Tom Stoppard

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Tom Stoppard
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I. Introduction to Tom Stoppard

• Sir Tom Stoppard (born 3 July 1937) is a
  British screenwriter and playwright. He has
  written plays such as The Coast of Utopia,
  Arcadia, Rosencrantz Guildenstern Are Dead, and
  Rock 'n' Roll. He co-wrote the screenplays for
  Brazil and Shakespeare in Love.
• Tom Stoppard's playwrighting career embodies a
  fascinating clash of opposites. In an interview,
  he once said, "I don't write plays for
  discussion." Yet his writings have been the
  subject of dozens of academic books and hundreds
  of critical articles. He has also commented "I've
  never felt . . . that art is important." Yet many
  of his characters continually ponder the
  significance of theater, indeed, the significance
  all the arts, as part of a perpetual (forever)
  search for meaning.

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• He is regarded as the most intellectual
  dramatist of our time, and his works are
  permeated (pervade) with cultural allusions and a
  remarkable depth of scholarship in a dizzying
  array of fields. Yet his formal education ended
  after the second year of high school. Finally,
  despite Stoppard's stature as a "serious"
  playwright, his writings overflow with fun
  parodies, puns, and verbal byplay across multiple
  languages.

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Career

• By 1960, he had completed his first play A Walk
  on the Water, which was later re-packaged as
  1968's Enter a Free Man. Stoppard noted that the
  work owed much to Robert Bolts and Arthur
  Millers Death of a Salesman. Within a week after
  sending A Walk on the Water to an agent, Stoppard
  received his version of the "Hollywood-style
  telegrams that change struggling young artists'
  lives." His first play was optioned, later staged
  in Hamburg, and then broadcast on British
  Independent Television in 1963.
• From September 1962 until April 1963, Stoppard
  worked in London as a drama critic for Scene
  magazine, writing reviews and interviews both
  under his name and the pseudonym William Boot
  (taken from Evelyn Waugh's Scoop). In 1964, a
  Ford Foundation grant enabled Stoppard to spend 5
  months writing in a Berlin mansion, emerging with
  a one-act play titled Rosencrantz and
  Guildenstern Meet King Lear, which later evolved
  into his Tony-winning play Rosencrantz
  Guildenstern Are Dead. In the following years,
  Stoppard produced several works for radio,
  television and the theater, including "M" is for
  Moon Among Other Things (1964), A Separate Peace
  (1966) and If You're Glad I'll Be Frank (1966).
• On 11 April 1967 following acclaim at the
  1966 Edinburgh Festival the opening of
  Rosencrantz Guildenstern Are Dead in a National
  Theatre production at the Old Vic made Stoppard
  an overnight success.

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• Over the next ten years, in addition to writing
  some of his own works, Stoppard translated
  various plays into English, including works by
  Slawomir Mrozek, Johann Nestroy, Arthur
  Schnitzler, and Vaclav Havel. It was at this time
  that Stoppard became influenced by the works of
  Polish and Czech absurdists. He has been co-opted
  into the Outrapo group, a far-from-serious French
  movement to improve actors' stage technique
  through science.
• "Stoppardian" has become a term used to refer
  to works in which an author makes use of witty
  statements to create comedy while addressing
  philosophical concepts.
• Stoppard was voted the number 76 on the 2008
  Time 100, Time magazine's list of the most
  influential people in the world.

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• Personal life
• Stoppard has been married twice, to Josie Ingle
  (19651972), a nurse, and to Miriam Stoppard (née
  Stern and subsequently Miriam Moore-Robinson,
  19721992), whom he left to begin a relationship
  with actress Felicity Kendal. He has two sons
  from each marriage, including the actor Ed
  Stoppard and Will Stoppard, who is married to
  violinist Linzi Stoppard.

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TheatreStoppards plays deal with
philosophical issues while presenting verbal wit
and visual humour. The linguistic complexity of
his works, with their puns, jokes,
innuendo(?????), and other wordplay, is a chief
characteristic of his work. Many also feature
multiple timelines.

• One place to begin with Stoppard, however, is
  to recognize that after he left school at the age
  of seventeen, he worked for a few years as a
  journalist, including several months as a drama
  critic. This career seems to have inspired in him
  an almost scientific curiosity about people's
  behavior, a fascination with how they attempt to
  maintain personal, emotional, and intellectual
  balance as they wander through the uncertainties
  of life. Indeed, the main characters in virtually
  all his plays conduct a perpetual struggle to
  affirm their beliefs and values in a bewildering
  world.

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• Works
• Nowhere is this theme more evident than in
  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967),
  Stoppard's first international success. Here he
  dramatizes the plight of two peripheral
  characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet, as they
  meander in and out of the turmoil that ravages
  the Danish court of Elsinore. The two men are
  unaware that Prince Hamlet has been ordered by
  his father's Ghost to revenge the murder of this
  father, the King, at the hands of Claudius, now
  ruler of Denmark and husband of Gertrude,
  Hamlet's mother. Nor have they any sense of the
  social, political, religious, and sexual
  implications of this crisis. All they know is
  that they have been summoned to discover why
  Hamlet, their old school chum, seems so
  distressed. Stoppard weaves scenes from
  Shakespeare with his own sparkling dialogue,
  creating a memorable portrait of two little men
  who seek to understand a world hopelessly beyond
  their ken.

