Parody and the Play: A Study of Selected Plays of Tom Stoppard.

(Abstract)

Tom Stoppard’s knighthood in 1997 finally got him recognition as an

important voice in the British theater. The present thesis Parody and the Play

proposes to study and analyze ten selected plays of Tom Stoppard, namely,

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1968), Enter a Free Man (1968), After

Magritte (1970), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Dirty Linen and New-Found-

Land (1976), Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1979), Dogg’s Hamlet (1979),

Cahoot’s Macbeth (1980), and Arcadia (1993). The thesis undertakes to explore

critically whether Stoppard’s dramatic intelligence is quickened or trivialized by the

limits of parody. The widely familiar perception of parody is that it is not serious

art, not- so- serious a mode of literary representation, as its spirit is parasitic upon

past texts and discourses. Parody as a literary device used from classical ages to

modern and postmodern times does not appear to have earned its writers esteemed

positions. However long and varied its tradition, parody has come to assume new

urgency and vibrant energy in the contemporary postmodern era. Stoppard has

intellectually used parody without becoming uninteresting or cheaply farcical.

The basic problem for the thesis arises from some conflicting positions

held by the Stoppard critics and contradictory perspectives in Stoppard. A fair

measure of the high reputation Stoppard enjoyed may be seen from a “Newsweek”

article of August 15, 1977:

2

Britain may be plagued by strikes, unemployment, inflation, a sinking

pound and rising racial tension, but one of its institutions appears to

be immune to ‘the British disease’. Britain’s theater is alive and well

and living off the fruitful imagination of more than a score of talented

playwrights. Of them all, the most original and consistently dazzling

is Tom Stoppard ... Without doubt, Stoppard is the most highly

praised and widely exported British playwright since Harold Pinter

and John Osborne.1

Taylor is not of the same opinion, and states that Stoppard “lacks a sort of

fundamental seriousness as a playwright, and that his ideas remain, in the

Coleridgean definition, on the level of fancy rather than imagination.”2 This view

may equally be contradicted by new contemporary critical standards beyond

Coleridgean postulates, and further by Stoppard’s unfailing productivity and

continuing box-office successes. Some critics find him as a political demagogue,

anti-Marxist in ideology, a linguistic juggler, fond of playing with ideas with no

social cause to realize; and others see in him an intellectual iconoclast with scant

regard for conventions and morals, having lack of convictions or no concrete

answers to deliver to the problematic issues he engages. On the other hand, among

others, Whitaker, Simrad, and Brassell have dealt with appropriations of parody in

Stoppard and shown varying degrees of understanding for his art. The playwright

certainly is no romantic visionary like some of the past centuries, nor is he lacking in

knowledge of modern scientific and philosophic ideas and issues. It is increasingly

perceived that Stoppard’s inventive uses of parody have produced a wide range of

confusions about Stoppard’s art and theater. The study thus is an attempt to see

3

parody, especially its postmodern variety, as a crucial creative force in Stoppard and

explore its radical effects affecting a whole gamut of other important aspects of his

art. Hence, this thesis Parody and the Play proposes to examine whether parody

structures the Stoppard play and whether it is a precondition for the play to shape up,

and more importantly, whether it has redeeming effects on the dramatic context and

characters. As parody naturally applies playful modes, the study faces a question to

address: Has it got the enabling force to free the play and spectators from naturalized

assumptions of times and life ideological, cultural, metaphysical and religious, or

does it only superficially entangle his plays in abundant surprises, paradoxes, and

interrogations?

Parody according to Simon Denith is a “comparable set of alternatives”3

which conservatively uses to mock literary and social innovation, policing the

boundaries of the sayable. In other words, the parody reworks and comments on the

existing targets or texts. He further states about the other radical premise of parody,

which celebrates the subversive possibilities of parody as its essential characteristic;

parody in this view typically attacks the official word, mocks the pretentions of

authoritative discourse, and undermines the seriousness with which subordinates

should approach the justification of their betters.4

Henceforth, parody as Hutcheon says is a “contrast between texts” and that

“parody is a sophisticated genre in the demands it makes on its practitioners and its

interpreters.”5 She identifies parody as a major form of modern self-reflexivity, one

that marks the intersection of invention and critique and offers an important mode

for coming to terms with the texts and discourses of the past.

