9 - Stoppard’s Shakespeare

Summary

[We[ always get back to Shakespeare, but I think with good reason, because he’s sort of there like a decanter, with that silver label around its neck saying “World Champ.”

Stoppard, “The Event and the Text”

The record of Stoppard’s engagement with Shakespeare shares the feature Stoppard values most in his own plays, “a series of conflicting statements made by conflicting characters.” In his nondramatic writing, interviews, and lectures, Stoppard himself may enact the conflicting characters who make conflicting statements. The simile of Shakespeare as decanter is reductive, an equivalent of the ashtrays and other inanimate objects to which Stoppard repeatedly compares inert play texts. But Shakespeare is also “World Champ,” an athlete who has defeated all competitors and attracted spectators like Stoppard, the cricket fan. In Stoppard’s plays, this ambivalence takes the usual form of conflicting statements by conflicting characters. During an argument in The Real Thing, for example, a similar analogy states the same type of contradiction. The playwright Henry will identify and defend his craft in terms of sport, an elaborate description of a cricket bat. His wife Annie, an actress, anticipates him with an image of Shakespeare outrunning everyone else in a foot race for an immaterial prize, “Eng. Lit.” In lecture and play, Shakespeare is both a winner and something less.