Plays by Tom Stoppard (Book Guide)  (English, Paperback, Source Wikipedia)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Commentary (plays not included). Pages: 24. Chapters: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia, The Real Inspector Hound, Rock 'n' Roll, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Travesties, Rough Crossing, On the Razzle, Indian Ink, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, The Invention of Love, Artist Descending a Staircase, Night and Day, Jumpers, Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land, After Magritte, In the Native State, Dalliance, Hapgood, Heroes: Le Vent Des Peupliers, Enter a Free Man, Undiscovered Country, 15-Minute Hamlet. Excerpt: Arcadia is a 1993 play by Tom Stoppard concerning the relationship between past and present and between order and disorder and the certainty of knowledge. It has been cited by many critics as the finest play from one of the most significant contemporary playwrights in the English language. Arcadia is set in Sidley Park, an English country house, in both the years 1809-1812 and the present day-1993 in the original production. The activities of two modern scholars and the house's current residents are juxtaposed with the lives of those who lived there 180 years earlier. In 1809, Thomasina Coverly, the daughter of the house, is a precocious teenager with ideas about mathematics well ahead of her time. She studies with her tutor, Septimus Hodge, a friend of Lord Byron (who is an unseen guest in the house). In the present, a writer and an academic converge on the house: Hannah Jarvis, the writer, is investigating a hermit who once lived on the grounds; Bernard Nightingale, a professor of literature, is investigating a mysterious chapter in the life of Byron. As their investigations unfold, helped by Valentine Coverly, a post-graduate student in mathematical biology, the truth about what happened in Thomasina's lifetime is gradually revealed. The play's set features a l...