Tom Stoppard / The Art of Theater

Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard

The Art of Theater No. 7

Interviewed by Shusha Guppy

ISSUE 109, WINTER 1988

 

At the time of this interview, Stoppard was near the end of rehearsals for his new play, Hapgood, which opened in London in March, 1988. For the duration of the rehearsals Stoppard had rented a furnished apartment in central London in order to avoid commuting, and although he had said, “I would never volunteer to talk about my work and myself more than ninety seconds,” he was extremely generous with his time and attention. Stoppard is tall and exotically handsome, and he speaks with a very slight lisp.

Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol / Tells us the necessity of Universal Health Care

 

Charles Dickens was an famous author from Victorian London

Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol

Tells us the necessity of Universal Health Care

24 DECEMBER 2022, 

FERNANDO LLORCA CASTRO

The achievement of Universal Coverage in Health Care represents the best of humanity. Thanks to its creation, the solidarity of a few countries, replaced the dependence on charity suffered by a large part of the population to access medical and social services. Access to health care is a human right, not some sort of philanthropy.

Cornwall Settings Inspired Daphne du Maurier 

(1907-1989)

On the jacket of du Maurier’s Vanishing Cornwall, an unidentified author wrote that “Cornwall has provided the writer with the background for her most famous novels:Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, Frenchman’s Creek, The King’s General, My Cousin Rachel, andThe House on the Strand.” (The Loving Spirit and Rule Britannia are also set in Cornwall.) While it is true that the Cornwall scenes du Maurier saw inspired her, du Maurier was far too creative to use in her novels the settings she loved unaltered. In each book, she changes settings to arrive at the atmosphere—or details—she wants. Visitors to Cornwall even shortly after a book was published could not, using the descriptions in her books, find the settings she describes.

Ann Radcliffe a Sicilian romance / The first lady of gothic

Ann Radcliffe was an English novelist and a pioneer of Gothic fiction

Ann Radcliffe a Sicilian romance

The first lady of gothic fiction

20 MARCH 2023, 

TRACEY MADELEY JONES

Ann Radcliffe wrote A Sicilian Romance in 1790 the second of her early gothic novels. The main protagonist is Julia although her brother Ferdinand also features prominently in the book, an aspect that will be discarded in later female-centred gothic novels. Julia wishes to marry Count de Vereza but her father insists on her marrying the odious Duke de Luovo. When she tries to elope with the Count, Mazzini kills him and Julia consents to joining a convent rather than marrying. These were the only two options for a woman whose desire conflicted with those in power. Hoeveler suggests a convent is an attractive option being an all-female space, apart from men, who are seen as inherently violent. This may be true of her earlier works, but not of later books such as The Italian, where the convent can be administered by a malevolent abbess. 

 

Photo from the movie of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

A gothic critique of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

Analyzing historical context, novel criticism, and literary references

20 SEPTEMBER 2024, 

TRACEY MADELEY JONES

Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey was not published until 1818, five months after her death, yet it was believed to have been written in the 1790s, at the time when the gothic novels it so famously criticises were being produced. It was sent to the publishers Crosby and Company under the title Susan in 1803 but was never published. Another novel by the same name was later published anonymously. Based in the remote isles of Scotland, it drew criticism from Anna Laetitia Barbauld, suggesting it was overrun with fevers, faintings, two duels, and deaths. Austen would therefore change the name of the book to distance herself from such criticism, but first, she had to reclaim the rights from the publisher. In 1809, she wrote to them under the pseudonym Mrs. Ashton Dennis (MAD), requesting they either publish the book or she would. They replied, stating they owned the copyright and she could buy it back at the same price they paid. 

 

Papers from May 1889 to April 1896 show the decision by trustees to exclude Oscar Wilde from the British Museum’s Reading Room.

