It reads: ‘Romanticism is an idea which needed a classical mind to have it.’ The original programme – held in the archives of the National Theatre – includes a paragraph comparing romanticism and classicism, which ends with the quote. It was something pretty smart-arse like, “The romantic is an idea, but it needs a classicist to have it”. ‘And then I kind of sat back and waited for somebody to, but it hasn’t happened to this day. ‘So then I made it up and attributed it to a professor whom I also made up. ‘In the end I couldn’t find a quotation which quite said what I meant,’ he said.
While writing the programme for the play Arcadia – which premiered at the National Theatre in 1993 – the playwright couldn’t find a quote that adequately expressed what he wanted to say. Sir Stoppard – the man behind Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Thing – made the revelation while speaking at the Althorp Literary Festival this week. Playwright Sir Tom Stoppard has admitted making up a quote in the programme of one of his most famous plays, and then making up a professor to say it. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships - and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes - husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer.Admission: Playwright Sir Tom Stoppard confessed to the audience at the Althorp Literary Festival that he made up a quote for Arcadia's programme, and made up a professor to say it A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders.
Stoppard called this "the most important" speech in the play.Ĭontext: An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality. „An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.“ He has been married three times, to Josie Ingle, then Miriam Stoppard, and Sabrina Guinness. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the three years prior in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. In 2008 The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".īorn in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. Stoppard has been a key playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. Themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil, The Russia House, and Shakespeare in Love, and has received one Academy Award and four Tony Awards.
#TOM STOPPARD QUOTES PROFESSIONAL#
He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter, knighted in 1997.
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