It has been an October ritual to wait with anticipation until the Swedish Academy decides, yet again, to not give the Nobel Prize for Literature to Tom Stoppard. Stoppard doesn’t need it. At 86, he’s a Sir, an O.B.E., the winner of an Oscar and five Tonys so far, whose most recent play, Leopoldstadt—closed and reopened before and after lockdown—is about a baptized Jew like Stoppard, whose family fled the Nazis. Ambitious stuff, no doubt, but then, ambition is Stoppard’s brand.
Stoppard made his first splash with a play many of us first encountered in high-school English: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The title comes from the final scene of Hamlet. These two dolts were, unbeknownst to them, dispatched by King Claudius to send a death warrant to the King of England. The letter, revised by Hamlet, brings about their own deaths. Stoppard, by way of Waiting for Godot, found his way in and around two ancillary Shakespeare characters, while having serious fun of his own; it is as if he took Beckett’s absurdity and let it decant. You could now imagine it played by two Cousin Gregs from Succession.
I have marked moments of literary growth and discovery with Stoppard productions. During my freshman year of high school, I was on a school trip to London when I missed the bus to Stratford and found myself with someone else’s ticket for what was then the new Stoppard play: Hapgood, about a spymaster, played by the legendary Felicity Kendal—Stoppard’s partner between 1991 and 1998—who is trying to solve a case and unlock the mysteries of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle.
Here I was, barely passing algebra, almost getting in trouble, now suddenly drawn into a new world about Cold War realpolitik, romance, espionage, and physics. Of the latter, when the play was over, I felt like I understood something that I would never really understand. During the running time, my brain expanded. It was almost like a mind-altering drug with no side effects.
But the real reason why I think the Nobel has unjustly snubbed Sir Tom (Poor Tom he is not) is the perfection that is Arcadia, which ricochets between Thomasina, a prodigy girl in the Regency era who is on her way to discovering math that is way beyond her age, time, or space. (Again, I, a math idiot, was enthralled by all of this.)
She is a contemporary of Lord Byron’s, and a bit of gossip about him excites an Oxford don. He thinks this will be a big discovery. We know better. Stoppard lets us glimpse a heightened reality that feels like a secret history. The house will burn down right before Thomasina turns 17. People remember Byron, but not her. But we do. The present and the past are on the same stage, but only we get the picture.
The real reason why I think the Nobel has unjustly snubbed Sir Tom (Poor Tom he is not) is the perfection that is Arcadia.
The Invention of Love was the afterglow, starting with the Victorian poet and aesthete A. E. Housman at the River Styx, newly dead. Oscar Wilde and Housman went to separate colleges at Oxford and never met, but they share the stage here. “Shakespeare’s Dark Lady probably had bad breath,” says Stoppard’s Wilde. (Stoppard had already written dialogue for Joyce, plausibly, in Travesties.)
Housman, perhaps speaking for Stoppard, asks, “How am I to leave my mark? A monument of lasting bronze, as Horace boasted, higher than the pyramids of kings, unyielding to wind and weather and the passage of time?” As a writer? A scholar? Housman is told he must choose. Stoppard, a high-school dropout, seems to know nearly everything about everything, and he makes it all come alive, taking figures out of dusty volumes and making them preen and strut across the stage.
Right after these miracles, Stoppard scribbled the Oscar-winning screenplay for the Oscar-winning movie Shakespeare in Love. Shakespeare, like Hollywood scribes for hire, wrote as much for the educated as he did for the rabble in the pit, and Stoppard writes for everyone, too. Screenwriters don’t usually get their unmediated vision out there—not like playwrights do—but we can credit Stoppard for everything the film did right.
The plays as political treatises and graduate seminars followed—long, dense, to be audited, to be taken for credit. The Coast of Utopia took three parts, and I saw Ethan Hawke play Mikhail Bakunin in a very Ethan Hawke way. Rock ’n’ Roll was in search of Syd Barrett and the Velvet Revolution, and the shattered dreams, bodies, and psyches that followed. Stoppard kept being the autodidact playwright of our time as we struggled to be his contemporary.
Tom Stoppard is now 86, and to celebrate, Grove Atlantic is reissuing four of his plays, not that they ever got old. When Stoppard is asked about retiring, he says he is not done thinking. What a victory in these uncertain times.
We are often told that we are at an inflection point, and no one understands those like Stoppard. He always brings the past to the present, but what if he did that in a few years? Instead of the Bolshevik Revolution, it’s the here and now, or the on and anon. The attempted coup of 2021 could have been a preview for 2025, except that this time they have been planning for it. There is, perhaps, an ancillary character, someone who has figured something out that is beyond everyone else. Stoppard will tell her story.
We may be living in a world of darkness, but it is impossible surviving these unforgiving years without Stoppard illuminating us along the way. “I don’t think writers are sacred,” says Henry in The Real Thing, “but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.”
David Yaffe is a professor of humanities at Syracuse University. He writes about music and is the author, most recently, of Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. You can read his Substack here
