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| Category: | 
Modern Theatre |
| Name: |   Tom Stoppard |
| Birth Year: | 1937 |
| Death Year: | na
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| Representative Image: |  |
| Biography, Lectures, and Research Links: |
Malaspina Great Books -
Tom Stoppard
(1937)
Biography
Blog Tom Stoppard
The playwright Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937. He received an English education in India, to which his family had fled to avoid the Japanese invasion of Singapore. His father was killed during this exodus, and his mother married a British army major called Stoppard, who gave the boy his Anglo-Saxon surname. Stoppard's most famous work to date is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a brilliant comedic play which casts two minor characters from Hamlet as its leads but with the same lack of power to affect their world or exterior circumstances as they have in Shakespeare's original. Hamlet's role is similarly reversed in terms of his stage time and lines, but it is in his wake that the heroes drift helplessly toward their inevitable demise. Rather than shaping events, they pass the time playing witty word games and pondering the hows, wheres, whys and whos of their predicament. It is similar in many ways to Samuel Beckett's absurdist Waiting for Godot particularly in the main characters' lack of purpose and comprehension of their situation. Stoppard's well-known later work includes Travesties, a parody of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, The Real Thing, and Arcadia. Stoppard won an Academy Award in 1999 for cowriting the screenplay of the film Shakespeare in Love. [This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Tom Stoppard.]
The Great Books: Tom Stoppard
Please browse our Amazon list of titles about Tom Stoppard. For rare and hard to find works we recommend our Alibris list of titles about Tom Stoppard. Post Comments, Questions or Suggestions! This database is maintained by Malaspina Great Books.
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Books, Music, Art: | Jumpers: A Play
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
The Real Thing
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| Browse Books, Music, Art & Book Reviews: | Books from Alibris: Tom Stoppard
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| Records from Related Period and Category: | Modern Theatre
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 About
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This web page is part of a biographical database on Great Ideas. These are living ideas that have shaped, defined and directed world culture for over 2,500 years. By definition the Great Ideas are radical. As such they are sometimes misread, or distorted by popular simplifications. Understanding a Great Idea demands personal engagement. Our selection of Great Ideas is drawn from literature and philosophy, science, art, music, theatre, and cinema. We also include biographies of pivotal historical and religious figures, as well as contributions from women and other historically under-represented minorities. The result is an integrated multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary database built upon the framework of the always controversial Great Books Core List published in 1940 by the late Great Books Pioneer Mortimer Adler (1902-2001). Most of the works on that list are available in the 60 volume Great Books of the Western World.
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