In the long first scene of Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppard’s late masterpiece about a Viennese Jewish family in the first half of the twentieth century, the characters engage in a spirited, multilayered conversation about a range of cultural topics. They discuss Arthur Schnitzler’s scandalous play La Ronde, Gustav Mahler’s second symphony, the Riemann Hypothesis in number theory, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the controversy over Gustav Klimt’s painting Philosophy for the Vienna University Great Hall, and, most consequentially, as it turns out, the debate occasioned by Theodor Herzl’s 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat, calling for the formation of a Jewish state. ‘Don’t fall for this Judenstaat idiocy’, Hermann Merz tells his mathematician brother-in-law Ludwig, played in the opening production by Stoppard’s son, Ed. ‘Do you want to do mathematics in the desert or in the city where Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven overlapped, and where Brahms used to come to our house? We’re Austrians. Viennese. Doctors come from all over the world to study here. Philosophers. Architects. A city of art lovers and intellectuals like no other’.¹

The scene is quintessentially Stoppardian in its breadth of allusion, its wide array of topics from the arts, humanities, and sciences, its intellectual wit, and the sheer articulateness of its dozen or so characters. It is also, as the play eventually makes evident, Stoppardian in a more personal sense. The scene documents the cultural significance, as well as the vulnerability, of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian empire and the growing threat of anti-Semitism. In the final scene of the play, set in 1955, a character whose experiences are parallel to the young Stoppard’s learns the truth about his family from its two other surviving members. Leo, a successful young comic writer who has lived most of his life in Britain after his mother married an Englishman, looks over a family tree drawn by his cousin Rosa. Like Stoppard’s, most of Leo’s family perished in the Holocaust; the play ends with a long, slow roll-call of the dead.

The complexity of Stoppard’s own life-experiences, together with the scope and variety of his work, demand that his extraordinary career be viewed in context, indeed in a whole range of contexts: historical, aesthetic, political, intellectual, and biographical. Tom Stoppard in Context situates Stoppard in the world he lived through as well as in the diverse cultural landscapes his works explore. Playwright, screenwriter, activist, and public intellectual, Stoppard has had a long and complex career. His personal history has intersected with some of the pivotal events of the last century, from World War II and decolonization to the Cold War and the rise of globalism. Stoppard’s work is distinguished by its range and scope, its verbal wit, and the dazzling array of artistic, historical, and scientific topics with which he engages. Tom Stoppard in Context provides illuminating perspectives on the world that shaped Stoppard’s intellectual and artistic outlook as well as insights into the career and achievements of one of the most important modern playwrights.

Like all volumes in the Literature in Context series, Tom Stoppard in Context is designed to move directionally from context to literature, rather than the reverse. From the geopolitics of the post-war world in which Stoppard came of age to the conditions of the London theatre scene in the era of his ascendance, each entry provides readers with a compact contextual sense of the historical and intellectual landscape out of which Stoppard’s theatre emerged. At the same time, the entries move beyond background reading and actively probe Stoppard’s particular relationship to the events and entities at hand: why they proved of interest to him, personally or professionally; how he engaged them in his works and why that should inform our understanding of his plays; and, in certain cases, how the historical context changed in turn in response to Stoppard’s engagements and interventions. Contributors, selected equally for their relevant contextual expertise as for their familiarity with Stoppard’s work, provide readers with a unique window into the historical and cultural landscapes that made Tom Stoppard’s world and works.

