Cultural Studies · Thinking Activity
Squeezed DryMarginalization, Power and the "Little People" in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
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This post works through the five questions of the Thinking Activity in turn, reading Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead through the lens of Cultural Studies Althusser on ideology, Foucault on power and knowledge, Gramsci on hegemony, Greenblatt on self-fashioning, Said on contrapuntal reading, Williams on base and superstructure and asks what these two forgettable courtiers have to tell us about the economy we are about to enter.
1Marginalization in Hamlet
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive in Elsinore already owned. Claudius's summons is candid to the point of rudeness: the need we have to use you did provoke our hasty sending. They are introduced not by who they are but by what they are for. Gertrude completes the transaction by promising that their visitation will receive such thanks as fits a king's remembrance payment deferred, unspecified, held entirely at the sovereign's pleasure. And the two accept instantly, in chorus: we both obey, and here give up ourselves, in the full bent. Althusser's theory of interpellation is rarely dramatised so cleanly. The state hails them; they turn around; in turning around they become subjects. Nobody threatens them. Being recognised by power feels like being valued, and that feeling is the mechanism.
Shakespeare marginalises them formally as well as politically. They have no soliloquy, no family, no history, no separable psychology. Claudius thanks "Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern"; Gertrude immediately corrects him to "Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz." The correction is a joke with a blade in it, because the audience cannot verify which order is right. Royalty cannot tell them apart, and neither can we, and the play does not consider this a problem. Their names function as a single compound noun. Being interchangeable is not a personality trait here it is a structural position.
Their assigned work is surveillance. They are sent to glean what afflicts Hamlet, to extract information from a friend and carry it upward. This makes them perfect illustrations of Foucault's argument that power is not merely repressive but productive: it needs knowledge, and it builds fine capillaries to collect it. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are those capillaries. They are simultaneously agents of the surveillance apparatus and, because they can be observed from above while observing sideways, its most exposed component.
Fig. 1 — The logic Hamlet compresses into a single metaphor in Act 4, Scene 2.
Which brings us to the sponge. Cornered in Act 4, Scene 2, Hamlet tells Rosencrantz that he soaks up the king's countenance, his rewards, his authorities and then delivers the sentence the whole play has been arranging:
When he needs what you have gleaned, it is but squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry again.Hamlet, 4.2
The insult is economic before it is personal. A sponge has no content of its own; it holds what it is dipped in. Value passes through Rosencrantz but never belongs to him. He is storage, not agency a container the king fills and empties at will. Hamlet extends the image with something worse: such officers are kept like an ape keeps food in the corner of its jaw, first mouthed, to be last swallowed. That is disposability with a delay built in. The retrenchment has already been decided; only the date is pending.
The play then confirms the metaphor with its own structure. Their deaths happen offstage, engineered by a letter they carried without reading, and are announced in one flat line by an ambassador nobody sent for. No character grieves. Hamlet's verdict they are not near my conscience; their defeat does by their own insinuation grow is the first draft of every explanation the powerful have ever offered for the people they use up. Greenblatt argues that Renaissance self-fashioning requires social power to fashion with. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have none, so there is no self to fashion; there is only a function, and functions get outsourced.
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| Hamlet confronting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. |
2Modern Parallels to Corporate Power
Strip the verse away and the plot is a human-resources case study. Two people are recruited at short notice for a poorly defined project. They are briefed on objectives but never on strategy. They are asked to gather information about a colleague and report it upward. They are promised recognition rather than a contract. They are handed a sealed document to deliver, and the document destroys them. At no point do they have access to the information that determines their fate and at every point they believe they are doing well.
That last detail is the sharpest part of the parallel. The modern equivalents are not hypothetical. Workers have been required to train their offshore or automated replacements as a condition of receiving severance a practice documented in well-publicised cases at Disney and Southern California Edison in 2015. Managers routinely deliver a restructuring script and then find themselves on the following quarter's list. Engineers build the automation that eliminates their function. Each of them, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, carries the letter.
Fig. 2 — After two quieter years, cuts surged again in 2026. By early May the year's worldwide total had passed 100,000; roughly half of the reported cuts were attributed to AI or automation. Sources: Layoffs.fyi via Statista and TechRadar, 2026.
The scale is not literary. Tech layoffs crossed one lakh worldwide within the first five months of 2026, with single announcements running to 16,000 at Amazon, around 9,000 at Microsoft and up to 30,000 planned at Oracle. Several companies stated openly that the cuts were funding a shift toward AI and data-centre investment. The reason given is not cruelty; it is reallocation. Nobody at Elsinore hates Rosencrantz either. He is simply no longer where the value is.
