Arcadia

by Tom Stoppard

THE LITERARY WORK

A play set in Derbyshire, England, from 1809-1812 arid in “the present” first published and performed in 199 3.

SYNOPSIS

Three modem-day scholars— a literature don, a historian, and a mathematician—convene at Sidtey Park to try to piece together the history of the Park and its Inhabitants.

Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place

The Play in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Play Was Written

For More Information

Sir Tom Stoppard, often thought of as the quintessential contemporary English playwright and gentleman, was actually born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, on July 3, 1937. Stoppard took the name of his stepfather, Kenneth Stoppard, a British officer who married his mother after his natural father was killed during the Second World War. In the 1960s Stoppard began to write plays that treat a breathtaking variety of topics, from nuclear physics to metaphysics. Stoppard’s early play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead, which retells the story of Hamlet from the point of view of its most minor characters, was a huge success when it premiered in 1966. Stoppard’s subsequent plays include The Real Inspector Hound (1968), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), The Real Thing (1982), Hapgood (1988), and The Invention of Love (1997). While known primarily as a playwright, Stoppard has also written both fiction (Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, 1966) and screenplays, including those for Brazil (1986), Empire of the Sun (1987), and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1991). Most recently, Stoppard won the Best Screenplay Oscar for the 1998 film Shakespeare In Love. Like this film, Stoppard’s Arcadia moves back in time, exploring history to tell us more about our own era.

Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place

Chronological note

Arcadia takes place in the same room during two different time periods: 1809-1812, and “the present” day. The plot has characters from the contemporary era trying to learn about the historical characters, and the two time periods are set before the viewer for comparison and contrast.

The Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815)

The Napoleonic Wars were a series of conflicts between the French and most of the other European powers. The French troops intended at first to defend and spread the republican ideals of the French Revolution (1789), but the war soon turned into French conquest for its own sake. By 1809, when the earlier part of Arcadia is mainly set, the French Empire under Napoleon controlled nearly all of Europe, including Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Prussia, and most of Italy. This left Britain essentially alone to oppose France.

Napoleon was eventually brought down by his own vast ambitions. In 1813 a new coalition of European powers finally managed to raise an army greater than Napoleon’s, and they began to liberate nations one by one. In 1814, this coalition invaded France, reaching Paris in March. Napoleon abdicated and was exiled in Elba for a year. However, he escaped and returned to France in 1815 to raise his final army. England, Russia, Prussia, and Austria swiftly and effectively opposed him, bringing Napoleon to defeat at Waterloo in June of 1815. The Napoleonic Wars are an important, if unseen, backdrop to Arcadia. For Lady Groom, the war is merely an inconvenience to travelers: “The whole of Europe is in a Napoleonic fit, all the best ruins will be closed, the roads entirely occupied with the movement of armies, the lodgings turned to billets and the fashion for godless republicanism not yet arrived at its natural reversion” (Stoppard, Arcadia, p. 41).

Lord Byron and Romanticism

While Lord Byron, also known as George Gordon (1788-1824), never actually appears in Arcadia, he is nevertheless a major presence in the play. One of the key plot points concerns whether Lord Byron ever visited Sidley Park, and what he may or may not have done during his stay there.

Lord Byron is an actual literary and historical figure, a poet and satirist whose very name has become synonymous with Romantic masculinity; we speak even today of a “Byronic” hero. Stop-pard’s fictional protagonist Septimus Hodge is a friend of Byron’s from both Harrow (middle/high school) and Trinity College (Cambridge University), and in Arcadia, Septimus and Byron move in the same literary and social circles.

Both Byron’s life and work exemplify important qualities of the Romantic Movement, which emphasizes individuality, high emotions, irrationality, spontaneity, sensuality, and imagination. Romanticism was a rebellion against classical and neoclassical values, which included reason, moderation, the intellect, tradition, and observance of aesthetic and moral rules. Romantic writers like Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and others lived lives full of passion and imagination—they traveled widely, wrote intensely, and had various love affairs (see “England in 1819” and Other Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times).

Byron’s fictional behavior in Stoppard’s Arcadia certainly reflects aspects of the poet’s real life. One of the play’s modern characters, the literature professor Bernard Nightingale, tries to figure out why Lord Byron left England so suddenly in the year 1809. The solution he comes up with is wrong, but the mystery is historically a real one—Byron did in fact suddenly and mysteriously leave England, and to this day no one knows why. In the play, Byron has affairs with all the play’s adult female characters; in real life, Byron was very promiscuous and had affairs with women across Europe, most notoriously with his own married half-sister Augusta, Mary Shelley’s niece Claire, and Lady Caroline Lamb.