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•   From time to time, Rosencrantz and
  Guildenstern encounter some Players who entertain
  at Hamlet's court, and at those moments, the two
  lost souls tend to regard themselves as actors on
  the stage of life. This theme is developed
  further in one of Stoppard's most successful
  short plays, The Real Inspector Hound (1968), in
  which two theater critics, casually reviewing a
  preposterous thriller, are drawn reluctantly into
  the conflict onstage. On one level, Hound is a
  delightful spoof of critical jargon and the
  pomposity that characterizes Stoppard's former
  profession. Yet more subtly it suggests how any
  of us, thinking ourselves safe from the hubbub of
  the world, may nonetheless be whisked unwillingly
  and even fatally into the chaos.

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• Stoppard's next major play, Jumpers (1972),
  accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of
  bringing the world of contemporary philosophy to
  the theatre. Throughout the play, the
  protagonist, who shares the name of
  twentieth-century British philosopher G. E.
  Moore, prepares for an academic debate on the
  nature of moral values. His ruminations are
  frequently interrupted, however, by the
  shenanigans of a troupe of renegade
  gymnast/philosophers who, believe it or not, have
  seized the British government. Part of the
  background to these bizarre goings-on is the 1969
  landing on the moon, and the way that this event,
  so Stoppard suggests, altered humanity's
  perception of itself. The play is ultimately a
  reaction against the modern denial of values, and
  an affirmation that something inherent within us
  makes us human, and allows us to maintain faith
  in goodness and beauty.

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• Stoppard's first attempt to create historical
  drama was Travesties (1974), which uses as a
  starting point the coincidence that novelist
  James Joyce, Russian revolutionary Lenin, and
  Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara all lived in Zurich,
  Switzerland during World War I. No historical
  evidence indicates that the three ever
  encountered one another, but in Stoppard's
  imagination they do so. The text is complicated
  by the use of an elderly narrator, whose frazzled
  memory muddles details of plot beyond
  description. In the midst of the confusion,
  though, we may discern parallels between the
  goals of the artistic revolutionary and those of
  the political revolutionary, as well as the need
  for all individuals to establish a purpose for
  their existence.

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• These brief outlines suggest some of the themes
  that have buttressed Stoppard's extensive
  dramatic output. In more recent works, he has
  moved through a great range of political, social,
  religious, and scientific issues, many of which
  may be found in Arcadia, along with perspectives
  on Time, Poetry, Love, and other subjects too
  numerous to elucidate here. Perhaps the most
  important point to remember, though, is that no
  matter how intellectually daunting the material,
  Arcadia is, in fact, a "play," and that at its
  foundation lies a joy and creative energy to be
  found uniquely in the magic of theater.

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II. Analysis of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom
Stoppard's best-known and first major play,
appeared initially as an amateur production in
Edinburgh, Scotland, in August of 1966.
Subsequent professional productions in London and
New York in 1967 made Stoppard an international
sensation and three decades and a number of major
plays later Stoppard is now considered one of the
most important playwrights in the latter half of
the twentieth century.
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• Recognized still today as a consistently clever
  and daring comic playwright, Stoppard startled
  and captivated audiences for Rosencrantz and
  Guildenstern Are Dead when he retold the story of
  Shakespeare's Hamlet as an absurdist-like farce,
  focusing on the point of view of two of the
  famous play's most insignificant characters. In
  Shakespeare's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
  are little more than plot devices, school chums
  summoned by King Claudius to probe Hamlet's
  bizarre behavior at court and then ordered to
  escort Hamlet to England (and his execution)
  after Hamlet mistakenly kills Polonius.
• Hamlet escapes Claudius's plot and engineers
  instead the executions of Rosencrantz and
  Guildenstern, whose deaths are reported
  incidentally after Hamlet returns to Denmark. In
  Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
  become the major characters while the Hamlet
  figures become plot devices, and Stoppard's
  wildly comic play becomes the story of two
  ordinary men caught up in events they could
  neither understand nor control. Stoppard's play
  immediately invited comparisons with Samuel
  Beckett's Waiting for Godot and also brought to
  mind George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Luigi
  Pirandello. "Stoppardian" is now a recognizable
  epithet that suggests extraordinary verbal wit
  and the comic treatment of philosophical issues
  in often bizarre theatrical contexts.

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Themes of the Play

• 1. Language and Communication
• In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the
  two title characters often play with words. They
  pun off of each other's words without much
  intention of moving their dialogue toward a set
  purpose. Instead, they are simply goofing around,
  like two kids throwing a ball back and forth. At
  the same time, however, the consistently poor
  communication in the play seems to hint at a
  broader breakdown in understanding between the
  characters that may help send the play into its
  tragic spiral. Language is sometimes seen as an
  empowering way of writing one's own fate, but for
  Ros and Guil it often seems like an impotent
  tool, best suited for idle speculation.

