Parody and the Play: A Study of Selected Plays of Tom Stoppard. (Abstract) Tom Stoppard s knighthood in 1997 finally got him recognition as an

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1 Parody and the Play: A Study of Selected Plays of Tom Stoppard. (Abstract) Tom Stoppard s knighthood in 1997 finally got him recognition as an important voice in the British theater. The present thesis Parody and the Play proposes to study and analyze ten selected plays of Tom Stoppard, namely, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1968), Enter a Free Man (1968), After Magritte (1970), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Dirty Linen and New-Found- Land (1976), Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1979), Dogg s Hamlet (1979), Cahoot s Macbeth (1980), and Arcadia (1993). The thesis undertakes to explore critically whether Stoppard s dramatic intelligence is quickened or trivialized by the limits of parody. The widely familiar perception of parody is that it is not serious art, not- so- serious a mode of literary representation, as its spirit is parasitic upon past texts and discourses. Parody as a literary device used from classical ages to modern and postmodern times does not appear to have earned its writers esteemed positions. However long and varied its tradition, parody has come to assume new urgency and vibrant energy in the contemporary postmodern era. Stoppard has intellectually used parody without becoming uninteresting or cheaply farcical. The basic problem for the thesis arises from some conflicting positions held by the Stoppard critics and contradictory perspectives in Stoppard. A fair measure of the high reputation Stoppard enjoyed may be seen from a Newsweek article of August 15, 1977:

2 2 Britain may be plagued by strikes, unemployment, inflation, a sinking pound and rising racial tension, but one of its institutions appears to be immune to the British disease. Britain s theater is alive and well and living off the fruitful imagination of more than a score of talented playwrights. Of them all, the most original and consistently dazzling is Tom Stoppard... Without doubt, Stoppard is the most highly praised and widely exported British playwright since Harold Pinter and John Osborne. 1 Taylor is not of the same opinion, and states that Stoppard lacks a sort of fundamental seriousness as a playwright, and that his ideas remain, in the Coleridgean definition, on the level of fancy rather than imagination. 2 This view may equally be contradicted by new contemporary critical standards beyond Coleridgean postulates, and further by Stoppard s unfailing productivity and continuing box-office successes. Some critics find him as a political demagogue, anti-marxist in ideology, a linguistic juggler, fond of playing with ideas with no social cause to realize; and others see in him an intellectual iconoclast with scant regard for conventions and morals, having lack of convictions or no concrete answers to deliver to the problematic issues he engages. On the other hand, among others, Whitaker, Simrad, and Brassell have dealt with appropriations of parody in Stoppard and shown varying degrees of understanding for his art. The playwright certainly is no romantic visionary like some of the past centuries, nor is he lacking in knowledge of modern scientific and philosophic ideas and issues. It is increasingly perceived that Stoppard s inventive uses of parody have produced a wide range of confusions about Stoppard s art and theater. The study thus is an attempt to see

3 3 parody, especially its postmodern variety, as a crucial creative force in Stoppard and explore its radical effects affecting a whole gamut of other important aspects of his art. Hence, this thesis Parody and the Play proposes to examine whether parody structures the Stoppard play and whether it is a precondition for the play to shape up, and more importantly, whether it has redeeming effects on the dramatic context and characters. As parody naturally applies playful modes, the study faces a question to address: Has it got the enabling force to free the play and spectators from naturalized assumptions of times and life ideological, cultural, metaphysical and religious, or does it only superficially entangle his plays in abundant surprises, paradoxes, and interrogations? Parody according to Simon Denith is a comparable set of alternatives 3 which conservatively uses to mock literary and social innovation, policing the boundaries of the sayable. In other words, the parody reworks and comments on the existing targets or texts. He further states about the other radical premise of parody, which celebrates the subversive possibilities of parody as its essential characteristic; parody in this view typically attacks the official word, mocks the pretentions of authoritative discourse, and undermines the seriousness with which subordinates should approach the justification of their betters. 4 Henceforth, parody as Hutcheon says is a contrast between texts and that parody is a sophisticated genre in the demands it makes on its practitioners and its interpreters. 5 She identifies parody as a major form of modern self-reflexivity, one that marks the intersection of invention and critique and offers an important mode for coming to terms with the texts and discourses of the past.

