As an accompaniment to this presentation, please read the Introduction to Tom Stoppard in the Norton Anthology.
Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in 1937 in Czechoslovakia.  His Jewish parents escaped the Nazi invasion with their two sons, but Stoppard’s grandparents and aunts died in Nazi concentration camps.  Upon their escape, Stoppard’s family immigrated to Singapore, arriving just prior to the Japanese invasion in which Stoppard’s father was killed.
Stoppard, his mother, and brother were evacuated to India, and narrowly escaped the sinking of their ship by the Japanese.  In India, Stoppard attended an American-run, English-speaking school until his mother’s marriage to British officer Kenneth Stoppard prompted the family’s settlement in England, where Stoppard took his stepfather’s name and embraced English heritage.  His stepfather was a staunch imperialist who demanded that his stepsons suppress their Czech background.  Stoppard remembers that when, as a nine-year-old boy, he innocently mentioned his “real” father, Stoppard’s stepfather replied with resentment, ‘Don't you realise that I made you British?'  Stoppard readily embraced British traditions; and under his stepfather’s tutelage, he notes, “I was coming on well as an honorary Englishman. He (Major Stoppard) taught me to fish, to love the countryside, to speak properly, to respect the Monarchy.”  Happily contented with his new English lifestyle, Stoppard did not concern himself with his Jewish heritage until the 1980s when family stories emerged that revealed his relatives’ deaths in the Holocaust.  When he began to support the cause of Russian Jews, his stepfather, whose  “Raj-nurtured sense of superiority over what Kipling called the lesser breeds had long festered into a bile against Jews, blacks, Irish, Yanks, foreigners in general and the urban working class” (in Stoppard’s words), wrote to him asking that he cease using the Stoppard family name.  But Stoppard points out that his Czech roots could never reclaim him—his formative life experience was still fundamentally English.  Still the incongruence of a mixed heritage perhaps contributes to the postmodern features of his works.  (Work Cited: Stoppard Interview. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000166941319210&rtmo=LbtKLyid&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/99/10/15/tlstopp15.html>).
After completing his education, Stoppard worked as a journalist, writing about films and theater.  In 1960 he turned to drama himself, writing stage plays and radio dramas (two of which were produced for BBC radio) and then gained fame with his 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a comic/existentialist reworking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Stoppard is distinctly postmodern in his exuberant mixture of “high art” and popular culture throughout his career, working as a script doctor for Hollywood (he contributed to Indian Jones and the Last Crusade, among other popular entertainments) even at the height of his critical acclaim as a stage dramatist.  (The above caricature indicates how Stoppard has turned his artistic endeavors into a lucrative career commercially). And he never hesitated to use works of classic literature as the foundation for his own witty and irreverent writings (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Shakespeare in Love serve as excellent examples).  His work exhibits a postmodern eclecticism as he continues to write for several media—film, television, radio, and the stage—and a series of film directors with widely varying styles.  Three of his plays, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Travesties, and The Real Thing, have won Tony Awards for Best Play in their Broadway productions; and in 1990, Stoppard directed his own film adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  In 1999, he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, which he co-wrote with Marc Norman.
Stoppard exhibits the postmodern blending of high art and popular culture not only in his diverse writing career, but also within the texts of his plays, uniting complex, erudite treatments of scholarly subjects with humorous modern references.  His works also demonstrate the characteristic postmodern obsession with the past, particularly with reworking classic literature.  And he delights in an anachronistic blend of historical references, bringing together famous personalities from different historical periods or tossing contemporary pop images and situations into settings from the past.  (Note the example cited in the Twentieth-Century PowerPoint presentation from the opening scenes of Shakespeare in Love when the Bard is depicted at his writing table using a souvenir mug from Stratford-on-Avon as a pen holder—an image that sets up the theme of the illusory division between “real” life/history and popular constructions of life/history, such as those offered by the theater and the souvenir trade ).  Such bizarre and incongruent combinations result in humor and a powerful sense of the ridiculous in Stoppard’s work, exhibiting the influence of the Theater of the Absurd, a style of drama popular in the 1940s (particularly with French dramatists) that emphasized the absurdity of the human condition through meaningless, repetitious dialogue and senseless plot situations.  But while works from this movement focused on the despair that results from this absurdity in the modern world, Stoppard’s works stress not only the fearful uncertainty of humanity’s chaotic existence but also, through vibrant humor, the numerous creative possibilities offered by a world with no fixed meanings or boundaries.  For example, Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is modeled on absurdist dramatist Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a play that focuses on two characters senselessly waiting on a third who never arrives.  But while the absurdity of Beckett’s play creates an overwhelming sense of dejection and frustration, the lively, fast-paced humor of Stoppard’s play undercuts the tragedy and provides a postmodern critique of the characters’ tragic situation.  Ros and Guil, two minor characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, discover in Stoppard’s version that they are trapped in a play in which they can perform only bit parts.  They are caught in the larger drama of Hamlet’s tragedy and are carried along to an inevitable conclusion (their execution) against their wills—or so they think.  At the end of Stoppard’s piece, Ros and Guil and the audience learn that in fact the two characters were dead all along because they had refused to live, to take advantage of the opportunities offered to them to “rescript” their lives.  At critical moments in the play, Ros and Guil had the opportunity to act to support Hamlet and avert their own tragedy.  But fearful of consequences, they felt incapable of action and ridiculously allowed themselves to be swept on toward their deaths.  The play is based on several notions of modernist existentialism-- that a human’s existence precedes his “essence” (in other words, you can merely exist without truly living and creating a productive identity or “essence”), and that a human must create a positive essence through positive actions in the world that enhance the quality of life for those around him.  The responsibility for such action in the existentialist view lies entirely with the individual, for in the existential conception of the cosmos, humans are entirely alone in the universe—there is no greater deity to turn to for help or meaning.  Thus, humans are entirely free, but they are also entirely responsible.  There is no one they can blame for the consequences of their actions (or inaction) except themselves.  But instead of depicting only the terror and agony that result from this existential situation (as is the case in many modernist works of absurdist theater), Stoppard takes the postmodern stance of suggesting the myriad opportunities that also accompany existential freedom.
