A play will not shape or destroy the academic discipline of history. Any play “based on a true story” remains just that. Audience members who take that fiction as truth are most likely also guilty of giving a Whig history of their morning.

So put history onstage, I say—sometimes, fictionalization is worth the risk. Stories are the way people and events embed themselves in public consciousness. You package moments in narratives so that people can remember them and think: yes, this still matters.

What did Lord Byron do that day, and why? the historian asks in chorus with the playwright. We are all asking the same questions, and answering them in different ways.

“It’s wanting to know that makes us matter,” Stoppard’s Hannah Jarvis says, and the audience nods along.

The proper, footnoted history will always be more complex than its stage counterpart—lives are always messier than the ways we can communicate them. But the stageplay reminds us to keep looking back: there is something there. It reminds us to look to the past for the Persons, not just the names,; to remember that these were people who were made of flesh and blood, just like the actors now temporarily bearing their names.

“Come to me,” the theater says, “and I will teach you to continue to want to know, to look to the past for that which is fascinating and beautiful and challenging and mysterious, and perhaps not as distant as it may seem.”

Alona R. Bach ’16 is a history of science concentrator in Cabot House.