4 4 Mel Gussow gives his opinion on the works of Stoppard and states that: Stoppard reconsiders postulates of his past predecessors like William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde and Harold Pinter, and recontextualizes their viewpoints from different perspectives, in such a way that the play becomes humorous and exhilarating. 6 As Margaret Rose remarks, literary parody contains at least two texts, or textworlds, as partial imitation or evocation of originally serious images while reworking in a newly disjunctive or comic manner. 7 Stoppard identifies the past and re-forms it with the present. Thus modes of parody are used to shape his play as well as subvert traditional absolutes and assumptions. It is the postmodern spirit of parody which has invigorated Stoppard s plays with wit and exhilarating intellect. The past-present sequence can be found in Arcadia, one of Stoppard s full length play. The play shifts from one time span to another, the present and the early years of the nineteenth century. The first scene is set in a single space room with a garden in front, a large country house in Derbyshire in April The second scene moves to the twentieth century in present day where the Coverly descendents reside at the estate. At the conclusion of the play Stoppard brilliantly merges the past and present as Septimus and Thomasina, Hanna and Gus whirl around the stage to the strains of a waltz, separated by centuries yet united by the mysteries of chaos and attraction. The concluding scene of Arcadia recalls of Derrida s difference wherein opposites are united; chaos and order, attraction and

5 5 repulsion, past and present, young and old all depend on each other integrally, henceforth, no presence without absence and no absence without presence. 8 Tom Stoppard s plays have also been examined in the light of the postmodernist view of intertextuality. Stoppard transcends the limits of subjectivity with his own inventiveness questioning radically notions of stability and rejecting modernist paradigms. The plays have been discussed touching on the Bhaktinian dialogic amidst different views and consciousnesses. Derrida s crucial reading of language and neologism or Dogg language as invented by Stoppard in Dogg s Hamlet incline towards the playfulness and ambiguous nature of life dethroning ideological biases, since signifiers no longer point at their accepted signifieds: Abel: (into the microphone) Breakfast, breakfast sun dock trog [* Testing, testing one two three ] (he realizes the microphone is dead. He tries the switch a couple of times and then speaks again into the microphone.)sun dock trog pan slack [*one two three four five ] (The microphone is still dead. Abel calls to someone off-stage.) 9 Stoppard gives a translation in English for the audience at the end of a conversation. The conversation of the children goes on simultaneously in both languages and becomes quite complicated. It is through the actions on the stage that to the audience import an understanding to the play. The familiar assumptions about language as the natural medium of expressing reality are deconstructed; moreover, language is treated like a scaffolding platform to building a structure, which once completed is usually dismantled or discarded. The absence of final truth about

6 6 language, about any entity, in the manner of postmodernist belief, brings forth in Stoppard a blending and clashing of ideas and worldviews making the world and life more open and meaning more plural. All these notions of intertextuality supplemented by Stoppard in his plays have the dramatist s concerns for making sympathies more expansive and life more tolerant. Stoppard goes beyond the absurd, while the absurd in literature is that which defies what is conventionally comforting, religiously re-assuring, and metaphysically logical. Stoppard enhances postmodernist views through his plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where the tossing of the coin comes to head every time, this reflects that the theater of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead denies the comforting humanist perspectives of the Elizabethan stage and the Enlightenment rationalism of truth as against uncertainty. It puts into doubt, the way Beckett and Pinter did, the sanctity of the individual which naturalism so resolutely upholds 10 Stoppard s radical positions conforming to none of the conventionally modeled realities or structured meanings appear to move towards a realist theater, a realism which does not deny the essentially comic-farcical and which has to negotiate inevitably the shifting subjectivities and the undecidable difference of the contemporary times. The absurdist theater aimed at and structured a mode of expression to recreate that which is absurd subverting cerebrations of stable meanings and symbolic forms of meaningfulness. The postmodernist theater, such as Stoppard s, nevertheless, apart from its complicated relationship with modernism, goes many steps ahead to be a theatrical spectacle by celebrating the playfulness and jouissance of life rather than intellectually cloistered meanings.

