Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), an absurdist and existentialist tragicomedy by English playwright Tom Stoppard, focuses on two characters from Hamlet who have very few lines in Shakespeare’s play. School friends of the Prince of Denmark, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spend their time playing Questions to kill time while they are called up to the stage, (although they are already on stage). Always on the sidelines, in a dark and practically empty stage, both characters are constantly dumbfounded and confused with everything happening around them: they are never told what their role or goal is and they do not recall anything before the beginning of the play:

Guil: (angrily) The what do you expect? (Unhappily) We act on scraps of information… sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct. (Act III)

These “main” characters are, quiet literally, in the twilight that adjoins Hamlet's main action. If we take Shakespeare’s play as one of the most lucid representations of sovereignty, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, would correspond to the terrible place in which we live in most of the time: far from the main action, without having a very clear understanding of the situation or its consequences. In short, a threshold between personal reality and oficial history, between the life of the individual and the fictions created by power.

The mental state of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is identical to their “dramatic” situation: on many occasions they are about to discover their status of characters in a play, which evades them no matter how close they come to this conclusion. They are so close to realizing that they are dramatis personae that, annoyed and resigned, they exclaim:

Ros: (an anguished cry) Consistency is all I ask! Guil: (low, wry rhetoric) Give us this day our daily mask. (Act I)

Without noticing it, by a convention they cannot avoid, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are forced to assume themselves as masks, as persons (0.13) who must pronounce their lines and play their roles in the scenario of sovereignty without being fully included in it.