

The Player accepts and loses two futile bets to Guildenstern and agrees to pay with a play. Guildenstern is appalled but the Player maintains that people only go to the theater for crude entertainment full of "blood, love, and rhetoric" (and mostly blood).

The Tragedians march onstage lead by the Player, who sees Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a potential audience and tries to entice them into buying a performance with the chance to sodomize the lowliest tragedian, Alfred. They realize they can't remember a past before tossing coins and have only vague recollection of being called by royal summons.

Wearing Elizabethan costumes on a blank stage, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are tossing coins, all of which land 'heads.' Rosencrantz is unperturbed by the improbable odds but Guildenstern grows disturbed, demanding Rosencrantz think through potential meanings of the unlikely situation.
