SOURCE: A review of Arcadia, in The Nation, New York, Vol. 260, No. 17, May 1, 1995, pp. 612-13.

[In the review below, Appelo remarks favorably on Arcadia.]

In Ulysses, there is an Oxford don who goes around pushing a lawnmower that chuffs "Clevercleverclever." Though he quit school at 17 and ran off to the circus of newspaper journalism, Tom Stoppard has always been very like Joyce's professor, forever cramming his head with arcane books and emitting their more entertaining notions in clipped, endlessly articulate, witty disputations. The question has always been whether Stoppard is anything more than clevercleverclever—is he simply a prestidigitator of prose and a joke mechanic, a whiz kid staging fantastically elaborate intellectual collisions as if they were toy-train wrecks? Or is he in it for deeper satisfactions than the transitory sparks a nice crackup tosses off?

Stoppard himself has admitted that his early play The Real Inspector Hound...