# of Words: 276

The wide range of topics in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia has made it a popular for faculty freshman-year read-alongs, as a book which, ideally, may appeal to anyone from emo poets to science nerds. Early reviewers of Arcadia's initial run remarked that Tom Stoppard, like the Tin Man at The Wizard of Oz, had at long last discovered his heart.

After almost three decades of plays that a saw more as intellectual exercises compared to heartfelt drama (Stoppard's first success was with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a play that retells Hamlet from the point of view of its two most insignificant characters), lots of commentators felt that Stoppard was eventually getting his emotional groove on. While his subsequent plays have been successful both in London and on Broadway, Arcadia and great old Rosencrantz and Guildenstern remain the plays for which Stoppard is best known.

While Arcadia can seem as a model of English-ness (which can make it a little confusing for an American audience), Tom Stoppard was actually born in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), under the name Tomas Straussler. He lived in India before moving to England. While England has become his adopted home, Stoppard has also never forgotten his origins: his play Indian Ink is set, not surprisingly, in India, and his latest work, Rock 'n' Roll, moves between Cambridge and Prague. Along with the Czechs haven't forgotten him either: there's a Tom Stoppard Prize, given to writers of Czech origin. Besides his plays, Stoppard has also worked for decades on human rights problems in Eastern Europe and elsewhere...so maybe those critics shouldn't have needed Arcadia to know that he had a heart.

Related Papers

The Clouds Aristophanes

Think that John Oliver devised the art of providing a healthy dose of cultural opinion when making folks laugh? Nope, sorry--folks have been doing this for centuries, also Aristophanes is one of the masters. His comment about the philosopher Socrates (who appears as a personality) was so pointed that a few (like any unknown dude named Plato) believed that the play was responsible for producing the bad rep which eventually got Socrates attempted and implemented. Consequently, in the event that......Read More

The Hound Of The Baskervilles Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Did you know that in The Hound of the Baskervilles, world-famous detective Sherlock Holmes is a zombie? It's true. In a manner of speaking. As we mention in our "In a Nutshell" section for The Return of Sherlock Holmes, writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (spoiler alert!) Kills off his famous detective in the conclusion of the short story "The Final Problem," published in 1894. We may all love Sherlock Holmes, the classic Victorian gentleman detective who uses his colorful observations to reason......Read More

Eumenides Aeschylus

It is like Mockingjay. In other words, it is the next installment of a trilogy of blockbuster hits... except that the crowds that pushed out the theater to see the highest of The Eumenides were toga-wearing Ancient Greeks. Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia trilogy (Part I'm Agamemnon, and Part II is Libation Bearers) to be achieved back-to-back-to-back, on one moment. Those Athenian audiences had quite the attention period. Each collection of plays in Ancient Greece will normally be connected by a......Read More

Related Topics