The form of the ending matters as much as the numbers. Shakespeare kills these two offstage and reports it in a line. The contemporary version is the pre-dawn email, the badge that stops working, the Slack account deactivated before the meeting invitation arrives. No scene, no farewell, no acknowledgement that a relationship existed. And the language does the same work Hamlet's metaphor did, only politely: rightsizing, headcount, redundancy, roles impacted, difficult decision. Abstraction is not a failure of communication. It is a technique of power, and "sponge" is simply an unusually honest version of it.
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| From Elsinore to the open-plan office: the changing face of expendable labor. |
Globalization sharpens the analogy. When a multinational relocates, the decision is taken in a jurisdiction the worker will never visit, in a vocabulary of shareholder value they do not speak, on the basis of figures they cannot see. The England to which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sail is a country they know nothing about, reached by a route they did not choose, on the authority of a document they are not permitted to open. Distance is not incidental to the harm; distance is what makes the harm administratively comfortable.
One honest complication, though. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not innocent labour. They are courtiers middle management who agree to run surveillance on a friend before they become objects of it. The parallel is therefore not only to the worker at the bottom but to the enforcement tier: the HR partner who writes the performance-improvement plan, the team lead who ranks their own colleagues, the manager who reads out the script. Marginalization is not only a matter of being at the bottom. It is often a matter of being in between close enough to power to be useful, never close enough to be safe.
3Existential Questions in Stoppard's Re-interpretation
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| Gary Oldman and Tim Roth Play Off Each Other Brilliantly in 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead' |
Stoppard opens with a man tossing a coin. It comes down heads. It comes down heads again, and again, ninety-odd times, while his companion loses the bet each time without visible distress. Probability has been switched off. The reason is structural and quietly devastating: these two are inside a text that was finished in 1601. Their future is not uncertain, it is published. What looks like chance is determinism wearing a disguise which is exactly the experience of being told that the market is unpredictable by people who already have the restructuring deck built.
The play then stages the negative space of Hamlet: the hours between the scenes in which Shakespeare needed them. The content of their lives turns out to be waiting inside somebody else's plot. They cannot remember who summoned them or why. They lose track of which of them is which. They speak in questions, and Stoppard formalises this into a game in which a statement loses you the point a grammar for people who have not been granted the right to assert. When the Player tells them that actors are the opposite of people, he is not being witty. He is describing their condition and his own, and he is the only one who has made peace with it.
Why does Stoppard insist on their search for meaning rather than simply their deaths? Because by 1966 marginalization had stopped being only an economic condition and had become an ontological one. Stoppard writes after Beckett, after Camus, after a war that industrialised the disposal of people. Shakespeare's characters die inside a providential frame there's a divinity that shapes our ends so even an unjust death has a shape. Stoppard removes the divinity and leaves the administration: a boat, a letter, a script, a schedule. His characters are not denied life. They are denied a why, and then made to feel it is their own fault for not finding one.
The boat is his finest corporate image. Aboard it the two feel unusually free, precisely because they are being carried. They can walk about, change direction, rattle around the deck and none of that alters where the ship is going. That is the autonomy on offer in most contemporary workplaces: choose your tools, negotiate your hours, set your own quarterly goals, and have no vote whatever on the destination. Movement within a container is easily mistaken for agency, and the mistake is not accidental.
This is why the play reads as an unnervingly accurate account of modern work. Organisations now supply the language of meaning in bulk mission statements, values, purpose, impact, "we're a family" while keeping the power to define meaning several floors up. David Graeber's research on jobs that their own holders cannot justify describes the same disorder: the search for significance has been outsourced downward, while significance itself is fixed upward. Burnout, on this reading, is not exhaustion from overwork. It is the strain of being required to care deeply about something you cannot influence.
And Stoppard refuses them even a death scene. They do not die; they stop, mid-sentence, mid-thought. Guildenstern realises there must have been a moment, early on, when they could have said no and cannot locate it anywhere in memory. I know of no better description of precarity. The refusal was never actually offered, and you are held responsible for not having made it.
4Cultural and Economic Power Structures
Shakespeare's critique is immanent delivered from inside the hierarchy it exposes, and never announced as critique. Its key moment is Rosencrantz's speech to Claudius in Act 3, Scene 3, where he argues that the fall of a king is never a private event: the cess of majesty draws what is near it, and ten thousand lesser things are attached to the massy wheel. It is a genuinely beautiful defence of hierarchy, and it is spoken by one of the ten thousand lesser things, in verse, voluntarily, to the man who will get him killed.
