The title of the play is a phrase that the writer borrows from the end of the play 'Hamlet'. In the play of Shakespeare, Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are two men, whom the king entrusted the responsibility to spy Hamlet and learn the events happening in the palace. For Stoppard, these two children were enchanted by the royal court and acted, without knowing it, without their will. However their relation with power had cost them their life. The writer conveys the following message: the fate of all those implicated in the mechanisms of history is nothing else but death.