4

Mel Gussow gives his opinion on the works of Stoppard and states that:

Stoppard reconsiders postulates of his past predecessors like William

Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde and Harold Pinter, and

recontextualizes their viewpoints from different perspectives, in such

a way that the play becomes humorous and exhilarating.6

As Margaret Rose remarks, literary parody contains at least two texts, or text-

worlds, as partial imitation or evocation of originally serious images while

“reworking in a newly disjunctive or comic manner.”7

Stoppard identifies the past and re-forms it with the present. Thus modes of parody

are used to shape his play as well as subvert traditional absolutes and assumptions.

It is the postmodern spirit of parody which has invigorated Stoppard’s plays with wit

and exhilarating intellect.

The past-present sequence can be found in Arcadia, one of Stoppard’s full

length play. The play shifts from one time span to another, the present and the early

years of the nineteenth century. The first scene is set in a single space room with a

garden in front, a “large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809”. The second

scene moves to the twentieth century “in present day” where the Coverly

descendents reside at the estate. At the conclusion of the play Stoppard brilliantly

merges the past and present as Septimus and Thomasina, Hanna and Gus whirl

around the stage to the strains of a waltz, separated by centuries yet united by the

mysteries of chaos and attraction. The concluding scene of Arcadia recalls of

Derrida’s ‘difference’ wherein opposites are united; chaos and order, attraction and

5

repulsion, past and present, young and old all depend on each other integrally,

henceforth, no presence without absence and no absence without presence.8

Tom Stoppard’s plays have also been examined in the light of the

postmodernist view of intertextuality. Stoppard transcends the limits of subjectivity

with his own inventiveness questioning radically notions of stability and rejecting

modernist paradigms. The plays have been discussed touching on the Bhaktinian

dialogic amidst different views and consciousnesses. Derrida’s crucial reading of

language and neologism or ‘Dogg’ language as invented by Stoppard in Dogg’s

Hamlet incline towards the playfulness and ambiguous nature of life dethroning

ideological biases, since signifiers no longer point at their accepted signifieds:

Abel: (into the microphone) Breakfast, breakfast…sun—dock—trog

…[* Testing, testing…one—two—three…] (he realizes the

microphone is dead. He tries the switch a couple of times and then

speaks again into the microphone.)sun—dock— trog—pan—

slack…[*one—two—three—four—five…] (The microphone is still

dead. Abel calls to someone off-stage.) 9

Stoppard gives a translation in English for the audience at the end of a conversation.

The conversation of the children goes on simultaneously in both languages and

becomes quite complicated. It is through the actions on the stage that to the

audience import an understanding to the play. The familiar assumptions about

language as the natural medium of expressing reality are deconstructed; moreover,

language is treated like a scaffolding platform to building a structure, which once

completed is usually dismantled or discarded. The absence of final truth about

6

language, about any entity, in the manner of postmodernist belief, brings forth in

Stoppard a blending and clashing of ideas and worldviews making the world and life

more open and meaning more plural. All these notions of intertextuality

supplemented by Stoppard in his plays have the dramatist’s concerns for making

sympathies more expansive and life more tolerant.

Stoppard goes beyond the absurd, while the absurd in literature is that

which defies what is conventionally comforting, religiously re-assuring, and

metaphysically logical. Stoppard enhances postmodernist views through his plays

like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , where the tossing of the coin comes

to head every time, this reflects that the theater of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are

Dead denies the comforting humanist perspectives of the Elizabethan stage and the

Enlightenment rationalism of truth as against uncertainty. It puts into doubt, the

way Beckett and Pinter did, “the sanctity of the individual which naturalism so

resolutely upholds”10

Stoppard’s radical positions conforming to none of the conventionally

modeled realities or structured meanings appear to move towards a realist theater, a

realism which does not deny the essentially comic-farcical and which has to

negotiate inevitably the shifting subjectivities and the undecidable difference of the

contemporary times. The absurdist theater aimed at and structured a mode of

expression to recreate that which is absurd subverting cerebrations of stable

meanings and symbolic forms of meaningfulness. The postmodernist theater, such

as Stoppard’s, nevertheless, apart from its complicated relationship with modernism,

goes many steps ahead to be a theatrical spectacle by celebrating the playfulness and

jouissance of life rather than intellectually cloistered meanings.