This is Gramsci's hegemony rendered as dramaturgy. Domination that relies on force is expensive and unstable; domination that persuades the subordinate to argue its case is cheap and durable. Shakespeare hands the little man the most eloquent available statement of the ideology that will destroy him and then, one scene later, hands Hamlet the sponge speech, which describes the identical relationship from the other end. Service and extraction turn out to be one transaction seen from two positions. Shakespeare does not editorialise. He juxtaposes, and lets the structure convict itself. New Historicists would add, with Greenblatt and Veeser, that the play both contains this subversion and circulates it the critique is real, and it is also safely housed inside a court entertainment.
Stoppard's critique is explicit, formal and positional. He does to Hamlet roughly what Edward Said does to Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism: he reads contrapuntally, from the place the canonical text has silenced. The underlying insight is that a canon is a distribution of attention, and that deciding who receives a soliloquy is an ideological act, not a neutral craft decision. Stoppard's intervention is simply to redistribute stage time and that redistribution turns out to be an argument.
| Hamlet (c. 1601) | Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) | |
|---|---|---|
| Where power sits | In persons a king, an uncle, a prince. Nameable, embodied, blameable. | In the script, the letter, the offstage. Anonymous, textual, unblameable. |
| Form of harm | Deliberate use and disposal | Indifference; harm as a by-product of a plot they are not in |
| Governing metaphor | The sponge: absorb, squeeze, discard | The boat: move freely inside a course set elsewhere |
| What the victims lack | Standing and information | Standing, information, and any account of why |
| Frame of death | Providential a divinity shapes our ends | Administrative a document, a voyage, a stage direction |
| Modern analogue | The employer who uses you and lets you go | The system in which no individual decided anything |
The decisive difference is the face of power. In Hamlet, power has a face: you can name Claudius. In Stoppard, nobody is cruel to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at all. They are simply not important, and there is no one to appeal to about it. That shift tracks the historical movement from the identifiable master to the distributed system from the mill owner to the shareholder, the algorithm, the quarterly guidance, "the market." This is why Stoppard resonates so strongly with contemporary job insecurity. Very few people experience a layoff as cruelty by a person. They experience it as weather: a process that arrived, that no one authored, and that it would be naive to take personally.
Raymond Williams's argument about base and superstructure explains the last move. Culture supplies the narratives that make economic arrangements feel natural rather than chosen. "The market demands it" is a superstructural sentence doing base-level work, and its ancestor is the massy wheel. Both plays are valuable precisely because they catch that sentence being spoken.
A fair criticism, for balance: Stoppard's critique is metaphysical where Shakespeare's is material. He documents powerlessness exquisitely and offers no lever no union, no solidarity, not even a named antagonist. Marxist readers have found the play quietist for exactly this reason, since it converts a structural problem (who controls the script) into an existential condition (nobody can read the script). Read together, though, the two plays repair each other. Stoppard supplies the point of view; Shakespeare supplies the economics.
5Personal Reflection
The word that stays with me is asset. It arrives sounding like a compliment — she's a real asset to the team and it is an accounting term. Assets are acquired, deployed, depreciated and eventually written off. The same is true of the whole vocabulary: human resources, because resources are extracted; talent pipeline, because a pipeline carries material to the place where it is consumed; bandwidth, because you are a channel. Listen to an ordinary Monday morning in an office and you are hearing Hamlet's sponge speech with better manners.
As a postgraduate student, I recognise this before any employment has actually happened. Placement culture teaches us to be absorbent: collect certificates, add skills, glean credentials, build a profile, and hope somebody finds us useful before we dry out. The CV is a document in which I describe myself in the third person as a set of capabilities. My seniors hold contractual and ad-hoc teaching posts renewed semester by semester, on terms decided by committees they will never sit on. The instruction we receive is precisely Claudius's: you are needed, come quickly, do not ask about the strategy.
What Cultural Studies changed for me is the question I bring to a text. I used to read Hamlet for Hamlet. Now I find myself asking who is not speaking, and why the play appears to think that is fine. Marginality is not a natural property of a character it is a decision, made by an author, ratified by a canon, and repeated by every syllabus that asks about Hamlet's delay and never about Guildenstern's confusion. "Minor" is not an adjective describing these characters; it is something that was done to them. That is the whole insight, and it travels far beyond literature.