7 7 In a sense, Stoppard continues the Socratic tradition of open dialogue in his plays. An example can be extracted from Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a scene at school, the teacher tells Sacha about freedom and its different forms. Stoppard seems to be questioning freedom through his characters and aims towards a morally purposive dimension in human life, which is the inwardly felt impulse for the initiation of an action, thus awakening the audience about freedom and directing towards the activity of need, desires and ideas. Stoppard reveals that he is a man of no convictions, and believes that one should have the courage of no convictions. As he sees it, self-contradiction is a dialogue between contending dimensions within, thus constituting a dialectical strength. To hold to an ideal with rigorous consistency often produces a kind of atrophy of spirits. 11 His plays demonstrate a space of contentions. Parody renders Stoppard s theater to be an entertaining performance with serious morals. However, the serious intents are by no means a legitimate formula for old assumptions and beliefs to revive; the more significant purpose rather is to reclaim the fundamentals of life s values and the freedom of conviction. To Stoppard the freedom of conviction is not to be exercised from certain imposed presuppositions; in other words, it may be cultivated in interactive discourses, in dialogic processes such as the present is in a dialogue with the past, the selfreflexive contemporary with the self-legitimating traditions. And the dialogue is open-ended, self-critiquing and self-reflexive without any metaphysics of reassuring certainty and truth to prove.

8 8 Chapter 1: Introduction. This chapter explores on the idea of parody and it s relevance to Stoppard s plays. The playwright s brief biographical sketch and his views on parody and play is being contested. The chapter also situates Stoppard as a playwright in the tradition of English playwrights like Shakespeare, Beckett, Wilde and Pinter among others. His achievements in the literary world have been explored and opinions in relation to his works by critics have been highlighted. Postmodernist views have been touched upon to situate Stoppard as a radical parodist, with his predecessors. His works have been examined in the light of an entertainer, and how far he has succeeded in entertaining his audience. His contemporaries like Pinter, have evolved from the modernist tradition of English drama after Samuel Beckett. Both Stoppard and Pinter have gone beyond Beckett in their characterization and style. With Peter Shaffer and Edward Bond, Tom Stoppard forms a circle dominating the National Theater in Britain; however, unlike them and unlike the new social realists, mostly his esteemed near-contemporaries such as Behan, Delaney, Livings, Arden, McGrath, Osborne and Wesker, Stoppard shows his affinities with Beckett and Pinter for the kinds of metaphysical questions explored intellectually in his plays above social issues. Sometimes, Eliot s Prufrock seems more to characterize his own intellectual creations, in the sense that Prufrock lives absurdity of life and intellectual uncertainties in transcending lurking incompatibilities between individual ability and social complexity, knowledge and reality, logic and chance. Such incompatibilities form the central dramatic interest, which Stoppard engages with powers of wit and imagination at his command.

9 9 Stoppard emerges as an intellectual and entertaining parodist. Parody has a seminal place in Stoppard s dramatic art and theatrical performance, to say the least. Moreover, an energetic sense of play (playfulness) is insistent in Stoppard the parodist. The kind of parody Stoppard sensitively apprehends may be underlined as postmodern. Chapter 2: Stoppard s Intertextual World. This chapter explores the playwright s sources of inspiration and his conscious adoption and adaptation of past masters in various genres of literature and art. As works of literature Stoppard s plays take on the pre-existent plays, texts or traditions, and attempt to critically respond to established notions of meaning, cultural codes and philosophical absolutes in a manner that resembles postmodernists. Postmodern concepts of intertextuality and subjectivity have been examined. The post-world War-II situations expose scientific progress, the laissez faire and free market economies, Salvationist faith, socialist ideals and the nuclear family as bedtime lullabies. The empty and illusory stabilities of these grand narratives do increasingly indicate the fact that no text is uniquely placed to hold the absolute meaning. Stoppard s plays are intellectually and philosophically demanding. Their apparent meanings are not the only ones which make them interesting, these have been examined in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead where Ros and Guil the two characters of Stoppard are split between the conscious and the unconscious, having existential problems. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Stoppard's technique of extracting two minor characters from the famous Shakespeare play

