Table of contents; acknowledgements; introduction; the real thing: tom stoppard interview with brian firth; chekhov's stoppard; tom stoppard: a portrait of the artist as a youngman; stoppard's arcadia; "the illusion of proprietorship"; tom stoppard, a.e. housman, and the classics; stoppard's shakespeare; insecurity, frustration and disgust in tom stoppard's fiction; the inauthentic translations in the invention of love; lost and found; who rules the empire?; confrontations with mortality; select bibliography; contributors; index
With a writing career spanning over half a century and encompassing media as diverse as conferences, radio, journalism, fiction, theatre, film, and television, Tom Stoppard is probably the most prolific and significant living British dramatist. The critical essays in this volume celebrating Stoppard's 75th birthday address many facets of Stoppard's work, both the well-known, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Shakespeare in Love, as well as the relatively critically neglected ..