Tom StoppardTom Stoppard is one of the most interesting and creative playwrights of the twentieth century. He uses his art form to criticize society's inability to deal with the thought that we are governed by chaos. The modern world has created fate as an excuse to do nothing to shape or change our outcome. Stoppard uses his works as a mirror held up to society, showing his audience how ridiculous it is to leave everything to fate. Tom Stoppard is a contemporary playwright living in Great Britain. He was born in 1937 and produced his first successful play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966. His more recent works include Travesties and Arcadia. The setting of these three plays is very different; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern set in Shakespeare's time, Travesties set during the First World War and Arcadia set in 1809 and the present day. Yet, in all three settings, Stoppard created modern characters to reflect modern attitudes and, more specifically, modern flaws. In any case it shows that the characters representing modern men will readily believe that their future cannot be changed and that they are not responsible for their actions. He uses different characters in very different circumstances to make and criticize this same point. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Stoppard skillfully removes the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet's play, extends their Shakespeare caricatures, and modernizes them. The show is now about how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern present the viewer with a picture of modern attitudes. They never perceive any kind of order in the universe. For them everything is completely random. The Player instead represents the...... center of the card...... capable of creating clear differences in attitude between the cast of 1809 and the current one. In this way he was able to show his social mirror to the public in two different ways. First, in the differences between the 1809 cast and the modern one and secondly through the ways in which the characters of the modern cast embodied modern attitudes. Prime examples of this are the differences between Thomasina and Valentine and how Valentine's lack of patience and his willingness to give up looking for patterns in nature's chaos reflect society's inability to deal with chaos. Bibliography: Stoppard, Tom., Arcadia, New York, Samuel French, Inc., 1993.Stoppard, Tom., Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, New York, Samuel French, Inc., 1967.Stoppard, Tom., Travesties, New York, Grove Press, 1975.