Henry Carr and James Joyce met during a production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Stoppard borrows the comic situations and tone of the play as well as some of the characters for Travesties.

Lenin's wife Nadya reads from her biography Memories of Lenin (1930) in Travesties. The biography focuses on Lenin's experiences during the Russian Revolution.

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstem are Dead (1966), Stoppard constructs a play around the absurd situations in which the two characters borrowed from. Shakespeare's Hamlet find themselves

Ulysses (1922), the novel James Joyce is writing in the play, was banned in the United States until 1933. Although its obscurity has produced controversy among literary scholars, it is considered to be one of the finest works of the twentieth century.