkers, our task is not only to analyze such patterns but to envision systems where human dignity replaces expendability.

Conclusion

Through the lens of Cultural Studies, Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead reveal the enduring structures of marginalization that bind human experience. From the courts of Elsinore to the cubicles of corporate offices, power continues to operate through ideology, knowledge, and economic necessity. Shakespeare’s tragedy and Stoppard’s absurdist reinterpretation remind us that while systems evolve, the logic of exclusion persists. By exposing these dynamics, literature becomes a form of resistance an act of reclaiming meaning for those silenced by authority.

References

• Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, 1971.
• Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon, Pantheon, 1980.
• Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers, 1971.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1993.
• Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Project Gutenberg, 1999.
• Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Grove Press, 1967.
• Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. Routledge, 2018.
• Williams, Raymond. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 82, 1973, pp. 3–16.