Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: The Expendable Men

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are almost never spoken of individually. Shakespeare treats them as a unit, and Hamlet ostentatiously refuses to tell them apart. They were Hamlet's friends at university. Now they are Claudius's instruments, summoned to spy on a man they grew up with.

Hamlet sees through them immediately, in Act 2, Scene 2, with the line 'You were sent for.' From that point, any warmth between them is performance. They are not evil. They are compliant, which in Shakespeare's moral universe is almost as bad.

They carry the letter to England that orders Hamlet's execution, not knowing what it contains. Hamlet intercepts it, alters it, and sends them to their deaths instead. Tom Stoppard's 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead gives them a point of view. Shakespeare's Hamlet does not, which is the point. They are people who made themselves interchangeable and paid for it.