This document provides an analysis of two characters in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It discusses their marginalization and how they are used by other powerful characters. It also summarizes Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which explores the characters' existential crisis and how they are merely pawns without control over their own lives. The document then discusses the concepts of marginalization, class, and caste and how discrimination can isolate and exclude subordinate groups.

1. ➢ Name : Rita Dabhi
➢ Sem :2
➢ Roll no. : 20
➢ Enrollment no. : 2069108420200007
➢ Paper : Cultural study
➢ Topic : Two Characters in Hamlet:
Marginalization with a Vengeance
➢ Submitted : Department of English
MKB University
➢ Batch : 2019-2021
➢ Email : dabhirita1198@gmail.com

2. “Cultural studies is composed of
elements of Marxism, poststructuralism
and postmodernism, feminism, gender
studies, anthropology, sociology, race
and ethnic studies, film theory, urban
studies, public policy, popular
culture,and postcolonial studies: those
fields that concentrate social and cultural
forces that create community or cause
division and alienation.”
What is
cultural
study
❏Cultural studies :-

3. ❏Cultural study of Hamlet :-
➢ Power relationship
➢ Two character in Hamlet:
marginalization with a
vengeance.
➢ “Play within the play”
➢ Jellyfish of the Shakespeare's
character.

4. ❏Speech of Rosencrantz :-
“The singular and peculiar lines is bound
With all the strength and armor of the mind
To keep itself from anyonece but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it. It is a massy wheel
Fixed on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoined; which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the King sigh but with a dental groan.”
(III.iii)

5. ❏Murray J. Levith :-
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are from the
Duch-German: literally, ‘garland of rose’ and
‘golden star’. Although of religious origin, both
names together sound singsong and odd to
English ears. Their jingling gives them a
lightness, and blurs the individuality of the
characters they label”.

6. ❏Harley Granville Barker :-
“Cursed by actors as the two worst bores in the
whole Shakespearean canon; not expecting
even those other twin brethren in nonentity
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern”.

7. ❏ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
➢ Written by Tom Stoppard
➢ Is an absurdist, existential
tragicomedy
➢ First stage at the Edinburgh
Festival fringe in 1966.
➢ The title of the play is directly
taken from the final scene of the
Shakespeare's Hamlet.

8. ❏Conti….
➢ In the twentieth century the dead, or never living, Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern were resuscitated by Tom Stoppard in a
fascinating re-seeing of their existence, or its lack.
➢ In Stopard’s version, they are even more obviously two
ineffectual pawns, seeking constantly to know who they are,
why they are here, where they are going. Whether they “are”
at all may be the ultimate question of this modern play.
➢ If Shakespeare marginalized the powerless in his own version of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Stoppard has marginalized us
all in an era when- in the eyes of some all of us are caught up in
forces beyond our control.

9. ❏Conti….
➢ If the philosophical view of Stoppard goes too far for
some, consider a much more phenomenon of the letter
twentieth century and time to come we expect.
➢ Whether in Shakespeare's version or Stoppard's,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are no more than what
Rosencrantz called a “small annexment”, a “petty
consequence” , mere nothing for the “massy wheel” of
Kings.

10. ❏Marginalization : Cast and Class
➢ The marginalization is the theory of class and caste
differentiation.
➢ Indian situation comes with to social difference: caste and
class.
➢ Class become more powerful factor in the social canvas.
➢ Class and cast both have occupied wide range of issue the
dealt with signal of status, level of equality and inequality.
➢ Class are the units in the system of relationship which is the
product of power and income.

11. ❏Conti…….
➢ Marginalization revolves around agency that
discriminates, isolates, shame and excludes subordinate
groups on the basis of caste, religion and gender.
➢ The marginalization of caste occurs because of some
fundamental features of caste system.

12. ➢ Guerine, Wilfred L. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to
Literature. Oxford University Press, 2005.
❏ Work cited