by Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard, born Tomas Straussler on July 3, 1937, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, believed that he became “a playwright by historical accident,” since plays were the dominant mode of literary expression in late 1950s and 1960s England (Gussow, p. 3). A former journalist and novelist, Stoppard experienced his first real success with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which premiered in 1966 (as part of the Edinburgh fringe festival). Despite not being born English himself, or perhaps because of it, many of Stoppard’s plays have focused on the canon of classic British and Irish literature: The Real Inspector Hound (1968) satirizes mystery writer Agatha Christie; Travesties (1974) features novelist James Joyce as a character; Arcadia (1993) focuses on the comings and goings of the poet Lord Byron; and The Invention of Love (1997) is about the poet A. E. Housman, with playwright Oscar Wilde in...