7

In a sense, Stoppard continues the Socratic tradition of open dialogue in his

plays. An example can be extracted from Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a scene

at school, the teacher tells Sacha about ‘freedom’ and its different forms. Stoppard

seems to be questioning ‘freedom’ through his characters and aims towards a

morally purposive dimension in human life, which is the inwardly felt impulse for

the initiation of an action, thus awakening the audience about ‘freedom’ and

directing towards the activity of need, desires and ideas.

Stoppard reveals that he is “a man of no convictions,” and believes that one

should have the courage of no convictions. As he sees it, self-contradiction is a

dialogue between contending dimensions within, thus constituting a dialectical

strength. To hold to an ideal with rigorous consistency often produces “a kind of

atrophy of spirits.”11 His plays demonstrate a space of contentions.

Parody renders Stoppard’s theater to be an entertaining performance with

serious morals. However, the serious intents are by no means a legitimate formula

for old assumptions and beliefs to revive; the more significant purpose rather is to

reclaim the fundamentals of life’s values and the freedom of conviction. To

Stoppard the freedom of conviction is not to be exercised from certain imposed

presuppositions; in other words, it may be cultivated in interactive discourses, in

dialogic processes such as the present is in a dialogue with the past, the self-

reflexive contemporary with the self-legitimating traditions. And the dialogue is

open-ended, self-critiquing and self-reflexive without any metaphysics of reassuring

certainty and truth to prove.

8

Chapter 1: Introduction.

This chapter explores on the idea of parody and it’s relevance to Stoppard’s

plays. The playwright’s brief biographical sketch and his views on parody and play

is being contested. The chapter also situates Stoppard as a playwright in the tradition

of English playwrights like Shakespeare, Beckett, Wilde and Pinter among others.

His achievements in the literary world have been explored and opinions in relation

to his works by critics have been highlighted. Postmodernist views have been

touched upon to situate Stoppard as a radical parodist, with his predecessors. His

works have been examined in the light of an entertainer, and how far he has

succeeded in entertaining his audience. His contemporaries like Pinter, have

evolved from the modernist tradition of English drama after Samuel Beckett. Both

Stoppard and Pinter have gone beyond Beckett in their characterization and style.

With Peter Shaffer and Edward Bond, Tom Stoppard forms a circle dominating the

National Theater in Britain; however, unlike them and unlike the new social realists,

mostly his esteemed near-contemporaries such as Behan, Delaney, Livings, Arden,

McGrath, Osborne and Wesker, Stoppard shows his affinities with Beckett and

Pinter for the kinds of metaphysical questions explored intellectually in his plays

above social issues. Sometimes, Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ seems more to characterize his

own intellectual creations, in the sense that Prufrock lives absurdity of life and

intellectual uncertainties in transcending lurking incompatibilities between

individual ability and social complexity, knowledge and reality, logic and chance.

Such incompatibilities form the central dramatic interest, which Stoppard engages

with powers of wit and imagination at his command.

9

Stoppard emerges as an intellectual and entertaining parodist. Parody has a

seminal place in Stoppard’s dramatic art and theatrical performance, to say the least.

Moreover, an energetic sense of play (playfulness) is insistent in Stoppard the

parodist. The kind of parody Stoppard sensitively apprehends may be underlined as

postmodern.

Chapter 2: Stoppard’s Intertextual World.