Byron is today admired not only for his literary works (e.g. the epic poems Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-18) and DonJuan (1819-24) (in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times) but for his zestful and passionate life. When he wasn’t writing, traveling, or attending to his various mistresses, Byron was challenging himself to swim across the Dardanelles (a strait connecting the Aegean Sea and the Sea of Marmara), or leading a brigade of Greek revolutionaries in their war against the Turks. In Arcadia, Septimus Hodge, like his friend Byron, is also a wit, a literary critic, and a seducer of women who gets challenged to a duel.

Sir Isaac Newton and classical physics

In Arcadia, Septimus Hodge teaches Lady Thomasina the scientific and mathematical principles that were current in the early nineteenth century. These principles were drawn almost entirely from the work of Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727). Newton’s work figures into Arcadia in several important ways, but perhaps the most important concepts can all be explained in terms of Newton’s three laws of motion: 1) unless a force operates upon them, objects in motion stay in motion and objects at rest stay at rest; 2) the change of motion in an object is proportional to the force exerted upon that object; 3) for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. All three laws deal with Newton’s discovery of force, which is actually now measured in units called newtons. Force is in fact the basis for Newton’s famed law of gravity as well. Newton discovered that any particle of matter in the universe attracts any other with a force varying directly as the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them. The moon and the earth, for example, attract each other in proportion to their masses, which keeps the one orbiting around the other. Newton called the force that keeps the moon circling around the earth gravitas, a Latin word that literally means “heaviness” or “weight.”

In Arcadia, these Newtonian ideas inspire a lot of confidence in the universe. If objects that are in motion remain in motion, for instance, then we don’t need to worry that the planets will one day suddenly stop dead in their orbits. All motion is predictable. The planets will keep moving in their elliptical paths the way each and every atom in the universe moves—according to Newton’s laws—and they will all presumably keep moving that way forever and ever. This idea does cause the characters some philosophical problems. For instance, Septimus poses the question, “If everything from the furthest planet to the smallest atom of our brain acts according to Newton’s law of motion, what becomes of free will?” (Arcadia, p. 5). In other words, if all the motion in the universe is governed by physical law, do human beings have any real choice about their actions?

Newton’s deterministic laws of motion turned out not to be the only laws governing the universe. Early nineteenth-century scientists like the Anglo-American Benjamin Thompson (1753-1814), and the Frenchman Sadi Carnot (1796-1832) made discoveries that laid the groundwork for what would come to be called the science of thermodynamics, or the study of heat. Thompson argued that heat was a form of motion and not a substance: when its molecules move quickly, a thing is hot; when they move slowly, a thing is cold. Thus heat and motion are essentially the same science. Carnot’s work showed that there is no way for a perfectly efficient engine to exist because working engines give off heat, which escapes and cannot be used productively as an energy source. Therefore no engine produces enough power to run itself—the energy output of a machine is always less than the energy input. This may seem obvious, but the fact that heat escapes, that things move from hotter to colder and not the other way around, contradicted an important consequence of Newton’s laws, which suggest that physical events are reversible, that they can run backwards as well as forwards. Where Newton’s laws of motion suggested a universe that would keep moving forever, the science of thermodynamics suggested that energy escapes a system over time, and thus the universe is slowly growing colder and slowing down.

The science of thermodynamics therefore was the first major challenge to the Newtonian Universe. While historically, the laws of thermodynamics were not formulated until later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Arcadia’s Lady Thomasina turns out to be a scientific genius. Sidley Park happens to be in possession of an early steam engine, and Thomasina, though brought up with Newtonian ideas, figures out that “Mr. Noakes’s engine cannot give the power to drive Mr. Noakes’s engine” (Arcadia, p. 87). With this stroke of brilliance, Thomasina contradicts Newton, anticipates thermodynamics, and profoundly shocks her tutor Septimus, who realizes that “the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold. Dear me.” (Arcadia, p. 93).

Landscape gardening

In the modern part of the play, gardening historian Hannah Jarvis notes that:

The history of the garden says it all, beautifully. There’s an engraving of Sidley Park in 1730 that makes you want to weep. Paradise in the age of reason. By 1760 everything had gone—the topiary, pools and terraces, fountains, an avenue of limes—the whole sublime geometry was ploughed under by Capability Brown. The grass went from the doorstep to the horizon and the best box hedge in Derbyshire was dug up for the ha-ha so that the fools could pretend they were living in God’s countryside.

(Arcadia, p. 27)

In other words, Sidley Park has experienced all three of the main styles that characterize eighteenth-and nineteenth-century landscape gardening: the neoclassical, the natural, and the picturesque. Until 1760, Sidley Park’s garden and grounds had been designed in the neoclassical style, which technically speaking isn’t landscape gardening at all, but really a form of architecture. The neoclassical style emphasized geometric precision, so that for instance the garden at Hampton Court Palace was characterized by avenues radiating out from a central point like the spokes from the hub of a wheel.

