Dramatic irony and situational irony are prevalent in the play. The play itself opens with Guildenstern flipping coins and the two main characters wondering why the coins only come up on heads, which disregards the laws of probability, as well as audience expectation. By introducing the characters with this surreal scene, Stoppard highlights the absurdity of the world of Hamlet as viewed through the side characters, and how Shakespeare’s intent to narrate a story centered on Hamlet overrides Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s desire to develop as characters. This sense of futility and the characters’ knowledge of the plot is further illustrated by:
- The Player, who states that he never changes out of costume, both as an actor for the play-within-a-play of Hamlet and a character within Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead
- The Player also notes that “[t]he plot was two corpses gone before we caught sight of ourselves, stripped naked in the middle of nowhere and pouring ourselves down a bottomless well”, which foreshadows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s death, which the characters are not aware of but any audience with knowledge of the original play would be.
- In addition, the main characters of Hamlet constantly mistake Rosencrantz for Guildenstern and vice versa, and the characters end up reacting to the mistaken identities(intentionally or not), while the audience knows better and can distinguish between the two.