This chapter explores the playwright’s sources of inspiration and his

conscious adoption and adaptation of past masters in various genres of literature and

art. As works of literature Stoppard’s plays take on the pre-existent plays, texts or

traditions, and attempt to critically respond to established notions of meaning,

cultural codes and philosophical absolutes in a manner that resembles

postmodernists. Postmodern concepts of intertextuality and subjectivity have been

examined. The post-World War-II situations expose scientific progress, the laissez

faire and free market economies, Salvationist faith, socialist ideals and the nuclear

family as bedtime lullabies. The empty and illusory stabilities of these grand

narratives do increasingly indicate the fact that no text is uniquely placed to hold the

absolute meaning.

Stoppard’s plays are intellectually and philosophically demanding. Their

apparent meanings are not the only ones which make them interesting, these have

been examined in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead where Ros and Guil the

two characters of Stoppard are split between the conscious and the unconscious,

having existential problems. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Stoppard's

technique of extracting two minor characters from the famous Shakespeare play

10

Hamlet enables the audience to gain unique and enlightening perspectives on the

existential problems of the individual. Situated in the context that it is, the two

characters Ros and Guil are unable to comprehend their own identities and thus their

own individualities, which prevents them from conceiving their own free will. The

lack of making choices and taking control of their lives, ultimately leads to them

falling into the contrivances of fate, which let them question the meaning of life.

This is explicit in the opening scene where they discover probabilities. In this

regard, they are conscious of a world that seems to be controlled around them.

However, one could argue that their existence is already contrived by their previous

existence in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

It might seem to the audience of Travesties that Stoppard is teasing us with

mischief in the play, which opens with silence later followed by a diverse and

miscellaneous flow of languages. Tzara blabbers out his poem which happens to

make sense in French, Joyce gabbles about from the chapters of XIV of Ulysses, and

Lenin’s wife drops a scrap of paper which Joyce reads out for the audience in

English which makes no sense.

In Arcadia Stoppard talks about knowledge and explores the nature of the

world with questions that examine staple truths of science, religion and romanticism.

He premises that no being is created superior to the other and that one is

differentially defined in terms of the other. Plurality of life and freedom of the

perception are reinforced.

It is a fact that Stoppard’s play is felt to be an intertext. The Stoppard

reader feels thus obliged to consider the network of textual relations as well as their

11

meaningful significances that arise out of such conditions of intertextuality. The

chapter also investigates the complex issues of language where signifiers no longer

point at their signifieds. That there is no final truth about life, no objectively

verifiable absolute meaning anywhere. Poststructuralist thinkers like Julia Kristeva

are relevant to the present study, for she introduces the idea of intertexuality in her

“The Bounded Text” as constructed out of already existing discourses. Parody as a

literary device is used artistically by Stoppard to deal with intertextual perspectives.

Chapter 3: Aiming Beyond the Absurd.

This chapter explores beyond depths of absurdity and nihilism postulated

by Stoppard’s predecessors such as Beckett among others. The aesthetic movement

of absurdism started as a radical response to effects of the Second World War; its

issues are found to receive impetus from Dadaism and Surrealism. The idea of

absurdity is based on man’s divorce from the meaningful background he once

possessed and man’s existence in an incomprehensible world; and the absurdist

theater that derived energies once from the ‘existentialism’ other arts became a

staple of stage performance in the fifties and sixties. The absurd dramatists were

interested in the staging of absurd human conditions rather than narrating mental

conflicts in narrative modes became dramatically more effective in capturing the

interest of audience. Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is

significantly a recontextualization of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. However, here

Ros and Guil, raised above Shakespeare’s pawns meant for sacrifice, wander

bewilderingly for some clues to explain why they are put in a world or a situation as

it is, which is absurd. This reflects that the theater of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

are Dead denies the comforting humanist perspectives of the Elizabethan stage and

12

the Enlightenment rationalism of truth as against uncertainty. It puts into doubt, the

way Beckett and Pinter did, “the sanctity of the individual which naturalism so

resolutely upholds”12

In Dirty Linen and Newfoundland Stoppard travesties the British Parliament

showcasing the House of Commons, a comedy filled with wit, puns and full of

entertainment. While Stoppard, presents an attack on the suppression of individual

liberties in Communist countries in Every Good Boy Deserves Favor. He contrasts the

circumstances of a political prisoner and a mental patient in a Soviet mental asylum, to

question the difference between free will and the freedom to conform.