Stoppard also makes frequent use of fantasy in his plays, placing real historical figures in fantastic situations.  For instance, his play Travesties speculates on what kind of conversation might have resulted from the unlikely meeting of Lenin, James Joyce, and the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara in Zurich in 1916 (all three men did visit the city in that year, but there’s no evidence of a meeting between them).  His most recent play The Invention of Love depicts the afterlife of poet/literary critic A. E. Housman, opening with Housman in the Underworld, waiting to be ferried across the river Styx.  The fantasy setting allows a retrospective of Housman’s private life and public career that raises questions about the intersections between life and literature and how literature can sometimes express real emotions that are repressed in daily existence. As the previous example illustrates, Stoppard’s works often concern “the indistinct frontier between Life and Art” (The Norton Anthology, p. 2786).  What is reality, and what is artifice?  Stoppard’s approach to these themes reflects the postmodern notion of an indefinable, amorphous reality.  In blurring the lines between real life and the stage in his mystery parody The Real Inspector Hound, Stoppard implies that the clear solutions and neatly resolved endings of traditional mysteries are no longer viable in postmodern reality. The stage is one of his recurring metaphors for expressing the tenuous nature of reality in the postmodern world and the infinite possibilities for experience that such a world offers.  When there are no fixed truths and no set reality, one can play any variety of roles, scripting any number of future realities for oneself.  Stoppard’s plays dramatize both the fear and exciting hope resulting from this existential situation.
Stoppard’s best known recent work is his screenplay for the Oscar-winning comedy Shakespeare in Love, which illustrates many of his central themes, symbols, and stylistic devices (particularly the stage metaphor).  Consider comparing this film with The Real Inspector Hound for an extra credit or final exam essay. Shakespeare in Love is a biographical fantasy about the writing of Romeo and Juliet.  Young Will Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) is a freelance playwright struggling with writer’s block until he meets his muse, Viola, a beautiful upper-class English woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) with a taste for the stage.  Viola not only recognizes the power of Shakespeare’s poetry, but also wishes to perform it.  The only problem is that women were not allowed to act in Renaissance theater—all female roles were played by boys.  To realize her dream of acting on the stage, Viola disguises herself as a boy and auditions for “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter,” the play Shakespeare is then struggling to write.  The aspiring actress and playwright meet and fall in love in a romantic comedy that inverts gender roles and turns reality on its head. Like The Real Inspector Hound, Shakespeare in Love critiques and celebrates the theater and its patrons and uses the stage metaphor to show us the transformative, protean nature of reality, even within the confines of the Elizabethan world’s rigid social constructs. The scenes listed on the slide above illustrate the film’s postmodern qualities, particularly Stoppard’s use of the theater to represent the blurred boundaries between art and life.  The film opens with a sequence that introduces the thematic use of the stage to explore the intersection of reality and artifice.  A long shot of Elizabethan London pans into the interior of the Rose Theater, where theater owner Philip Henslowe is being tortured by his moneylender for failure to repay a loan, while a script of the play, “The Lamentable Tragedie of the Money Lender Reveng’d” flutters in the breeze on the theater floor.  Henslowe escapes further torture by promising his creditor the proceeds (and an acting part) from his next play, and desperate to make the needed profits from his theater, contacts young Shakespeare to demand the script he has promised for his new play, “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter.”  But the Bard is suffering writer’s block; and in Scene 1 listed above, he visits an Elizabethan “therapist” to seek a cure.  The scene with its hilarious Freudian references is a fine example of postmodernism’s irreverent and anachronistic treatment of history and personalities associated with “high art.”  The therapist suggests that the Bard’s “impotence” in art results from an impotence in life, a need for “real” love. Scene 2 takes place just after a court performance of Shakespeare’s play Two Gentlemen of Verona.  Lady Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow), who has not yet met the play’s author, is discussing the performance with her nurse.  Entranced by the poetry and by Shakespeare’s depiction of love, Lady Viola dreams of having love in life and on the stage.  Consider the boundaries Lady Viola discusses between “real” love and stage love, art and life, dreams and reality.  How does the stage magically cross and blur these boundaries? Lady Viola’s determination to “have poetry in my life” (note the convergence of art and life in that goal!) leads her to audition for a stage role herself in Shakespeare’s upcoming play “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter” (of which the Bard has still written only a few scenes, while his rival playwright, Christopher Marlowe, has produced another stage hit). 