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• 2. Isolation
• In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, main
  characters Ros and Guil, when left alone in the
  play, often suffer from feelings of isolation. In
  the opening and closing scenes of the play, it is
  just Ros and Guil alone on stage. One wonders if
  it is the degree to which these two are isolated
  that has led to their constant idleness and
  passivity, or if things worked the other way
  around. From the very start of the play, however,
  it does seem as if Ros and Guil are marked, as if
  they are moving toward their deaths, simply
  passing through the action of the play. The sense
  of isolation reaches its highest pitch, perhaps,
  when it is just the two of them in the dark on
  the boat in the last act. It is, in a sense, a
  premonition of death, or a fear of what death
  might be bodiless nothingness, with only the
  mind working.

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3. Manipulation(??)

• People use each other quite a bit in
  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and part
  of the reason the main characters, Ros and Guil,
  are never in control of their situation is
  because they seem naively incapable of using the
  people around them. Manipulation, in many ways,
  is compared the act of directing a play it's
  the ability to control the course of events. A
  play is explored as something that manipulates
  the audience something that attempts to affect
  the way that they think and feel.

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• 4. Fear
• In the opening of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
  are Dead, there is a long string of coin flips
  that come up heads, which frightens Guil, one of
  the main characters. He later attempts to reason
  through how the laws of probability could
  seemingly be suspended, and at one point
  concludes, "The scientific approach to the
  examination of phenomena is a defence against the
  pure emotion of fear" (1.73). What Guil means is
  that we fear the unknown (such as death).
  Science, by trying to make things comprehensible,
  attempts to reduce this fear. By coming to know
  things about our world and the laws by which it
  works, we try to feel more at home in it, more
  like we have a handle on what is happening. The
  alternative recognizing just how little we know
  about the world around us causes fear.

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• 5. Foolishness and Folly
• In many ways, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
  are Dead it is the title characters' fault that
  they die. They are easily, and, at times,
  willingly manipulated. Not to mention, Ros and
  Guil spend a good portion of the play messing
  around swapping names, misunderstanding each
  other, playing at games of their own devising.
  Their foolishness is, in part, a source of
  comedy, but it also seems a natural way to stay
  entertained when one has as little to do.

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• 6. Passivity
• Ros and Guil may be at the center of the action
  in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but
  they certainly don't drive it. It can be seen
  most clearly in Act II how they are just left to
  sit around and wait unless someone else crosses
  the stage or tells them what to do. Another main
  character, the Player, seems to suggest that they
  should be more active and that Guil shouldn't
  waste so much time questioning things, but Guil
  is less concerned with action than with freedom
  of action. Yet, in the end, the fact that Ros and
  Guil betray their friend Hamlet makes their
  passivity morally significant their failure to
  act may play a role in their own fates.

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• 7. Versions of Reality
• In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the play-within-a-play
  is packed within a clear context and is used by
  Hamlet to send a message to Claudius. For us as
  the audience of Stoppard's play, however, the
  distinctions between a play and reality get
  totally jumbled. First, Rosencrantz and
  Guildenstern is nothing but a play on the stage.
  Secondly, it is a play that interacts with the
  action of an earlier play, Shakespeare's Hamlet.
  Third, it is unclear to what extent the Player
  and his Tragedians are driving the action of the
  play and to what extent the "real" characters are
  in control of what is happening. The difference
  between drama and reality is called into
  question, most explicitly in the arguments
  between Guil and the Player.

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• 8. Fate and Free Will
• This theme is introduced in the very first
  scene of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,
  where the long string of coins tosses coming up
  "heads" seems to suggest that the laws of
  probability have been suspended. The way that
  fate operates in the play is largely through the
  words of William Shakespeare. Since Stoppard's
  play works within the framework of Shakespeare's
  Hamlet, his characters are bound to undergo a
  certain series of events their fate was
  "written" in 1600. Main characters Guil and Ros
  have the most freedom when they manage to get out
  of the action of the Hamlet storyline, but in
  these times they often find themselves bored and
  listless. The relationship between Stoppard's
  play and Shakespeare's allows Rosencrantz and
  Guildenstern are Dead to ask the question to
  what degree do fate and chance control our own
  lives?

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• 9. Morality
• So, you probably noticed that the word "dead"
  in the title Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
  Dead, and that there is a lot of discussion of
  death in the play. Stoppard's play is intensely
  aware of the fact that we will all, one day, die.
  It is also aware of the fact that death simply
  cannot be captured in art. The main character,
  Guil, sees death as the negative, as a blind spot
  in the mind something that humans are incapable
  of thinking about. As a result, he sees acted out
  deaths in plays as pretense claiming to put
  something on stage that one cannot. In contrast,
  Guil's rival, the Player, thinks that no one can
  tell the difference between an acted death and a
  real one, and he thus decides to give his
  audiences the sort of entertainment they want
  death, and lots of it.

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Shakespeare in Love
Written by Tom Stoppard