One of England's most important playwrights, Tom Stoppard (born 1937) gained a wide international audience. His two great stage successes were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Thing, and his co-written screenplay Shakespeare in Love was...

[This entry was updated by Anne Wright (University of Sunderland) from her entry in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 366-388.] Tom Stoppard, a leading figure of the British theater since the mid 1960s, ranks as a dramat...

Tom Stoppard, a leading figure of the British theater since the mid 1960s, ranks as a dramatist of brilliant and original comic genius. His first major success established him as a master of philosophical farce, combining dazzling theatricality and wit w...

[Dogg's Hamlet] is an elaboration of a minor curiosity called Dogg's Our Pet, and [Cahoot's Macbeth is] fresh evidence that its author is becoming a sort of one-man Amnesty International, with a special interest in his native Czechoslovakia. Little need be said about the first, except that it interjects a comically compressed version of Hamlet into [a] whimsical series of verbal jokes…. 'Cretinous git', says a boy to his headmaster, who nods in gracious acknowledgme...

["Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth"] is the latest prank by Tom Stoppard to reach our shores. Actually, it's two pranks, since it consists of a couple of little plays that the ingenious author has contrived to join loosely together but that have the air of having been surprised into marriage by the universal shotgun known as giving the customers their money's worth…. These plays combine comically abbreviated versions of "Hamlet" and "Macbe...

[There] are two basic jokes in Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, one for each part of the play. The first is that language is an arbitrary form of signification and therefore susceptible to humorous mutation if words are ascribed different meanings from those they normally possess. The second, which also depends upon incongruity for its effect, is that the action and famous lines of a well-known play can be made to appear quite ridiculous if stripped of all incidental substance and performed at br...