{"id":184,"date":"2025-12-22T06:25:53","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T11:25:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/?p=184"},"modified":"2025-12-22T06:31:39","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T11:31:39","slug":"%c2%a7-0-14-umbral-y-ficcion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/2025\/12\/22\/%c2%a7-0-14-umbral-y-ficcion\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00a7 0.14. Threshold and Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph translation-block\"><em>Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead<\/em> (1966), an absurdist and existentialist tragicomedy by English playwright Tom Stoppard, focuses on two characters from <em>Hamlet<\/em> who have very few lines in Shakespeare\u2019s 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 <em>are already<\/em> 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Guil: (angrily) The what do you expect? (Unhappily) We act on scraps of information\u2026 \nsifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct. (Act III)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph translation-block\">These \u201cmain\u201d characters are, quiet literally, in the twilight that adjoins <em>Hamlet's<\/em> main action. If we take Shakespeare\u2019s play as one of the most lucid representations of sovereignty, <em>Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead<\/em>, 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, <em>a threshold between personal reality and oficial history, between the life of the individual and the fictions created by power.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph translation-block\">The mental state of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is identical to their \u201cdramatic\u201d 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 <em>dramatis personae<\/em> that, annoyed and resigned, they exclaim:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ros: (an anguished cry) Consistency is all I ask!\nGuil: (low, wry rhetoric) Give us this day our daily mask. (Act I)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph translation-block\">Without noticing it, by a convention they cannot avoid, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are forced to assume themselves as masks, as persons (<a href=\"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/2025\/12\/22\/\u00a7-0-13-persona-mascara\/\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"180\" target=\"_self\">0.13<\/a>) who must pronounce their lines and play their roles in the scenario of sovereignty without being fully included in it.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rosencrantz y Guildenstern han muerto (1966), tragicomedia absurdista y existencialista del dramaturgo ingl\u00e9s Tom Stoppard, se centra en dos personajes de Hamlet que tienen muy pocas l\u00edneas en la obra de Shakespeare. Amigos de escuela del pr\u00edncipe de Dinamarca, Rosencrantz y Guildenstern pasan el rato jugando preguntas para matar el tiempo mientras los llaman a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":274836558,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[432627],"tags":[552349,786108934,190564,54626,786108933,62792858,218465632],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-preambulo","tag-dramatis-personae","tag-masks","tag-mascaras","tag-personas","tag-rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead","tag-rosencrantz-y-guildenstern-han-muerto","tag-top-stoppard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgYHfz-2Y","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/274836558"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267,"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions\/267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/locusterribilis.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}