In Scene 3 depicts Lady Viola, disguised as a boy named Thomas Kent, auditioning for the part of Romeo for the weary Bard, who has been listening all day to mechanical speeches from other candidates for the role. But Shakespeare recognizes true feeling in Thomas’ performance, and in an effort to discover the identity of the young actor, follows the “boy” home.  The scene concludes with the Lady Viola returning home and nearly appearing before her mother in her boy’s disguise.  Viola’s mother and father have been arranging a marriage for her to a titled aristocrat.  At this point, the reality of Viola’s future as a woman to be bought and sold in marriage will begin to vie with her dream of the stage and true love as she decides to continue her stage disguise as Thomas Kent.
Still trying to discover Thomas’ identity, Shakespeare crashes a party at Viola’s manor (where he thinks Thomas works as a servant) and there meets Lady Viola, with whom he falls desperately in love.  In conversing with her on her balcony after the party, he recovers his poetic powers and expresses his admiration in a sequence that will become the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet (the name “Ethel” was quickly discarded when the Bard’s poetry returned!).  After their meeting, Shakespeare races to his garret, blissfully free of his writer’s block, to work on composing his play.  Having fallen in love with Shakespeare, Viola is more determined than ever to continue her dual life as a stage actor and returns to the theater disguised as Thomas Kent to join the cast of Romeo and Juliet.  Shakespeare, believing Thomas to be Lady Viola’s servant, gives Thomas a love letter (a new sonnet) to convey to Lady Viola.  In Scene 4, Shakespeare inquires about the reception of his letter and discusses his lady love with Thomas in a conversation that reveals the “play-acting” involved in gender roles and considers the relationship between reality and fantasy in the realm of love.  Lady Viola reveals her dual identity as Thomas the actor and Viola the lover, and the scene ends with Shakespeare and Viola consummating their love.  After the “real” love-making, Viola attests, “I would not have thought it, but there is something better than a play.  Even your play!” As the Bard and the lady continue their affair in private, Shakespeare continues to write his play, and Viola continues to rehearse it with the theater company in public, disguised as Thomas.  The lovers’ on-stage and off-stage relationships intertwine, feeding and enriching both the reality of their love and the art of the play they’re composing and performing.  Scene 5 illustrates this vibrant intermingling of life and art in a sequence that cuts back and forth between the lovers’ private meetings and their stage rehearsals.  As they make love in private, they “rehearse” the play, quoting lines of poetry from it to express their love.  Rehearsal of the same scene also occurs on stage where Viola’s private emotions inspire her public performance.  Note, too, how this sequence plays with reality by continually switching the gender roles.  In their private “rehearsals,” Shakespeare performs the part of Romeo and Viola recites Juliet’s lines, while in the public stage performance, Viola plays Romeo disguised as Thomas.  How do we distinguish between the “real” love and the stage love in this sequence?  Is any distinction possible?  What is the scene saying about the relationship between life and art, reality and illusion? Despite her love for Shakespeare and the stage, the reality of Viola’s situation as a Renaissance lady asserts itself, and she finds she must marry the man her parents have chosen.  She leaves the acting company, and Shakespeare himself must assume her part as Romeo.  But the day of Viola’s wedding is also the opening day of the play (surprise!), and Viola escapes immediately after the ceremony to rush to the theater and see the opening performance.  The boy playing Juliet is unable to perform, and Viola volunteers to replace him, so that the film ends with Shakespeare and Viola again performing their private roles as the lovers, but this time on a public stage.  The film shows the play’s climax, the suicides of Romeo and Juliet, in a magnificent scene that illustrates the powerful effects on the theater audience of the very real emotions they see performed on the stage.  Reality and stage illusion become one to allow the audience to experience a moment of true tragedy.  The scene dramatizes the power of art (in the form of the stage play) not only to envision a myriad of other realities for us, but also to let us truly experience those realities. After the play, Lady Viola must return to her husband and leaves with him on a journey to the New World where he owns a plantation.  She leaves Shakespeare behind, but her inspiration remains, and in the final scenes, Shakespeare begins writing his next play, Twelfth Night.  As he writes, the film shows Viola caught in a shipwreck off the shore of the New World.  But instead of tragedy, the shipwreck is depicted as a moment of rebirth for Viola.  She rises from the ocean alone and approaches the verdant shore of the New World a survivor, an independent woman.  The scenes don’t specify if this situation is happening to Viola in reality, or if it is just the story Shakespeare is imagining as he writes his play (Twelfth Night is about a heroine named Viola who survives a shipwreck and assumes a man’s identity to begin a new life).  But these final moments imply that in the end there is no distinction—the illusion of art can envision the very real and empowering potentialities of human life.  So perhaps art can allow us to realize our true potential.  Consider comparing the stage metaphor in this film and in The Real Inspector Hound—how does the stage represent the many realities possible in the postmodern experience?