Playwrights

Tom Stoppard’s Bookshelf

February 17, 2021 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“Stoppard is a maniacal reader who collects first editions of writers he admires. Asked on the BBC radio show ‘Desert Island Discs’ in 1984 to choose the one book he’d bring to a desert island, he replied: Dante’s Inferno in a dual Italian/English version, so he could learn a language while reading a favorite. His idea of a good death, he’s said, would be to have a bookshelf fall on him, killing him instantly, while reading.” –Dwight Garner, “‘Tom Stoppard’ Tells of an Enormous Life Spent in Constant Motion,” New York Times review of Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard: A Life (February 15, 2021)

Contributed by Guy Raffa (University of Texas, Austin)

Playwright Margaret Edson

February 19, 2012 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“MARGARET EDSON is the Harper Lee of playwrights. She has had just one play produced — ‘Wit,’ which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 and has been revived on Broadway in a Manhattan Theater Club production starring Cynthia Nixon — and having said what she had to say, she doesn’t feel any need to try playwriting again. She occupies herself these days with projects like learning the piano and setting the multiplication table to opera choruses. She reads Dante in Italian, a canto or so every day, and once made a scale model of Paradise with the Sun-Maid raisin lady holding a basket of souls.” [. . .] –Charles McGrath, The New York Times, February 16, 2012

Jozef Szajna, “Dante” (1974)

June 30, 2008 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“Among his other plays are “Rejoinder,” “Reminiscence” and “Dante,” the latter based on the journey through the realms of the dead in the 14th-century Divine Comedy but laced with Mr. Szajna’s depictions of 20th-century hellishness.” –Dennis Hevesi, The New York Times, June 30, 2008

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