The uncomfortable part is that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not innocent. They agree to spy on a friend. They accept the assignment because being chosen feels like being valued Althusser's point exactly, that ideology works by making recruitment feel like recognition. I recognise that too. I have stayed quiet in rooms where I should not have. I have done work without examining its purpose, because examining it would have been expensive. The warning of these plays is not only that the powerful will discard you. It is that you will help them, competently and cheerfully, and you will call it a job.
What the theory offers back is not rescue but method. Foucault: power circulates and we are inside it, so the useful question is never how to stand outside it but what it looks like from here. Gramsci: hegemony runs on consent, and consent can be withdrawn slowly, collectively, and never alone. Williams: the stories that make an arrangement feel inevitable were written by somebody, and can be rewritten.
My practical residue from this activity is what I have started calling the sponge test. Before agreeing to any system an institution, an employer, a project ask what happens here when I am dry. Is there a contract, a notice period, a union, a colleague who would notice my absence? If the honest answer is squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry again, then at least I walk in with my eyes open, which is more than either of these two ever managed.
And Stoppard's gesture, finally, is a small and genuine form of resistance: he gave two hours of undivided attention to the people the canon threw away. Criticism cannot give them their lives back. It can refuse the terms on which they were forgotten. That, for me, is what Cultural Studies is for.
Monologue Writing:
(Setting: A sterile, fluorescent-lit international departures lounge at 3:15 AM. GUILDENSTERN paces frantically by the boarding gate, clutching a biometric-locked hard drive. He speaks in a harsh, breathless whisper into his AirPods.)
GUILDENSTERN: "Rosencrantz, don't scan your boarding pass. Step out of the priority lane and listen to me.
Claudius didn't send us to the London office for a 'strategic knowledge transfer.' Look at the optics, man! Do you honestly think the CEO hands two mid-level risk analysts a physical, encrypted hard drive at midnight because we're highly valued assets?
I couldn't sleep. I plugged the drive into my personal terminal and bypassed the secondary firewall. I saw the metadata. It’s not the European market expansion strategy. It’s the offshore shell accounts. The toxic assets. The entire paper trail of the hostile takeover and every single document has been digitally watermarked with our security credentials.
We thought we were navigating office politics. 'Manage the Prince,' they said. 'Assess his behavioral metrics, see if he’s going to blow the whistle to the SEC.' We were so proud of our access, weren't we? Sitting in those glass corner offices, nodding at their buzzwords, thinking we were finally being fast-tracked to the executive tier. We aren't the inner circle, Rosey. We’re the crumple zone.
When mighty opposites go to war when the CEO and the majority shareholder start tearing the boardroom apart they don’t bleed. They just draft airtight NDAs and find two idiots desperate enough for a promotion to carry the bag. The Prince knew exactly what he was doing when he smiled and told us to have a safe flight. He didn't just dodge the audit; he re-routed the compliance failure directly into our portfolios.
The authorities aren't meeting us for a synergy workshop at Heathrow. It’s an ambush. We’re carrying the evidence of our own corporate execution. We thought we were playing the game, but we were just the instruments, and they played us perfectly.
Turn around, Rosencrantz. Walk away from the gate. They’re closing the doors on Flight 4B in exactly three minutes, and if we get on that plane, we cease to exist."
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Works Cited:
- Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, 1971, pp. 127–186.
- 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
- Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon, Pantheon, 1980.
- Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon & Schuster, 2018.
- Gramsci, Antonio. "The Intellectuals." Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, International Publishers, 1971, pp. 5–23.
- Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. University of Chicago Press, 1980.
- Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. "Cultural Studies in Practice: Two Characters in Hamlet: Marginalization with a Vengeance." A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, 5th ed., Indian ed., Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 305–311.
- "Number of Tech Layoffs in 2026 Already Tops 100K." Statista data compiled from Layoffs.fyi, reported May 2026.
- Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1993.
- Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Project Gutenberg, 1999, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1524.
- Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Grove Press, 1967.
- Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. Routledge, 2018.
- Veeser, H. Aram. "Introduction." The New Historicism, Routledge, 1989, pp. ix–xvi.
- Williams, Raymond. "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory." New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 82, 1973, pp. 3–16.
Cultural StudiesHamletTom StoppardMarginalizationHegemonyNew Historicism
Blog response to the Thinking Activity on Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Figures 1 and 2 are original diagrams; layoff data as reported by Layoffs.fyi and Statista, 2026.
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