10 10 Hamlet enables the audience to gain unique and enlightening perspectives on the existential problems of the individual. Situated in the context that it is, the two characters Ros and Guil are unable to comprehend their own identities and thus their own individualities, which prevents them from conceiving their own free will. The lack of making choices and taking control of their lives, ultimately leads to them falling into the contrivances of fate, which let them question the meaning of life. This is explicit in the opening scene where they discover probabilities. In this regard, they are conscious of a world that seems to be controlled around them. However, one could argue that their existence is already contrived by their previous existence in Shakespeare s Hamlet. It might seem to the audience of Travesties that Stoppard is teasing us with mischief in the play, which opens with silence later followed by a diverse and miscellaneous flow of languages. Tzara blabbers out his poem which happens to make sense in French, Joyce gabbles about from the chapters of XIV of Ulysses, and Lenin s wife drops a scrap of paper which Joyce reads out for the audience in English which makes no sense. In Arcadia Stoppard talks about knowledge and explores the nature of the world with questions that examine staple truths of science, religion and romanticism. He premises that no being is created superior to the other and that one is differentially defined in terms of the other. Plurality of life and freedom of the perception are reinforced. It is a fact that Stoppard s play is felt to be an intertext. The Stoppard reader feels thus obliged to consider the network of textual relations as well as their

11 11 meaningful significances that arise out of such conditions of intertextuality. The chapter also investigates the complex issues of language where signifiers no longer point at their signifieds. That there is no final truth about life, no objectively verifiable absolute meaning anywhere. Poststructuralist thinkers like Julia Kristeva are relevant to the present study, for she introduces the idea of intertexuality in her The Bounded Text as constructed out of already existing discourses. Parody as a literary device is used artistically by Stoppard to deal with intertextual perspectives. Chapter 3: Aiming Beyond the Absurd. This chapter explores beyond depths of absurdity and nihilism postulated by Stoppard s predecessors such as Beckett among others. The aesthetic movement of absurdism started as a radical response to effects of the Second World War; its issues are found to receive impetus from Dadaism and Surrealism. The idea of absurdity is based on man s divorce from the meaningful background he once possessed and man s existence in an incomprehensible world; and the absurdist theater that derived energies once from the existentialism other arts became a staple of stage performance in the fifties and sixties. The absurd dramatists were interested in the staging of absurd human conditions rather than narrating mental conflicts in narrative modes became dramatically more effective in capturing the interest of audience. Stoppard s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is significantly a recontextualization of Beckett s Waiting for Godot. However, here Ros and Guil, raised above Shakespeare s pawns meant for sacrifice, wander bewilderingly for some clues to explain why they are put in a world or a situation as it is, which is absurd. This reflects that the theater of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead denies the comforting humanist perspectives of the Elizabethan stage and

12 12 the Enlightenment rationalism of truth as against uncertainty. It puts into doubt, the way Beckett and Pinter did, the sanctity of the individual which naturalism so resolutely upholds 12 In Dirty Linen and Newfoundland Stoppard travesties the British Parliament showcasing the House of Commons, a comedy filled with wit, puns and full of entertainment. While Stoppard, presents an attack on the suppression of individual liberties in Communist countries in Every Good Boy Deserves Favor. He contrasts the circumstances of a political prisoner and a mental patient in a Soviet mental asylum, to question the difference between free will and the freedom to conform. Stoppard s plays sometimes come close in constructing language to Wittgeinstein s concept of language. By decisively separating the structure of language from the perceivable world, Wittgeinstein postulated that any investigation into human language would not give access to reality; on the contrary, language is a projection of the mind rather than a picture of the world, in a sense creates reality. 13 The playwright has an abiding interest in parodic apprehension of reality, and Stoppard s theater has gone beyond his predecessors in matters of characterization, moral perspectives, linguistic innovations, as well as stagecraft. Chapter 4: Towards a Moral Dialectic. This chapter focuses upon how Stoppard discusses the moral in terms of religion, society and culture, and how Stoppard as a playwright postulates the moral consciousness through his characters. The socio-political concern of Stoppard has been analyzed through questions like moral responsibilities towards individual freedom. The Socratic method is dialectical, which provides Stoppard with