Stoppard’s plays sometimes come close in constructing language to

Wittgeinstein’s concept of language. By decisively separating the structure of

language from the perceivable world, Wittgeinstein postulated that any investigation

into human language would not give access to reality; on the contrary, language is “a

projection of the mind rather than a picture of the world, in a sense creates

reality.”13 The playwright has an abiding interest in parodic apprehension of reality,

and Stoppard’s theater has gone beyond his predecessors in matters of

characterization, moral perspectives, linguistic innovations, as well as stagecraft.

Chapter 4: Towards a Moral Dialectic.

This chapter focuses upon how Stoppard discusses the moral in terms of

religion, society and culture, and how Stoppard as a playwright postulates the moral

consciousness through his characters. The socio-political concern of Stoppard has

been analyzed through questions like moral responsibilities towards individual

freedom. The Socratic method is dialectical, which provides Stoppard with

13

inspiration to form an inquiry and debate between characters with opposing

viewpoints. The asking and answering of questions stimulates the critical thinking

and illumination of ideas between characters in the plays. In Travesties, Stoppard

primarily dramatizes the complex relationship between art and revolution without a

consistent resolution. The central characters are presented as committed to their

avowed ideals, such as Lenin as a Marxist radical committed to absolute action,

Joyce to his modern experimental art with a religious passion, Zara zealously

committed to the pleasure principle, bent on pulling down outworn gods of the

Victorian world; whereas Carr is the anchor of discussions, himself a contradictory

spokesman for the truth.14 The moral that emerges out of the heated debates is that

no ideal or philosophy is sacrosanct; on the other hand, each character

contradictorily and parodically reveals some lurking shortcoming in another. One

remembers, historical materialists such as Marxists based the ideal of progress on

dialectical conflict of class consciousnesses, economic interests, or even

philosophers of dialectical Enlightenment advocated progress by reason as the

answer to all doubts.15

Enter a Free Man seems to be concerned with the problems of the

individual as a private being, having to exist in a society which does not agree with

him. There seems to be a conflict between social convictions and private aspirations

between the characters in Enter a Free Man. Riley holds his desires as more

important than what is reasonable according to his family, society or culture that

surrounds him. The Real Inspector Hound, turns into a surrealistic piece about the

rivalry of theater critics. Moon and Birdboot act as theater critics and their views

14

about life have been postulated as a never ending existence. To Stoppard life is a

continuation and everything is connected to the other.

Stoppard enforces in his plays a high degree of responsibility and moral

action, without which any action turns heartless and immoral. The important issue is

not whether God exists or does not exist as regards ethical behavior; but human

actions motivated, as the playwright believes, by hard practicability and logical

inferences alone would produce an impossible absolute. To him, a wholly rational

society is like a machine, a merciless performer of presupposed objectives. The kind

of moral vision that Stoppard advocates has to do with the in-betweenness between

all absolutist positions, and he would pursue a more democratic and tolerant world.

In an interview Stoppard reveals his moral views through one of his plays Jumpers

and states that, “Jumpers is a serious play dealt with in the farcical terms,”16 and

further asserts, “Jumpers obviously is not a political act, nor is it a play about

politics, nor is it a play about ideology….On the other hand, the play reflects my

belief that all political acts have a moral basis to them and are meaningless without

it.” 17 The moral world of Stoppard envisions elimination of oppressions and

subjugations of all kinds social, political, religious, economic, psychological. It is to

note pertinently that in Stoppard the mode of parody has definitely deflated the

grounds of all discriminatory discourses.

Chapter 5: Parody and the Theater.