The opening section, Origins, is the most biographical, and explores Stoppard’s eventful early life. Born Tomáš Sträussler² in Czechoslovakia in 1937, Stoppard experienced drastic losses and displacements in the first decade of his life, ending up with a new name and country. Stoppard has noted that his work, from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead onward, often deals with characters of unstable identity, who are frequently called by the wrong names. Only late in life did Stoppard come fully to understand his Jewish identity and tragic family history – subjects he dramatises powerfully in Leopoldstadt. His birthplace, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), is also an important context for his work: a country marked by successive incursions of fascism and communism and finally riven by political and cultural division. Though his family left when he was a child, Stoppard continued to engage with his homeland through his human rights work, his friendship with playwright and Czech president Václav Havel, and his late play Rock ’n’ Roll. Stoppard’s refugee childhood also took him to Singapore and India, where his life intersected with the tangled politics of empire and its aftermath, reflected in works like In the Native State and Indian Ink. After his mother remarried, Stoppard took on a new persona as a British subject. His identity continued to evolve in his adopted homeland, from his schooling in Yorkshire, to his work as a journalist in Bristol, to his social and cultural ascent in the world of the London theatre and his eventual purchase of a Palladian country house, reflected in his play Arcadia.

The biographical and geographical contexts of the first section are succeeded by literary and intellectual contexts in the second, Influences. Though he was an indifferent student and left school at seventeen, Stoppard developed into a voracious reader and autodidact, and his works show the profound impact of a number of important writers. Shakespeare, of course, provided the raw material for Stoppard’s breakthrough hit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and the inspiration, decades later, for one of Stoppard’s most successful film ventures in Shakespeare in Love. Russian literature and culture are touchstones to which Stoppard has repeatedly returned, from his ongoing critical engagement with revolutionary movements (from Herzen to Lenin and beyond) to his adaptations of Tolstoy and Chekhov. Stoppard’s brilliant verbal wit locates him in the theatrical tradition of another influence, Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest is the central intertext of Stoppard’s Travesties and Wilde himself plays a significant role in The Invention of Love. Samuel Beckett has haunted Stoppard’s plays without ever appearing directly in them: Waiting for Godot is a kind of artistic template for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Jumpers ends with an oblique but forceful acknowledgment of Beckett’s influence. Finally, Vaclav Havel is a playwright whose political example was as powerful for Stoppard as his artistic work. Havel’s Charter 77 work for human rights inspired Stoppard’s own interventions on the part of dissident writers. Stoppard later dedicated Rock ’n’ Roll, the play that most directly engages his own Czech background, to Havel, who became a close personal friend.

The third section of the book, Ideas, seeks to contextualise Stoppard’s lifelong engagement with various realms of intellectual inquiry. The playwright’s fascination with philosophy informed early pieces like Jumpers and Dogg’s Hamlet, based on engagements with logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy respectively, as well as later works like his radio play Darkside, which dramatises a famous thought experiment in contemporary moral philosophy, and The Hard Problem, which intermixes a wrenching personal drama with questions of consciousness and the philosophy of mind. Stoppard’s affinity for philosophical abstraction is equally matched by his interest in the hard sciences, spanning the disciplines of physics, biology, neuroscience, and ecology and informing plays from Hapgood (particle physics) to Arcadia (thermodynamics, biology, and ecology) to The Hard Problem (neuroscience and evolution). Though he won renown as a man of letters, Stoppard also has shown a recurring attention to numbers and numerical thinking in everything from discussions of statistics and probability in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to a prolonged consideration of chaos theory and biostatistics in Arcadia to debates over algorithms in The Hard Problem. Such intellectual pursuits were never separate from lived experience for Stoppard, and life itself was often viewed as an intellectual quandary. Hence the recurring themes of memory, history, and biography that show up both as the subject of his plays and as the objects for which characters in those plays are often (fruitlessly) searching, informing an engagement with heady themes of meta-history and meta-biography in deeply recursive works like Travesties and Arcadia. Even love could be an intellectual issue for Stoppard, and meditations on eros both historical and personal inform plays like The Invention of Love and The Real Thing.

