Allegories from the Past: Stoppard's Uses of History

Abstract

The surprising thing about Tom Stoppard is that – for all his reputation as a “cutting edge” dramatist, dealing with highly contemporary issues, tackling immediately relevant themes – i n his whole d ramatic output there a re on ly four full-length stage plays actually set in the present. These are Night and Day and Jumpers and Hapgood, along with his ironically titled, semi-autobiographical The Real Thing and his very first play, Enter a Free Man – although Stoppard has dismissed this as an amalgam of other people’s plays. Eighteen of his remaining nineteen full-length plays are set wholly or at least partially in the past, qualifying him for the title “historical playwright,” a fact that makes him quite unusual among major twentieth-century British playwrights. There are, of course, others who have turned to historical subjects, among them Edward Bond and Caryl Churchill. Yet neither of these has set more than one in three of their dramas in the past, and Churchill, for example, moves away from the historical, with most of her history plays being clustered in her early career. Perhaps the only playwright who has anything approaching the same weight of historical drama in his total output is Peter Barnes, whose plays are set in eras so distant and different from our own that the effect is estranging.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.