“The Real Thing”: Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday ed. by William Baker and Amanda Smothers

This collection about the works of Tom Stoppard includes essays both by Stoppard scholars and by graduate students from a 2011 seminar focusing upon the playwright’s less-known works. In line with this, the book is edited by a Stoppard critic, William Baker, and his graduate student at Northern Illinois University, Amanda Smothers. The book starts with a reprint of a thought-provoking 1982 interview with Stoppard on his play The Real Thing by Brian Firth; Baker introduces the interview and also introduces the essays in the collection.

Ira Nadel writes the first essay in the book, which concerns Stoppard’s adaptations of Chekhov as well as the influence of the Russian playwright on the contemporary one. As the author of a lengthy 2002 Methuen biography of Stoppard, Nadel has longstanding, deep knowledge of the playwright that makes his remarks about Stoppard and Chekhov particularly illuminating. Stoppard’s “wit, lightness, comic sense, and belief that underneath the misery of disappointment there could be some hope redefines his Chekhov for our time,” observes Nadel (17). Chekhov taught Stoppard that “themes that appear to be domestic … are actually political as well as universal” (32).

Basing his research on Stoppard’s manuscripts and correspondence at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, John Fleming enlarges his 1996 published essay on the seven years of Stoppard’s writing career before his 1967 hit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead into a 66-page article with detailed notes. Fleming’s learned article is a high point of this collection on Stoppard. Regarding the playwright’s career, Fleming writes, “Indeed, Stoppard’s mix of critical and commercial success is exceedingly rare, and his nine Best New Play Awards spread across five decades is nearly unparalleled” (88).

Having seen one of the first performances of Arcadia, John V. Knapp examines Stoppard’s play, applying ideas on “scientific metaphors” (103) from Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) and Terrence Deacon in Incomplete Matter (2012) while investigating “the tyranny of the remembering self” (118). Knapp’s use of cognitive psychology and contemporary scientific theory provides unusual, fresh insights about Arcadia.

Steven Price analyzes Stoppard’s coauthored television adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, which was shown in 2012. This was Stoppard’s first television adaptation since the late 1980s (121). A valuable underpinning to Price’s article is his utilization of Stoppard’s early drafts of Parade End that the playwright loaned to Baker. Stoppard’s drafts allow Price to analyze the evolution of this coauthored television adaptation. Price argues that “Stoppard has his own authorial style, and … his pre-eminence as a screen-writer allows it to be retained in scripts used by actors and crew in the production” (133).

Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack analyze Stoppard’s coauthored screenplay of Shakespeare in Love “[a]s Postmodern [n]arrative” (136). “Post-modernists such as Stoppard deliberately flaunt the constructed nature of history and the sanctity of historical truth in their texts,” Davis and Womack contend (137). They add that, “Utilizing postmodern polyphony in their screenplay, Norman and Stoppard not only problematize conventional notions of authorship through their usage of heteroglossia and various levels of metanarration, but also argue for the more hopeful, humanistic possibilities of postmodernity” (146). Davis and Womack’s dialogic approach allows them to persuasively defend Shakespeare in Love against critics who see it as a trivial treatment of Shakespeare.

Alastair Macauley probes how classical literature infuses Stoppard’s The Invention of Love via its characterization of A. E. Housman, along with the influence of the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde on the play. “If you had no prior knowledge of Theseus, Pirithous, Ligurinus, and the odes in which Horace includes them, if you had no clue about how the poems of Catullus were preserved, if you had no understanding of the textual criticism of ancient Greek and Latin texts, The Invention of Love soon plunges you deep into these matters,” explains Macauley (150). Macauley’s revealing analysis of classical and aesthetic elements in The Invention of Love forces readers to recognize the play as one of Stoppard’s best.

Revised seminar papers by graduate students conclude the collection. Investigating Stoppard’s uses of Shakespeare, Michael Dean reflects upon Stoppard’s little-known 1980 lecture, “Is it true what they say about Shakespeare?” Dean posits that, “While Stoppard undoubtedly counts Shakespeare as one of his greatest inspirations, his perspective oscillates between collaboration and stark revision” (180). In examining the relationship between Stoppard and Shakespeare, Dean adds to a fascinating topic for scholars interested in such masterpieces as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Shakespeare in Love.

Tim Hendrickson examines Stoppard’s novel and three short stories, opening up a neglected field—Stoppard’s fiction. Hendrickson argues that, “Stoppard’s fiction, despite its usefulness as a thematic introduction to his later drama, deserves to stand alone, if for no other reason that it gives readers a hint of a Stoppard the plays do not,” for the Stoppard of his fiction, unlike that of his plays, reveals himself in his text (196).

Like the critic Macauley, graduate student Melina Probst reads The Invention of Love, focusing upon translation and translators. “The translation of actual people does not produce them in their live, authentic form; instead, Stoppard translates them with creativity, transplanting them in the memory of AEH[ouseman], a faulty human faculty,” Probst explains (203). Probst’s focus upon translation is particularly valuable when approaching a playwright such as Stoppard, who has a richly multicultural background.

Discussing Stoppard’s Arcadia, Amanda Smothers exposes the “difference between historical truth and historical accuracy” (221). John Sieker, too, looks at Arcadia, but via its nightingale symbolism that he contends stem from Keats. “While Keats’s speaker [in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’] is able to wrench himself from the beautiful world which he, as a human, cannot ever truly inhabit, Septimus [in Arcadia] is doomed to search continually through equations to recreate his garden in a way which he deems more ideal,” Sieker writes (263). As with the essays in this collection that deal with Stoppard’s utilization of Shakespeare, Chekhov, aestheticism, and the classics, Sieker’s digging into the playwright’s use of Keats rewardingly expands our understanding of Stoppard.

Scott Stalcup describes complex issues of authorship in Stoppard’s coadapted screenplay of J. G. Ballard’s novel Empire of the Sun, cogently and intelligently summing up much research on that vexing question. Stalcup concludes that, “As difficult as it was for [Pauline] Kael and others to understand the film adaptation of Empire of the Sun, it is also difficult to determine conclusively how closely Stoppard’s vision of Ballard’s novel was represented on celluloid” (257).

Baker and Smothers’s essay collection ends with a helpful select bibliography. University libraries and Stoppard scholars will find this book a useful, readable one that should inspire further graduate seminars on Stoppard along with additional scholarship on the author.