Biography of the Author Literature & Language Coursework (Coursework Sample)

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Biography of the Author
The focus of this analysis will be on Shakespeare in Love by Tom Stoppard. There is no contemporary playwright that has been as successful as Stoppard in the creation of serious comedies that include funny plays dealing with critical ideas. It has resulted in recognition of his efforts with various rewards for playwriting. In addition to receiving different honorary degrees, he was honored with a knighthood in the U.K. He was born on 3rd July 1937 in Czechoslovakia. His family moved to Singapore from Nazis when Stoppard was two years old. It is during this period that his father died during the beginning of World War II. Throughout the time of the war, his family lived in India before relocating to England in 1946.
Stoppard's initial writing was when he started working as a newspaper journalist after quitting school at 17years of age. A Walk on the Water was his first play in 1960 and won his first award in 1965. Tom Stoppard engaged in writing various film and television scripts, short stories, and radio plays from this period. The Invention of Love was one of his greatest successes as it resulted in different positive reviews in 1997. Some of the factors that make Stoppard among the visual humor and comic intervention master and a great witty wordplay include the skills of investigating philosophical questions in an entertaining way (Michel). From 1977, there has been an increase in his concern on various issues relating to human rights and active involvement in Amnesty International.
Tom Stoppard started writing Shakespeare in Love in the 1980s, a period characterized by an increasingly influential trend on a self-revelatory or confessional monologue. The confessional performance played a critical role as the primary response to the American postmodern culture in the 1980s. It comprised solo performance artists working from autobiographical material, creation of comic-confessional portraits gallery, and the conventional playwrights responsible for structuring their plays based on confessional narratives. There are common categories of the 1980s confessional performance. The most common and widely used monologue drama disrupted the thematic certainty because of the prolonged and ironic reflexive confession of the character during the narration of the action. The monologue drama has significant confession domination as the primary thematic play conflict and action rather than a strategic framing device related to traditional realism (Schmor). In the 1980s monologue drama, confession presents identity as outright artifice or ambiguous construction question. It implies that confession is less of a recovery act and more of survival action, fashions self-immune to depict existing reality than to trace a true self in a rational past.