13 13 inspiration to form an inquiry and debate between characters with opposing viewpoints. The asking and answering of questions stimulates the critical thinking and illumination of ideas between characters in the plays. In Travesties, Stoppard primarily dramatizes the complex relationship between art and revolution without a consistent resolution. The central characters are presented as committed to their avowed ideals, such as Lenin as a Marxist radical committed to absolute action, Joyce to his modern experimental art with a religious passion, Zara zealously committed to the pleasure principle, bent on pulling down outworn gods of the Victorian world; whereas Carr is the anchor of discussions, himself a contradictory spokesman for the truth. 14 The moral that emerges out of the heated debates is that no ideal or philosophy is sacrosanct; on the other hand, each character contradictorily and parodically reveals some lurking shortcoming in another. One remembers, historical materialists such as Marxists based the ideal of progress on dialectical conflict of class consciousnesses, economic interests, or even philosophers of dialectical Enlightenment advocated progress by reason as the answer to all doubts. 15 Enter a Free Man seems to be concerned with the problems of the individual as a private being, having to exist in a society which does not agree with him. There seems to be a conflict between social convictions and private aspirations between the characters in Enter a Free Man. Riley holds his desires as more important than what is reasonable according to his family, society or culture that surrounds him. The Real Inspector Hound, turns into a surrealistic piece about the rivalry of theater critics. Moon and Birdboot act as theater critics and their views

14 14 about life have been postulated as a never ending existence. To Stoppard life is a continuation and everything is connected to the other. Stoppard enforces in his plays a high degree of responsibility and moral action, without which any action turns heartless and immoral. The important issue is not whether God exists or does not exist as regards ethical behavior; but human actions motivated, as the playwright believes, by hard practicability and logical inferences alone would produce an impossible absolute. To him, a wholly rational society is like a machine, a merciless performer of presupposed objectives. The kind of moral vision that Stoppard advocates has to do with the in-betweenness between all absolutist positions, and he would pursue a more democratic and tolerant world. In an interview Stoppard reveals his moral views through one of his plays Jumpers and states that, Jumpers is a serious play dealt with in the farcical terms, 16 and further asserts, Jumpers obviously is not a political act, nor is it a play about politics, nor is it a play about ideology.on the other hand, the play reflects my belief that all political acts have a moral basis to them and are meaningless without 17 The it. moral world of Stoppard envisions elimination of oppressions and subjugations of all kinds social, political, religious, economic, psychological. It is to note pertinently that in Stoppard the mode of parody has definitely deflated the grounds of all discriminatory discourses. Chapter 5: Parody and the Theater. This chapter examines about Stoppard s stagecraft and how parody has been used in theater. The concept of play has been discussed by re-interpreting the past texts. Each play by Stoppard has been conceived with an aim to engender

15 15 intertextual energy on the stage, suggesting brand-new perspectives to actors, directors, and stage-costume-lighting designers as well as a new mode of perception to the spectator. Jumpers stands as one of the most energetic plays of the seventies, where Stoppard conceives a style which deliberately exhausts possibilities and borders upon its own caricature. 18 Furthermore, Stoppard employs brilliant stage-craft, word play and inventiveness as instruments of clearly defined political purposes which invites his inescapable irony and parody. The Stoppardian play text serves as a bridge between the spectacle and the contexts that interest through a constant process of association and dissociation. The typical Stoppardian play seems to deal with philosophical concepts in a witty, ironic and linguistically complex way, such as Arcadia, a bittersweet country-house comedy that sweeps between Regency England and today, taking in discussions of romanticism, classicism and dynamics of scientific energy. Thomasina s distant relatives echo her lines through time, with a word misplaced. Stoppard achieves an enrichment of dramatic dialogue and intensification of theatricality through deliberate defamiliarization or denaturing of the languages of drama. However, his plays consistently exploit and celebrate the semiotic energy of intertextuality in which the inverting and re-contextualizing art of parody and the paradoxical involvement of play are invariably present. Chapter 6: Conclusion. The concluding chapter evaluates the earlier discussions and concludes comprehensively on Stoppard s performance and achievement as a postmodern dramatist. Some critics are of the opinion that as a playwright Stoppard s works are clever and entertaining. In the present thesis, many of the conflicting and confusing