This chapter examines about Stoppard’s stagecraft and how parody has

been used in theater. The concept of play has been discussed by re-interpreting the

past texts. Each play by Stoppard has been conceived with an aim to engender

15

intertextual energy on the stage, suggesting brand-new perspectives to actors,

directors, and stage-costume-lighting designers as well as a new mode of

perception to the spectator. Jumpers stands as one of the most energetic plays of

the seventies, where Stoppard conceives a style which deliberately exhausts

possibilities and borders upon its own caricature.18 Furthermore, Stoppard employs

brilliant stage-craft, word play and inventiveness as instruments of clearly defined

political purposes which invites his inescapable irony and parody. The Stoppardian

“play text” serves as a bridge between the “spectacle” and the contexts that interest

through a constant process of association and dissociation. The typical Stoppardian

play seems to deal with philosophical concepts in a witty, ironic and linguistically

complex way, such as Arcadia, a bittersweet country-house comedy that sweeps

between Regency England and today, taking in discussions of romanticism,

classicism and dynamics of scientific energy. Thomasina’s distant relatives echo her

lines through time, with a word misplaced. Stoppard achieves an enrichment of

dramatic dialogue and intensification of theatricality through deliberate

‘defamiliarization’ or denaturing of the languages of drama. However, his plays

consistently exploit and celebrate the semiotic energy of intertextuality in which the

inverting and re-contextualizing art of parody and the paradoxical involvement of

play are invariably present.

Chapter 6: Conclusion.

The concluding chapter evaluates the earlier discussions and concludes

comprehensively on Stoppard’s performance and achievement as a postmodern

dramatist. Some critics are of the opinion that as a playwright Stoppard’s works are

clever and entertaining. In the present thesis, many of the conflicting and confusing

16

views on Stoppard’s plays are found to be untenable and the view that his works are

too cerebral, and lacks enough heart has not much reason to defend. As a

postmodern playwright Stoppard has reconceptualized the Absurdist Theater, passed

beyond it by innovative dialogic of language and social politics in relation to his

predecessors. He reintroduces absurdity and political dialogue not giving a pre-fixed

solution. On the bases of earlier discussions it may be concluded that Stoppard is a

postmodern parodist. As a postmodern parodist, he has expressed radical views and

playfully parodied earlier texts and established assumptions. In these discursive

endeavors, his ethical and political premises appear more subversive of the

contemporary presuppositions and turn him into a postmodern realist. His intelligent

and creative handling of the subject matter ranging from politics to psychology,

metaphysics to mathematics, love to aesthetics, and from dehumanization to moral

issues has exhilarating effects and empowering potential for the reader.

17

Works Cited

1Hohne, Horst. Liberal Intellectualism in the Theatre: Tom Stoppard’s

Controversial Career as Dramatist, by Angol Filologiai Tanulmanyok.

Hungarian Studies in English, Vol. 14, 1981: 5.

2 Taylor, John Russell. Tom Stoppard, in: The Second Wave. London, 1971. 107 .

3 Denith, Simon. Parody: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 2000. 20.

4 Ibid 20.

5Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art

Forms. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 33.

6 Gussow, Mel. “American Theatre” . The New York Times. Dec. 1995. Web. 15th

August 2011.

7Rose, Margaret. Review of Parody, Christy L. Burns MLN Vol. 109, No. 5,

Comparative Literature Dec. 1994. 986-988.

8Zlomislic, Marko. Jacques Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics. United Kingdom: Lexington

Books, 2007. 56.

9Stoppard, Tom. Doggs Hamlet. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. 15.

10Brassell, Tim. Tom Stoppard An Assessment. London: Macmillan, 1985. 33.

11Whitaker, Thomas R. Fields of Play in Modern Drama . New Jersey: Princeton

University Press, 1977. 4.

12Brassell, Tim. Tom Stoppard An Assessment. London: Macmillan, 1985. 33.

18

13Ibid 235-236.

14Brassell, Tim. Tom Stoppard An Assessment. London: Macmillan, 1985. 140-141.

15Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Horkheimer, Max and

Theodor Adorno. USA: Stanford University Press, 2002. 25.

16Stoppard, Tom. “Ambushes for the Audience: towards a high comedy of ideas.”

Theater Quarterly. 1974. 8.

17Ibid 8.

18Barth, John. The Literature of Exhaustion. On Contemporary Literature. Ed.

Richard Kostelanetz New York: Avon Books, 1969. 672.

19

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