For Stoppard, the world of ideas was never far from the world of art itself, and the next section of the book, Aesthetics, places the playwright’s work in the context of the various artistic movements and forms it has drawn from and engaged. Theories of art are often explicitly scrutinised in Stoppard’s plays, most famously in the aesthetic debates of Travesties, The Real Thing, and Arcadia as well as in lesser-known works like Artist Descending a Staircase. Often such debates turn on the tension between classicism and romanticism, a wide-ranging theme in the history of European arts and letters that is explored directly in plays like Arcadia and The Invention of Love and obliquely throughout much of Stoppard’s oeuvre. At the same time, Stoppard is deeply indebted to the twentieth-century movements of literary and artistic modernism and to the aesthetic-political disruptions of the avant-garde: influences that come to the fore in Travesties but that can be seen even in his screenwriting work. Of all the artistic forms that Stoppard has parodied, scrutinised, and embraced within his prolific output, none has been so powerful an influence as music. From the pop music obsessions discussed in The Real Thing to the intertexts of the Plastic People of the Universe and Pink Floyd in Rock ’n’ Roll and Darkside to the classical music collaborations of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Penelope, Stoppard’s work has long been interlaced with this lifelong love.

The next section of the book, Politics, turns to questions of Stoppard’s political commitments. Born into the vast geopolitical chaos of the Second World War and having come of age as an artist in the midst of the Cold War and the dissolution of the British Empire, Stoppard’s work has frequently taken a political bent. As with so many things with Stoppard, political questions are often approached intellectually: issues of ideology formation and the philosophical frameworks of political commitment form the explicit subject of his epic Coast of Utopia trilogy, which traces Russian thought in the century before that country’s Communist revolution, and lie underneath much of Leopoldstadt as well. Both the lived reality and legacy of Communism has often been at the fore of Stoppard’s writing, a theme explored across various Eastern European geographies in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (the USSR), Squaring the Circle (Poland), and Rock ’n’ Roll (Czechoslovakia), among other works. Of course, the rise of Communism had dramatic effects on life in the West as well, and the thematics of the Cold War, including the daily ambient threat of nuclear annihilation, permeate much of Stoppard’s writing – implicitly in the absurdity and fatalism of early plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and explicitly in works dealing with interactions across the Iron Curtain like Professional Foul and Rock ’n’ Roll. Though Stoppard was often vague on his own domestic political commitments, he was an adamant supporter of international human rights, a topic of special concern given his friendship with Havel, a one-time political prisoner. In addition to informing his advocacy work throughout the Cold War, questions of human rights form the centrepiece of works including If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank, Cahoot’s Macbeth, Professional Foul, and others. Stoppard’s political imagination also extended beyond Europe, and his plays have occasionally turned to the political and social realities of postcolonial life – issues of personal concern given Stoppard’s early years in British Singapore and India. Such topics inform plays like Night and Day, set in a fictional African country in the wake of decolonisation, and Indian Ink, set partly in a quasi-independent ‘native state’ within 1930s India, and laced with Stoppard?s own nostalgia for his childhood in the last days of the British Raj.

The book’s final section, Page, Stage, and Screen, details and contextualises Stoppard’s diverse artistic career. He came to prominence during a fertile period for the British theatre, though he set himself apart from both the kitchen-sink edginess of the Royal Court and the severity of continental Absurdism. Stoppard distinguished himself with literate, upmarket plays for the National Theatre and the West End, providing intellectual challenges and exhilarating verbal wit for both audiences and actors. Alongside his original works were a number of adaptations and translations, often drawing on literary classics or lesser-known texts from Central and Eastern Europe. Stoppard’s early career as a reporter and theatre critic also informed his work for the stage, as issues of journalistic ethics recur throughout his career. While Stoppard is best known as a playwright, he made contributions in a range of media, from his one novel Lord Malquist and Mr Moon to some very significant work for radio and screens large and small. Stoppard’s screenwriting is both one of the most and least visible aspects of his output, ranging from the Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love (for which he shared credit with Marc Norman) to various instances of uncredited script-doctoring and several intriguing unproduced screenplays. These form a key part of the large and varied archive of Stoppard’s work, which brings together the interests, engagements, and artistic productions of a career spanning more than six decades. This volume aims to provide a suitably broad array of perspectives on that career, and to put in context one of the most important writers of our time.