View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What character from the play has left his card with Bennett?

2. Which character shushes the other characters onstage in the first scene of the play?

3. What term for Germans is Carr unfamiliar with before entering the war?

4. To which "misfortune" does Carr refer in this section, regarding Tristan Tzara (14)?

5. In describing his trenches experience in this section, Carr says he ruined several what?

Short Essay Questions

1. What lie does Carr argue is the artist's great achievement?

2. Why does Tzara have two names?

3. How does Bennett describe Tzara?

4. How does Carr explain Tzara's appearance?

5. Describe Carr's obsession with clothing.

6. How does Bennett become an asset to Lenin?

7. How do Gwendolen and Cecily mishandle their folders in the beginning of the play?

8. What ridiculous statement does Old Carr make about his connection to Lenin?

9. What confusion exist between Tzara and Carr regarding the reasoning behind the war?

10. How is Lenin devastated and frustrated listening to a Beethoven symphony?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Tristan Tzara is the contrarian of Travesties. He seems to lash out at all set values, just as Dada as a movement lashed out at accepted artistic norms. Focusing on his defamation of beauty, reason, and causality, write an essay about the character of Tzara. Why does he lash out at both Joyce and Carr? How does he connect the violence of the First World War to the art that came before Dada? Why, in the end, is he able to woo Gwendolen?

Essay Topic 2

The play opens with a tableau of the Zurich Library. It includes three tables, inhabited by five characters. Write an essay analyzing this opening tableau as a diagram for the artistic and political debate which is to follow. Who dominates each table? What are these dominant figures doing at the beginning of the play? What major movements of the First World War era are represented by these tables?

Essay Topic 3

Travesties is a homage and subversion of Oscar Wilde's comedy of manners The Importance of Being Earnest. He steals certain characters and scenes outright and transposes them to a different era. Write an essay about the connection between these two plays in three parts:

Part 1) The two love interests in The Importance of Being Earnest are also called Cecily and Gwendolen. They, too, have odd caveats for their love. What conditions do the two women give in this play regarding their hearts and how do they reflect a world in flux?

Part 2) Mistaken identity plays a major role in Wilde's farce like in Stoppard's. Why do characters in Travesties assume false identities? What is the meaning of the switched folders? How do both represent something more political than personal?

Part 3) Earnest is a product of the Victorian Era, an era of certitude and stricture. Travesties transposes this story to the Edwardian era, when certainty died in the trenches. How does Stoppard undermine Wilde's pat farce injecting it with the madness of the First World War?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,018 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample