Illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King

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 And he delights in an anachronistic blend of historical references, bringing together famous personalities from different historical periods or tossing contemporary pop images and situations into settings from the past.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.