Sir Tom Stoppard admits inventing a quote from a fake professor

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Playwright made the admission at the Althorp Literary Festival
The fictional quote appears in the programme for Arcadia
The play premiered at the National Theatre in 1993
Sir Stoppard also wrote 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead' and 'The Real Thing' among other plays

Published: 09:16 EST, 13 June 2015 | Updated: 12:09 EST, 13 June 2015

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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

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.

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.

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.

So he made one up instead.

‘In the end I couldn’t find a quotation which quite said what I meant,’ he said.

‘So then I made it up and attributed it to a professor whom I also made up.

‘And then I kind of sat back and waited for somebody to [notice], but it hasn’t happened to this day.

It was something pretty smart-arse like, “The romantic is an idea, but it needs a classicist to have it”. Or something like that.’

The original programme – held in the archives of the National Theatre – includes a paragraph comparing romanticism and classicism, which ends with the quote.

It reads: ‘Romanticism is an idea which needed a classical mind to have it.’

Offending quote: The fictional quotation appeared in the 1993 programme for Arcadia, which premiered at the National Theatre. It appears under the headline 'Classical & Romantic' on the left hand page

Sir Stoppard attributes it to the fictional J.F. Shade, who he claims lived between 1898 and 1959.

Searching for the quote online turns up only one hit – a Wordpress blog that cites the quote from the programme directly.

But Sir Stoppard didn’t stop with just one confession.

He went on to name the book he hadn’t actually read, but most often pretended he had.

‘I wrote one play which had James Joyce among the cast of characters.

‘Travesties, it was called. And it’s full of allusions to Ulysses, his masterpiece.’

Way with words: Sir Tom Stoppard is the man behind 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead' and 'The Real Thing', among other plays

Treading the boards: Actor Benedict Cumberbatch, appearing on the National Theatre stage as Rosencrantz in November 2013

After that, he confessed, people started to treat him as ‘a sort of Joyce expert’.

‘I hadn’t actually read Ulysses, actually. I just, as it were, found things in it at random.’

But around 25 years after writing the play, Sir Stoppard’s conscience proved too much for him and he read the book while on a week-long trip on the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Vladivostok.

THE LIFE'S WORK OF J.F. SHADE (1898-1959)

This is the full quote that appeared in the original 1993 programme of Arcadia, at the National Theatre. Sir Tom Stoppard attributed it to the fictional professor J.F. Shade:

'Our urge to divide, counter-balance and classify has never, perhaps, produced two denominations which work so suggestively over the infinite terrain of human expression.

'In speaking of Classical and Romantic literature, painting, music, sculpture, architecture or even landscape gardening, we balance reason against imagination, logic against emotion, geometry against nature, formality against spontaneity, discretion against valour…

'But in so doing, we are drawing attention not so much to different aesthetic principles as to different responses to the world, to different tempers.

‘Romanticism’ is an idea that needed a Classical mind to have it.’