16 16 views on Stoppard s plays are found to be untenable and the view that his works are too cerebral, and lacks enough heart has not much reason to defend. As a postmodern playwright Stoppard has reconceptualized the Absurdist Theater, passed beyond it by innovative dialogic of language and social politics in relation to his predecessors. He reintroduces absurdity and political dialogue not giving a pre-fixed solution. On the bases of earlier discussions it may be concluded that Stoppard is a postmodern parodist. As a postmodern parodist, he has expressed radical views and playfully parodied earlier texts and established assumptions. In these discursive endeavors, his ethical and political premises appear more subversive of the contemporary presuppositions and turn him into a postmodern realist. His intelligent and creative handling of the subject matter ranging from politics to psychology, metaphysics to mathematics, love to aesthetics, and from dehumanization to moral issues has exhilarating effects and empowering potential for the reader.

17 17 Works Cited 1 Hohne, Horst. Liberal Intellectualism in the Theatre: Tom Stoppard s Controversial Career as Dramatist, by Angol Filologiai Tanulmanyok. Hungarian Studies in English, Vol. 14, 1981: 5. 2 Taylor, John Russell. Tom Stoppard, in: The Second Wave. London, Denith, Simon. Parody: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, Ibid Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, Gussow, Mel. American Theatre. The New York Times. Dec Web. 15 th August Rose, Margaret. Review of Parody, Christy L. Burns MLN Vol. 109, No. 5, Comparative Literature Dec Zlomislic, Marko. Jacques Derrida s Aporetic Ethics. United Kingdom: Lexington Books, Stoppard, Tom. Doggs Hamlet. London: Faber and Faber, Brassell, Tim. Tom Stoppard An Assessment. London: Macmillan, Whitaker, Thomas R. Fields of Play in Modern Drama. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, Brassell, Tim. Tom Stoppard An Assessment. London: Macmillan,

18 18 13 Ibid Brassell, Tim. Tom Stoppard An Assessment. London: Macmillan, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. USA: Stanford University Press, Stoppard, Tom. Ambushes for the Audience: towards a high comedy of ideas. Theater Quarterly Ibid Barth, John. The Literature of Exhaustion. On Contemporary Literature. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz New York: Avon Books,

19 19 Bibliography Primary Sources Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, Print. ---, Enter a Free Man. London: Faber and Faber,1968. Print. ---, After Magritte. London: Faber and Faber, Print. ---, Jumpers. London Faber and Faber, Print. ---, Travesties. London: Faber and Faber, Print. ---, Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land. London: Faber and Faber, Print. ---, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. London: Faber and Faber, Print. ---, Dogg s Hamlet. London: Faber and Faber, Print. ---, Cahoot s Macbeth. London: Faber and Faber, Print. ---, Arcadia. London: Faber and Faber, Print.

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25 25 Orlich, Ileana Alexandra. Tom Stoppard s Travesties and the Politics of Earnestness. East European Quarterly XXXVIII.3 (September 2004): Web 6 June Reiter, Amy. A Literary Salon and Site Review Salon Magazine. 13 th Nov Sept Web. 7 th Feb Phiddian, Robert. Are Parody and Deconstruction Secretly the Same Thing? New Literary History, vol.28, no.4, 1997: Web. 15 April The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: University Press, Print XXIV. JSTOR. 6 August Scolnicov, Hanna. Stoppard's Intertextual. Assaph: Studies in the Theatre 11 (1995), Web. 7 Feb Stoppard, Tom. Interview with Shusha Guppy. The Art of Theater No. 7. Web. 18 July Stoppard, Tom. Interview. Ambushes for the Audience: towards a high comedy of ideas. Theater Quarterly Print. W P Phillips, John. A Guide to Jacques Derrida s Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences Revised 17/03/09. Web. 6 August Yiiksel, Aysegiil. Aesthetic Distancing in Tom Stoppard s Drama. Web. 15 th Feb