SOURCE: "Fantasy in Structure: Layered Metaphor in Stopparci," in Forms of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Third International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film, edited by Jan Hokenson and Howard Pearce, Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 233-39.

The following was first presented at a 1982 conference. Feeney contends that the seeming spontaneity of Stoppard's imagination obscures the careful craftsmanship of his plays, which, he claims, are structured around set of "parallel metaphors. "

Tom Stoppard has an imagination that feeds on analogies. "Things are so interrelated," he once commented in an interview [in Ronald Hayman's Tom Stoppard, 1979]; and in writing his plays Stoppard frequently finds himself discovering (often to his own surprise) various "convergences of different threads," "structural pivots," and points of "cross reference." In these plays, the themes, characters, plots, language, and setting somehow become curiously linked and, through multiple metaphors, end up standing parallel to each other...