Guildenstern: You can't do death!
The Player: On the contrary. It's what we do best. We have to exploit whatever talent is given to us, and our talent is for dying. We can die heroically, comically, ironically, sadly, suddenly, slowly, disgustingly, charmingly or from a great height! (01:11:52)
The Player: Are you familiar with this play?
Guildenstern: No.
The Player: A slaughterhouse! Eight corpses all totaled.
Guildenstern: Six!
The Player: Eight.
[Two actors act out being hanged, foreshadowing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's demise.]
Guildenstern: What are they?
The Player: They're dead. (01:11:11)
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: We can give you rapiers, rape, or both.
Guildenstern: I think I have it: A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself.
Rosencrantz: Or just as mad.
Guildenstern: Or just as mad.
Rosencrantz: And he does both.
Guildenstern: So there you are.
Rosencrantz: Stark, raving sane.
Rosencrantz: Do you think Death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no. Death is not. Death isn't. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.
Rosencrantz: Anyway, I don't believe in it.
Guildenstern: In what?
Rosencrantz: England.
Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
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.
Guildenstern: It's what people want, then?
The Player: It's what we do.
Ambassador: The sight is dismal. And our affairs from England come too late. The ears are senseless that should give us hearing, to tell him his commandment is fulfilled. That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
