Art as a Moral Matrix

  • Paul Delaney
Chapter

Abstract

Tom Stoppard has a vision of life which permeates all of his major plays, a vision which has for the most part been misunderstood. Though thoroughly conversant with the currents of thought which prevail in his own day, Stoppard chooses to stand largely opposed to them. He accepts a direct connection between art and morality, between art and life, however distinctly unfashionable such a view may be. Even more importantly, he relegates politics to a secondary status, acknowledging that he is ‘more interested in the metaphysical condition of man rather than the social position’.1 Simply and unequivocally Stoppard continues to declare, ‘I’m not a moral relativist; I’m not a political relativist’.2 Stoppard’s vision is of man as a moral being, a being subject to a moral order which is not contingent on intellectual fashion or political expedience or ideological imperatives or national interest. He writes of mankind as existing in a realm in which right and wrong are universal metaphysical absolutes.

Keywords

Major Play Moral Standard Moral Vision Real Thing Moral Order 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. 1.
    Lewis Funke, Playwrights Talk about Writing: 12 Interviews (Chicago: Dramatic Publishing, 1975), p. 228.Google Scholar
  2. 3.
    Tom Stoppard, ‘The Language of Theatre’, a public lecture at the University of California at Santa Barbara, 14 January 1977; recording: UCSB Library Special Collections.Google Scholar
  3. 4.
    Oleg Kerensky, The New British Drama: Fourteen Playwrights since Osborne and Pinter (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977), p. 170.Google Scholar
  4. 5.
    Tom Stoppard, ‘But for the Middle Classes’, review of Enemies of Society, by Paul Johnson, Times Literary Supplement, 3 June 1977, p. 677.Google Scholar
  5. 6.
    Harold Hobson, ‘A Fearful Summons’, Sunday Times, 16 April 1967, p. 49.Google Scholar
  6. 7.
    Peter Lewis, ‘How Tom Went to Work on an Absent Mind and Picked up £20,000’, Daily Mail, 24 May 1967, p. 6.Google Scholar
  7. 8.
    Clive Barnes, ‘Theater: Rosenkrantz [sic] and Guildenstern Are Dead, New York Times, 17 October 1967, p. 53.Google Scholar
  8. 9.
    Irving Wardle, ‘Theatre: A Grin without a Cat’, The Times, 22 June 1968, p. 19.Google Scholar
  9. 10.
    Philip Roberts, ‘Tom Stoppard: Serious Artist or Siren?’ Critical Quarterly, 20 (Autumn 1978), pp. 85, 87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  10. 11.
    Thomas R. Whitaker, Tom Stoppard (London: Macmillan; New York: Grove Press, 1983), p. 6.Google Scholar
  11. 14.
    Tim Brassell, Tom Stoppard: An Assessment (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), pp. 15–16.Google Scholar
  12. 15.
    Kenneth Tynan, ‘Withdrawing with Style from the Chaos’, New Yorker, 53 (19 December 1977), pp. 41–111; repr. in Kenneth Tynan, Show People: Profiles in Entertainment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 44–123.Google Scholar
  13. 17.
    Tom Stoppard, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’, Theatre Quarterly, 4, no. 14 (May–July 1974), p. 12: hereafter cited in my text as ‘Ambushes’.Google Scholar
  14. 23.
    Mel Gussow, ‘Stoppard’s Intellectual Cartwheels Now With Music’, New York Times, 29 July 1979, sec. 2, p. 22.Google Scholar
  15. 27.
    Tynan, ‘Withdrawing with Style’, p. 102; repr. in Show People, p. 112. More recently Michael Billington offers a more temperate statement of the same charge: ‘What Stoppard doesn’t acknowledge is the power of art to unsettle and unnerve or to alter our vision of reality’ Stoppard the Playwright (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 103.Google Scholar
  16. 28.
    A.C.H. Smith, ‘Tom Stoppard’, Flourish [The RSC Club news-sheet], issue one, 10 June 1974, n. pag.Google Scholar
  17. 29.
    Milton Shulman, ‘The Politicizing of Tom Stoppard’, New York Times, 23 April 1978, sec. 2, p. 3.Google Scholar
  18. 30.
    Hugh Hebert, ‘A Playwright in Undiscovered Country’, Guardian, 7 July 1979, p. 10.Google Scholar
  19. 31.
    Ronald Hayman, Tom Stoppard, 4th ed. (London: Heinemann, 1982), p. 137.Google Scholar
  20. 32.
    Andrew K. Kennedy, ‘Tom Stoppard’s Dissident Comedies’, Modern Drama, 25 (December 1982) 469.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  21. 34.
    Eric Salmon, ‘Faith in Tom Stoppard’, Queen’s Quarterly, 86 (Summer 1979) 216.Google Scholar
  22. 35.
    Tom Stoppard in interview with David Gollob and David Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’, Gambit, 10, no. 37 (Summer 1981), pp. 10, 11.Google Scholar
  23. 36.
    Hugh Hebert, ‘A Playwright in Undiscovered Country’, Guardian, 7 July 1979, p. 10.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Paul Delaney 1990

Authors and Affiliations

  • Paul Delaney
    • 1
  1. 1.Westmont CollegeSanta BarbaraUSA

Personalised recommendations