The Player quotes from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1991)

The Player

Audiences know what they expect, and that is all they are prepared to believe in.

The Player

For a handful of coin I happen to have a private and uncut performance of "The Rape of the Sabine Women," or rather woman, or rather Alfred, and for eight you can participate.

The Player

We're tragedians, you see? We follow directions – there is no choice involved. The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

The Player

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds – if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it.

The Player

There we were – demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance – and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don't you see?! We're actors – we're the opposite of people!

The Player

We're more of the love, blood and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.

The Player

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

The Player

Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get.

The Player

Pirates could happen to anyone.

The Player

I congratulate you on the unambiguity of your situation.

The Player

My talent is more general. I extract significance from melodrama, a significance which it does not, in fact, contain.

Player

Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion.

Guildenstern

And what's that, in this case?

Player

It never varies – we aim at the point where everyone who is marked for death dies.

Guildenstern

Marked?

Player

Between "just desserts" and "tragic irony" we are given quite a large scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get.

Guildenstern

Who decides?

Player

Decides? It is written.

The Player

The old man thinks he's in love with his daughter.

Rosencrantz

Good God. We're out of our depths here.

The Player

No, no, no! He hasn't got a daughter! The old man thinks he's in love with his daughter.

Rosencrantz

The old man is?

The Player

Hamlet … in love … with the old man's daughter … the old man … thinks.

Guildenstern

Who are we that so much should converge on our little deaths?

The Player

You are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. That's enough.