Tom Stoppard's Biographical Drama (review)

In Tom Stoppard's Biographical Drama, Holger Südkamp proposes to read most of Stoppard's stage plays–from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead through The Coast of Utopia–as instances of biographical writing. The biographical dimension is clear in The Invention of Love (where younger and older selves of A.E. Housman confront each other) and in The Coast of Utopia, where Stoppard traces the interwoven lives of Michael Bakunin, Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, and Ivan Turgenev from 1833 through 1868. Travesties likewise deals with such historical figures as James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Vladimir Lenin as reflected through the faulty memory of the historical Henry Carr, a minor functionary who sued Joyce over a pair of trousers and got his come-uppance in Ulysses. But Südkamp also finds the construction of biographical identity in Indian Ink as characters in the mid-1980s seek to limn the interaction, in 1930 India, between the fictitious poet Flora Crewe and Nirad Das. More tenuously, Südkamp jus-tifies including Arcadia because of its references to the historical Lord Byron "who dominates the play by means of his constant stage absence" (5). Südkamp categorizes such matter infelicitously as "'Byrongraphical' constructions" (6). Even more dubiously, Südkamp includes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as a biographical play in which Ros and Guil have three acts to play Boswell to Hamlet's Johnson.

Centrally concerned with "the construction and formation of the identity of the biographical subject" (6), Südkamp sees biography as possessing an "inherent aporia" in the impossible task of seeking to "reconcile objective truth with artistic authorial autonomy" (8). Disdainful of conventional or traditional biography that relies on "the depiction of life as a chronological succession" (56), Südkamp prefers innovative forms that avoid chronology, debunk their biographical subjects, and focus on "dark areas" or "non-documented episodes" (71) in the biographee's life.

But despite Südkamp's scepticism regarding chronology, the reader of Tom Stoppard's Biographical Drama (a publication of the author's 2007 University of Düsseldorf dissertation) is in for a plodding forced march through the history of biography and biographical theory before she or he gets to any discussion of the playwright. For a full fifty pages, the name of Stoppard is not mentioned. Although the third chapter begins with the question, "What does the theory of biography imply for Stoppard's drama?" (63), what follows is a chapter in which Südkamp distinguishes "the traditional/conventional/realistic history play" from the "innovative history play" (66) before dividing the latter category into various subcategories, all of which turn out to have analogous counterparts in biographical plays. When Südkamp turns, at last, to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he argues that Stoppard puts Ros and Guil at centre stage, not only to debunk them, but also to debunk the idea of heroism and "Shakespeare's hero Hamlet" (92). What Südkamp finds, characteristically in the passive voice, is that "[t]hroughout Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead it is emphasized that objective truth does not exist, not in life, not in biography and not in drama" (107).

At times what Südkamp is saying seems to come down to the argument that conventional chronological biography inevitably fails to convey truth, whereas art, by using aesthetic strategies to disrupt chronology, can succeed in conveying some subjective truth. But when he contrasts Stoppard's plays with "conventional biography," he mostly pits the playwright against a straw man: in his fifty-page chapter on biography, Südkamp dwells at length on biographical theory but does not find any biography by a writer more recent than Freud, Lytton Strachey, or Virginia Woolf ("the three central figures for the emergence of New Biography" [32]) that he sees as worth mentioning. Südkamp also asserts that Stoppard "is contemptuous of history" (230), saying the playwright "underlines that, while conventional biography may be a compilation of facts, it holds no deeper truth about...