Abstract
How many readers and theatre–goers would find the hallmarks of Tom Stoppard's verbal wit in those Peer Gyntian lines from Every Good Boy Deserves Favour? The lines are spoken rapidly by Alexander, the political prisoner detained in a "hospital," to his absent son; every word is meant, without ambiguity or irony either in the phrasing or in the situation; and the verse is a mnemonic, in case the prisoner is not allowed writing material "on medical grounds." This is only a local example of the remarkable change in Stoppard's comedy from a relativistic and parodic universe of wit to a new kind of comedy that combines moral and political commitment with a newly stable satire of real/absurd worlds, recognizably located in Russia and Czechoslovakia. It is an interesting transformation of comic vision, strategy and language.
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