Photograph: The Trustees of the British Museum

British Library to reinstate Oscar Wilde’s reader card 130 years after it was revoked

Dalya Alberge

Friday 13 June 2025

The British Library is to symbolically reinstate Oscar Wilde’s reader pass, 130 years after its trustees cancelled it following his conviction for gross indecency.

Who is better, Dickens or Shakespeare? We asked nine prominent writers

This article is more than 4 months old

Elif Shafak, Sarah Perry, Jeffrey Boakye and others tell us which of the two totemic literary figures they favour

Killian Fox

Sunday 2 March 2025

Emma Smith

Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College Oxford and author of This Is Shakespeare

It’s a brilliantly preposterous thesis that Peter sets out but I disagree. What’s great about Dickens is the maximalist, chock-a-block, teeming sense you get of that world. His work is like an extraordinary baroque cathedral that you could spend your life looking at, absorbed in the detail. By contrast, Shakespeare is more like a black box. There’s a huge amount of potential to do these plays in very different worlds with very different outcomes. So what’s great about Dickens is it’s all there. But what’s completely indispensable about Shakespeare is it’s waiting for us to combine with it to make something new. I don’t think rereading Dickens makes a new Dickens, but rereading or reperforming Shakespeare does make a new Shakespeare.

 

The letter fragment seems to place Anne Hathaway in London with William Shakespeare and mentions a joint debt.

Shakespeare did not leave his wife Anne in Stratford, letter fragment suggests

This article is more than 2 months old

Professor says text shows Hathaway lived with playwright in London, upending the established idea of an unhappy marriage

Dalya Alberge

Wednesday 23 April 2025

It has long been assumed that William Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway was less than happy. He moved to London to pursue his theatrical career, leaving her in Stratford-upon-Avon and stipulating in his will that she would receive his “second best bed”, although still a valued item.

A steamy wrestle’: Guardian article inspires play on Shakespeare and Marlowe collaboration

 

William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe

A steamy wrestle’: Guardian article inspires play on Shakespeare and Marlowe collaboration

This article is more than 1 month old

Exclusive: Born With Teeth by Liz Duffy Adams, coming to West End, imagines rival dramatists working together

Dalya Alberge

Mon 26 May 2025 

A Guardian report on William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe being literary rivals and collaborators has inspired a play that will be staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in London’s West End this summer.

BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud review – Hideous Kinky, the teenage years

A subtle, intriguing sequel revisits two girls as they grow into adults and question the impact of their unconventional upbringing

Joanna Quinn

Fri 4 Jul 2025 

Esther Freud’s childhood on the Moroccan hippy trail inspired her 1992 debut Hideous Kinky. That novel was told through a young child’s limited perspective, so daily life was described vividly – almond trees and coloured kaftans – while bigger issues, such as why she didn’t see her father, remained vague and mysterious.

Burial Plots / Robert Aickman’s Eerily Ordinary Stories

In a new selection from NYRB Classics, peculiarity is intertwined with drab, and very English, twentieth-century realism.Photograph by Ian Berry / Magnum

Burial Plots: Robert Aickman’s Eerily Ordinary Stories

By Anwen Crawford

May 5, 2018

Not a lot tends to happen in a story by Robert Aickman. Two young women picnic near a country churchyard. A newly elected councillor is appointed to a committee that oversees maintenance of the local cemetery. Somewhere on a Mediterranean-seeming island, an English couple buys a parcel of land. But, quietly, and at an unhurried pace, these modest scenes are infected by miasmas that feel both existential and supernatural, and which linger, for the reader as much as for the characters, like the ineradicable tint of certain dreams.

Remembering Frederick Forsyth: my encounters with the spy who stayed out in the cold

 

Frederick Forsyth

Remembering Frederick Forsyth: my encounters with the spy who stayed out in the cold

Paul Lashmar
12 June 2025

One of the great British purveyors of the spy and cold-war genres, Frederick Forsyth, who has died at the age of 86, was best known for his novels The Day of the Jackal (1971), The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974).