Landscape gardening properly refers to the movement in eighteenth-century English gardening in which gardens were modeled on landscape paintings. As such, it was a rebellion against the formal, classical garden. Landscape gardeners were inspired by “nature,” or rather famous paintings of nature. In trying to make the landscape seem more natural, landscape gardeners did away with the fences (or in the case of Sidley Park, hedges) that divided the formal gardens from the larger parkland that comprised an aristocratic estate. Gardeners instead substituted a ha-ha, a sunken ditch that was invisible from the house but kept a large estate’s grazing animals—like cows and sheep—out of the garden proper without destroying the illusion of one single, sweeping vista. The famous gardener Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1715-83) created a number of “natural” landscapes consisting mainly of grass, irregularly shaped lakes, and clumps of trees.

However, Capability Brown’s view of nature came to be itself challenged by a style known as the picturesque. The argument of the picturesque style is that “real” nature is messy and disorganized, characterized by chaos—rotting trees, overgrown ruins, waterfalls, swamps, jutting cliffs and the like. Of course, all of these elements—the trees, the ruins, the cliffs—would be carefully constructed in the new garden by an expert designer. In Arcadia, the fictional nineteenth-century landscape gardener Richard Noakes has plans for Sidley Park that include such features as “gloomy forest and a towering crag,” “ruins where there was never a house,” “water dashing against rocks where there was neither a spring nor a stone,” “a fallen obelisk overgrown with briars,” and—lest we forget—a hermitage (Arcadia, p. 12).

The rise of the waltz

It might be difficult to imagine now, but the waltz used to be considered an unsophisticated and even a scandalous dance. Coming from the German word waltzen, which means tramping, the waltz was born in the eighteenth century as a German peasant dance. Other nations became interested in the waltz in the years after the French Revolution, which stimulated an interest in folklore and other cultures. However, England didn’t begin to accept the waltz until about 1810, during the time when Arcadia is set. While the waltz quickly became a social phenomenon, it was still considered risque. Unlike the minuet, the highly precise and formal dance that had previously dominated upper-class society, the waltz forced couples into a close embrace and sent them whirling around the room at dizzying speeds. (The speeds then were, in fact, much faster than today’s waltzes.) Doctors claimed that waltzing would cause injury. Moralists claimed that the waltz was indecent and would corrupt European youth. But the flying, gliding freedom of the waltz was perfectly in tune with the Romantic spirit of the era. Lord Byron wrote a poem about waltzing in 1812, “The Waltz; An Apostrophic Hymn,” in which he described “Hands promiscuously applied/Round the slight waist, or down the glowing side” (Byron, The Poetical Works, p. 277). In 1812 in Arcadia, Lady Thomasina begs Septimus to teach her how to waltz, promising that “If mama comes I will tell her we only met to kiss, not to waltz” (Arcadia, p. 92). Apparently Thomasina would rather be discovered having an affair with her tutor than dancing the scandalous waltz!

The Play in Focus

Plot summary

Arcadia’s seven scenes (scenes 1-4 constitute Act 1; 5-7 constitute Act 2) all take place in one garden-front room of the Sidley Park estate during two different times, the early nineteenth century and “the present.” The last scene takes place simultaneously in the two time periods, although the characters are separated by time and do not interact with each other. The set for both times is the same: the room is furnished sparsely with a large wooden table and chairs and an architect’s stand. Over the course of the play, the table accumulates items from both periods.

ACT 1, Scene 1 (1809). Thirteen-year-old Lady Thomasina Coverly is studying with her tutor, Septimus Hodge; motionless on the table is Septimus’s pet tortoise, Plautus. Thomasina asks Septimus an unexpected question about sex. She has overheard that Mrs. Chater, their houseguest, was discovered in “carnal embrace” in the gazebo and wants to know what carnal embrace means. Septimus realizes that he himself has been caught. He has been having an affair with Mrs. Chater. A servant brings him a letter from Ezra Chater, Mrs. Chater’s husband, challenging Septimus to a duel. Septimus puts the letter into the book he is reading and planning to review, an epic poem by Mr. Chater called “The Couch of Eros.” Shortly thereafter Mr. Chater himself storms into the room, wanting vengeance. Septimus placates Chater by persuading him that his wife was only trying to get him a good review.

Lady Croom, Thomasina’s mother, sweeps in, upset about the gazebo. Chater and Septimus immediately assume she is condemning the love affair, when, in fact, she is merely complaining that the gazebo is about to be demolished by the landscape gardener Mr. Noakes, who is redoing the Sidley Park grounds in the picturesque style. Noakes shows the group his drawing book of the proposed new landscape. It contains, among other features, a decorative hermitage. Lady Thomasina, in a fit of whimsy, draws a picture of a hermit into Mr. Noakes’s book.

Scene 2 (the present). Writer Hannah Jarvis is temporarily living at Sidley Park because she is researching a book about its gardens. In particular, Hannah is interested in the hermit who lived there—whose only known likeness appears in the surviving copy of Mr. Noakes 1809 garden book. Rumor has it that the hermit lived in the garden for years, scribbling endless pages about how the world was coming to an end. Hannah considers the hermit a perfect symbol of “the Romantic sham,” which she conceives of as “the decline from thinking to feeling” (Arcadia, p. 27).

A literature don named Bernard Nightingale arrives but lies about his identity; he doesn’t want Hannah to know who he is because he wrote a terrible review of her last book. Bernard tells Hannah that he is doing research on the minor poet Ezra Chater. But Bernard’s real identity is soon exposed he is actually a famous scholar of Romanticism and Lord Byron. Bernard has found “The Couch of Eros” in Lord Byron’s library, and that copy contains a challenge from Ezra Chater to a duel. (This copy of “The Couch of Eros,” as we already know, actually used to belong to Septimus, and the challenge was made to Septimus also.) But Bernard is convinced that Byron dueled with Chater and killed him, which solves the famous mystery as to why Lord Byron fled England in 1809. Hannah thinks Bernard’s theory is wrong, but admits that her research has revealed that Sidley Park’s tutor, Septimus Hodge, was a classmate of Byron’s.

Scene 3 (1809). Back in the past, during her morning lessons, Thomasina tells Septimus that she thinks her mother is in love with Lord Byron, who is in fact currently a guest at Sidley Park. She also tells Septimus that at breakfast that morning, Lord Byron revealed that Septimus actually wrote a terrible review of Ezra Chater’s last book. Septimus tries to change the subject by criticizing Thomasina’s math homework: Lady Thomasina is trying to develop mathematical equations that describe not just simple curves and lines but natural shapes like leaves and flowers.

Lady Groom’s brother Captain Brice and Mr. Chater storm in. Chater is even angrier than before about Septimus’s affair with his wife, since he no longer believes that Septimus will give his poem a good review. Chater again challenges Septimus to a duel, and Septimus objects that he is not the only one having an affair with Mrs. Chater—Captain Brice is too—whereupon Captain Brice also challenges Septimus to a duel. Septimus wearily accepts them both, saying that he will fight Chater the next morning at 5:00 A.M., and that he “can fit [Captain Brice] in at five minutes after five” (Arcadia, p. 42).

Scene 4 (the present). Jumping forward to the present again, the play shows Hannah reading Thomasina’s math books to Valentine Coverly, the heir of Sidley Park and himself a mathematician: “I, Thomasina Coverly, have found a truly wonderful method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone” (Arcadia, p. 43). Valentine says that Thomasina must have been lying. What Thomasina claims to have discovered—fractal geometry and iterated equations—has only been known for the last 20 years.

Hannah informs Bernard that Captain Brice married Mrs. Chater in 1810—so presumably Mrs. Chater was a widow by 1810. Bernard is thrilled. He thinks this supports his theory that Byron killed Chater. Hannah points out that Bernard has no proof—in fact, Bernard can’t even prove that Byron was ever at Sidley Park. Valentine pipes up that Lord Byron certainly was at Sidley Park—in the game books, there is a record of Byron shooting a hare. Bernard is thrilled at this news.

Hannah asks Valentine why Thomasina couldn’t have done iterated equations in 1809, since they’re not that complicated, mathematically speaking. Valentine, exasperated, explains that there was not enough time or enough paper back then—what we can do today in seconds with a calculator or computer would have taken Thomasina years and years, and reams of paper. Valentine concludes that anyone who did endless, boring calculations on paper would a) have to have a really good reason for doing it and b) would have to be essentially insane.

ACT 2, Scene 5 (the present). Bernard is reading his research paper to Hannah, Valentine, Valentine’s sister, Chloe Coverly, and Valentine’s mute “genius” brother, Gus Coverly. Bernard is rehearsing for a press conference he will be giving in London. He plans to announce that Lord Byron killed Ezra Chater and fled England to escape murder charges. Hannah points out that Bernard fails to mention all the evidence that does not fit his theory.

Before he leaves for London, Bernard shows Hannah an excerpt from a book which describes the Sidley Park hermit and his pet tortoise Plautus. Hannah then reads Valentine a letter she has found, which claims that the hermit was driven insane by: “Frenchified mathematick that brought him to the melancholy certitude of a world without light or life . as a wooden stove that must consume itself until ash and stove are as one, and heat is gone from the universe” (Arcadia, p. 65). This surprises Valentine; the letter seems to be describing the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But thermodynamics—like iterated equations—hadn’t been discovered yet. Hannah notes that the Sidley Park hermit was born in 1787—the same year as Thomasina’s tutor Septimus Hodge.

Scene 6 (1809). Back in the past again, it is early in the morning and we hear the sound of a shot. But it isn’t the duel; it is just Septimus shooting a rabbit. Septimus has been waiting for the duel, but the butler informs him that during the previous night Mrs. Chater was discovered having an affair with Lord Byron, and Lady Groom threw all of them—the Chaters, Byron, and Captain Brice—out of the house! Byron is on his way to Europe and has taken Septimus’s copy of “The Couch of Eros” with him; the Chaters and Captain Brice are going on an expedition to the West Indies.

Scene 7 (1812 and the present, simultaneously). The modern characters are preparing for a fancy dress ball to be held at Sidley Park in nineteenth-century costume. Bernard’s sensational theory has made all the newspapers, giving rise to headlines such as “Bonking Byron Shot Poet” (Arcadia, p, 74). Valentine confesses to Hannah that he’s working on Thomasina’s equations. He’s done what she couldn’t do—put her equations into a computer—and he plans to publish the results. But Valentine still doesn’t believe that Thomasina realized what she had accomplished. He claims that if Thomasina had really discovered iterated equations she’d have been famous. But Hannah tells Valentine that Thomasina didn’t have time to be famous—she died in a fire the night before her seventeenth birthday. If anyone knew about and understood Thomasina’s discovery, says Hannah, it would be her tutor, Septimus Hodge.

At this point a young man rushes into the room—he looks like Valentine’s brother Gus, but he is really Lord Augustus, Thomasina’s brother (who is played by the same actor.) Sixteen-year-old Thomasina chases her brother in, and for the first time modern and historical characters occupy the same stage at the same time. Septimus arrives, separates the fighting siblings, and sits them down to take their drawing lesson. Thomasina asks Septimus if he liked her latest mathematical equation—it is, we understand now, an iterated equation—and explains that she didn’t have enough paper to finish working on it. Septimus studies Thomasina’s math book.

Elsewhere on the stage, among the present-day characters, Hannah is studying the same math book. Valentine explains to her that iterated equations are the mathematics of nature. If the laws of thermodynamics mean that the world is going to end, then iterated equations may show how this world started and how the next world may begin.

The early nineteenth-century Septimus puts down Thomasina’s equations and picks up his own book to read. He then shows the book to Thomasina; it is a French essay about heat. Thomasina reads the essay, and suddenly we hear the rhythmic pounding of a steam engine in the distance. Mr. Noakes is using a new engine to dig up the garden.

Lady Groom enters carrying a pot of dahlias, which have come from the West Indies. She tells us that Mr. Chater died in Martinique of a monkey bite, and that Captain Brice has married Mrs. Chater.

Thomasina finishes reading the French essay and announces that, just as she thought, Newton’s theories are incomplete. Just as Newton’s geometry does not describe nature, Newton’s theories of motion don’t account for the way heat works. Thomasina sits down and tries to draw a picture of what she means.

Lady Croom complains to Mr. Noakes that if he is going to build a hermitage in her garden, he ought to supply her with a hermit to live in it.

Thomasina leaps up and gives her drawing to Septimus, explaining that it shows how you can never get the same power out of a heat engine that you put into it. In fact, usable energy is always decreasing—this is the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Lady Croom is understandably puzzled by Thomasina’s statements, and suggests that perhaps Thomasina has had enough education—it may be time for her to get married. Thomasina meanwhile has been continuing to draw. This time she has sketched a portrait of Septimus and his tortoise, Plautus. Lord Augustus takes possession of the picture, and all leave the room.

ENGLISH COLONIALISM IN THE CARIBBEAN

In Arcadia, several characters go off on a Caribbean expedition. In fact, the English were the dominant colonial power in the West Indies during the nineteenth century. By the early part of the century, they control led Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Tobago, Grenada, Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica, Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat among other places. They did not control Martinique, the French colony from which lady Croom receives an exotic plant, the dwarf dahlia, in the play, British interests in the West Indies focused on the trade of slaves sugar, and manufactured goods. Often the Englishman went there only temporarily, setting tip plantations, then leaving them to function—and profit—in his absence while he himself returned home.

The present-day Bernard arrives and Hannah tells him the bad news: Ezra Chater wasn’t killed by Byron; he died of a monkey bite in Martinique. She has found this information in Lady Groom’s gardening diary, where Lady Croom explained how she came by her exotic dahlias. Hannah plans to correct Bernard publicly in the Times the next day. The modern characters put on period costumes for that night’s ball and leave the room to pose for a picture.

The light changes; night falls.

Septimus enters the dark room carrying an oil lamp and Thomasina’s mathematical papers. A few minutes later Thomasina sneaks in wearing her nightgown. She has come to beg Septimus to teach her to waltz. Someone is playing piano in the next room, but not a waltz. While they wait for the right music, they discuss Thomasina’s scientific theories.

Hannah and Valentine enter the room in period dress. Valentine is excited because he’s realized what Thomasina’s first drawing means. It’s a diagram of heat exchange, and now Valentine believes that Thomasina really was a genius who discovered the Second Law of Thermodynamics ahead of her time.

Septimus is at that very moment learning about the Second Law directly from Thomasina. He is also realizing to his horror what the Second Law means—that the universe is doomed to go cold and die. Septimus doesn’t know what to do in the face of this devastating knowledge, but Thomasina remains cheerful: if you are facing the end of the world, she tells him, all you can do is dance. Septimus takes Thomasina into his arms and begins to teach her the waltz. He stops, kisses her intensely, and then they continue waltzing.

SAFE AND SAFER SEX

The upper-class characters In the early-nineteenth-century part of Arcadia seem to enjoy relatively carefree sexual affairs In contrast to the late-twentieth-century characters. Although AIDS (acquired Immune deficiency syndrome) was identified as early as 1981, the disease didn’t really reach wide spread public consciousness until the mid to late 1980s, A fatal disease that still has no cure AIDS effectively ended an era of careless or carefree sex and ushered in an era of safe sex Arcadia modern characters live—and even Joke about—this new, grimmer world As Valentine notes, “My mother’s lent [Bernard] her bicycle. Lending one’s bicycle is a form of safe sex, possibly the safest there Is (Arcadia, p, 51),

Bernard rushes back into the room. Chloe’s mother has discovered that Chloe and Bernard have been having an affair. Bernard grabs his jacket and heads for the door, wishing Hannah good luck with her book. Hannah says that she can guess who the Sidley Park hermit was, but she can’t prove it.

Septimus stops the waltz lesson and tells Thomasina she should go to bed, reminding her to be careful with her candle. Thomasina asks Septimus to come to bed with her, but Septimus refuses. Thomasina then refuses to leave Septimus. They will dance again, once more, in celebration of her seventeenth birthday tomorrow.

The mute Gus Coverly comes into the room with a present for Hannah. He has found Thomasina’s second picture, the drawing of Septimus and Plautus. This is the final piece of evidence that Hannah needs to prove that Septimus Hodge became the Sidley Park hermit. Hannah now knows that Septimus and the hermit were the same age, that Septimus/the hermit had a pet tortoise named Plautus, that Septimus/the hermit spent the rest of his life working on Thomasina’s equations in the hermitage, that Septimus/the hermit knew about both iterated equations and thermodynamics, and that Septimus/the hermit had a reason to devote himself obsessively to this task. He was probably driven to madness by his grief at the sudden death of his beautiful and brilliant student. Gus then bows to ask Hannah to dance, and the play ends with the two couples— Septimus and Thomasina, Gus and Hannah— whirling around and around and around.

From Waterloo to Waterloo—things fall apart

Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia takes place in two different time periods: the early nineteenth century and the late twentieth century. One of the important ideas of the play concerns the discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that the amount of usable energy in the universe is decreasing. In other words, things decay; systems become more disorderly and less effective over time.

Stoppard illustrates this point by implicitly comparing the two time periods of his play. Metaphorically speaking, we can see things decaying even in the relatively short time span of two hundred years. For instance, the earlier part of the play is set from 1809-12, during the time when, as Lady Groom notes, “Europe is in a Napoleonic fit” (Arcadia, p. 41). Napoleon had extended the French empire throughout Europe (see entry above), conquering practically every major European power except for Great Britain. As the English audience for Arcadia already knows, the British Empire, led by the Duke of Wellington, would eventually bring Napoleon down at the famous Battle of Waterloo, which took place in 1815 and represented the beginning of a century of British world domination.

The only hint of the triumph of Waterloo present in Arcadia’s modern era is the implied reference to London’s Waterloo Train Station, where the Eurorail train from Paris terminates. Literature professor Bernard Nightingale tells us that he found Lord Byron’s books when the house they were in was “sold to make way for the Channel Tunnel Rail-link” (Arcadia, p, 30). Consider that England and France have historically been enemies (as they were during the Napoleonic wars). Consider that England has always felt protected from Europe, because it is an island separated from the mainland by the English Channel. Then think about what it means for the English that the Channel Tunnel has been built, allowing trains to move easily between England and the continent. The Channel Tunnel has taken away England’s island defenses, and has linked it, rather controversially, to France in particular and to Europe more generally. Arguably, England is no longer strong enough to exist entirely separately from Europe; the Channel Tunnel thus can be seen as a symbol of England’s global decline.

An English audience would understand how profoundly England has changed between the Battle of Waterloo (1815) and the digging of the tunnel to Waterloo Station (1987-1991), and might well think that the changes have not been for the better. Arcadia’s modem era suffers in comparison to the earlier time in other ways as well. For instance, the nineteenth-century character Septimus Hodge is a brilliant wit, scientist, literary critic, and lover. He reads physics in French, translates Shakespeare into Latin, reviews poetry, teaches drawing, dances the waltz. He is, in short, a man of many and various talents. In the modern era, the characters of Bernard Nightingale, Hannah Jarvis, and Valentine Cov-erly are all specialists. They have a particular area of expertise and cannot move fluidly between different areas of knowledge the way Septimus can. They don’t even dance well! Even in terms of sex, the nineteenth-century characters triumph. They have numerous affairs and intrigues, while their modern counterparts are all essentially celibate, save for the Bernard-Chloe affair which is painted as essentially sordid and unsatisfactory. In short, Stoppard seems to be saying that the world has grown worse since the early nineteenth century—we know less, love less, have less grace, charm and adventure, and have generally lost status and power—and that this is perfectly in accord with what science would tell us to expect.

However, there are certainly grounds in Arcadia for a contrary argument. From a late-twentieth-century perspective, the early-nineteenth-century world Stoppard describes is problematic in terms of class, race, and gender. The characters we see are primarily wealthy aristocrats, and so their lives are certainly not indicative of how things were for the average English person at the time. Some of Stoppard’s characters travel to the West Indies, but Stoppard doesn’t mention that England was the dominant colonial power there, or that the colonies were dependent on slave labor. Stoppard does a little better when it comes to women: he recognizes that, even though she’s a genius, Lady Thomasina’s formal education would shortly have come to an end; as her mother notes, it’s about time for Thomasina to get married. Unlike Septimus, Thomasina would not have been able to study at Cambridge. Modern woman Hannah Jarvis, on the other hand, has been able to pursue her studies and remain unmarried yet respectable.

Overall, Arcadia asks us to compare nineteenth-and twentieth-century scholars, lovers, dancers, and England. In each case, the play seems to find the former century superior to the latter. However, it is up to the reader to weigh all the evidence and decide if the nineteenth-century grass was actually greener.

THE CHANNEL TUNNEL RAIL LINK

Also called the “Eurotunnel” or the “Chunnel,” the Channel Tunnel runs for 31 miles underneath the English Channel and connects Folkstone, England to Calais, France. The idea of constructing a tunnel to Europe was revived in 1986 and caused a controversy which lasted for years, England has always had a diffident relationship to Europe in general and to France in particular. As an island, England has often been protected from events on the continent However, with the advent of the Chunnel, that island status has been significantly compromised, Dug between 198:7 and 1991, the Channel Tunnel officially opened in May, 1994, a year after Arcadia premiered in England.

Sources and literary context

As noted, Torn Stoppard’s Arcadia makes reference to a number of real people and events. Obviously Lord Byron was a real poet; less obviously, he did have an affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, the subject of Hannah Jarvis’s previous book. More obscurely, the play’s Newcomen Steam Engine was named for the actual English engineer, Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729), who improved heat engines early in the eighteenth century.

The scientific ideas that Arcadia refers to— Newton’s laws of motion, thermodynamics, iterated equations, fractal geometry, Fermat’s last theorem, and so on—are also real. As Stoppard explained to the journalist David Nathan, “I got tremendously interested in a book called Chasos by James Gleick which is about this new kind of mathematics. . I thought, here is a marvelous metaphor. But, as ever, there wasn’t really a play until it had connected with stray thoughts about other things” (Nathan, p. 13). Some of Stoppard’s stray thoughts were literary. Most of the poems and books Arcadia refers to are also real: Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” and his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). Stoppard’s only real invention was Ezra Chater and his apparently terrible poem, “The Couch of Eros,” and even he reflects reality in that his verse typifies poor literature of the era.

Other characters in Arcadia seem to be based on real people. For example, Lady Groom’s fictional gardener Richard Noakes evokes the real gardener Humphry Repton (1752-1818). Repton was the first to advertise himself specifically as a landscape gardener and, like the fictional Mr. Noakes, was famous for making picture books that provided “before” and “after” views of the gardens on which he worked. Similarly, in 1812 Septimus Hodge shows Thomasina a prize-winning French essay from the Scientific Academy in Paris. While Stoppard never names the scientist, the Baron Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) won the prize of the French Academy of Sciences in 1811 for his mathematical description of heat in solids. Septimus tells Thomasina that she is the French scientist’s prophet, and in fact Fourier did go on to make some of the same discoveries that Thomasina makes in Arcadia.

Events in History at the Time the Play Was Written

The quest for knowledge in the age of technology

If Stoppard’s historical and modern characters have one thing in common, it’s that they are all curious about the world and how it works. They deeply desire to learn and to make discoveries, both literary and scientific. Hannah wants to learn about the Sidley Park hermit; Bernard wants to leam about Byron; Thomasina and Valentine, in different eras, want to learn about the relationship between mathematics and nature. In fact, Hannah Jarvis claims that “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in” (Arcadia, p. 75).

Valentine Coverly, the present heir of Sidley Park, is a scientist, and one of his roles is to explain a number of recent scientific discoveries that are central to the plot of the play. In particular, Valentine explains to Hannah (and to us, the audience) iterated equations, fractal geometry, and the importance of computers in mathematics.

As Valentine eloquently explains, an iterated algorithm “is an algorithm that’s been … iterated” (Arcadia, p, 43). Eventually he does manage to come up with a more precise definition. Take a simple algebraic equation like 2x + 1 = y. If, say, x=1, then y = 3 ([2 x 1] + 1 = 3). If x = 2 then y = 5, and so on. In an iterated equation, you feed your answer back into the question, making your value for y into your next value for x. So, to iterate the sample equation above (2x + 1 =y): if x = 1, theny = 3, if x = 3 then y= 7, if x-7, then y= 15, and so on. Thomasina actually discovered iterated equations back in her time, but nobody recognized the fact because she died so young. Thomasina calls her iterated equation a “rabbit equation” because “It eats its own progeny”—in other words, the solution of the equation is “fed” back into it, just as rabbits sometimes eat their own offspring (Arcadia, p. 77).

It turns out that, as Thomasina suspected, many natural phenomena can be described by using iterated equations, where the answer feeds back into the question. For instance, population biologists—who, like the play’s Valentine Coverly, try to find equations that explain the rise and fall of animal populations—use iterated equations. Last year’s ending population y is the starting point for this year, or is this year’s x. The iterated equation into which each year’s x is fed to determine y is designed to describe and predict how the population will rise and fall depending on external factors, like famine or an abundant food supply.

In the example above, the ending population for 1995 (15,000) is the starting population for 1996 (15,000) and A stands for the transformation, or the equation, that turns each of the starting numbers into the ending numbers. The equation in the above examples always stays the same. What Valentine is trying to do with his game books (which provide a whole bunch of starting and ending numbers representing the varying population of birds on the estate) is to discover the iterated equation that describes the population change.

But iterated equations are not just for population biologists. They are also the basis for something called fractal geometry. In 1809 Thomasina decides to iterate her equations because she is trying to draw pictures of leaves and flowers on a graph. She doesn’t want her x and y graphs to be just boring old lines and arcs. It turns out that iterated equations, when plotted extensively on a graph with millions of numbers—plotted more extensively than Thomasina could ever do with pen and paper—can make pictures that look a lot like leaves, snowflakes, and mountains! As Thomasina says, she has discovered “a truly wonderful method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone” (Arcadia, p. 43).

But these graphs take millions of numbers to turn into recognizable pictures, and one of the key points of Arcadia is that Thomasina wasn’t able to push enough different numbers through an equation with just a paper and pencil. Presumably even Septimus Hodge, alone in his hermitage, wasn’t able to put enough different points onto the graph to make an equation draw itself like a leaf or a snowflake. Computers, however, make such tasks comparatively easy. They can do thousands of calculations in mere seconds.

Computers are a twentieth-century invention. John V. Atanasoff built the first electronic digital computer in 1939, and the first stored-program computers were introduced in the late 1940s. The desktop personal computer is an invention of the 1970s and 1980s, and the laptop computer that Valentine uses to do his grouse research in Arcadia was top of the line at the time. It enables him to calculate infinitely more quickly than anyone in the past would have dreamed possible. In the remaining 22 years of his life, Septimus, the hermit, could not perform the number of calculations that Valentine can do with a personal computer in a month. Arcadia shows another use for Valentine’s computer. He employs it to compare some anonymous essays to actual samples of Lord Byron’s writing, hoping to determine whether or not Byron actually wrote the essays. While some scholars of literature have used computers to authenticate anonymous prose, many (like Bernard) are skeptical about a computer’s ability to make sophisticated literary judgments. Literature professors want to make discoveries, too, but appear to prefer the human touch.

Reception

Arcadia was almost instantly a critical and public success, winning both the Olivier and the Evening Standard awards for Best Play of 1993, and moving from the Royal National Theatre to the West End for a long and profitable run. The expression “almost instantly” is used because the reviews of the play immediately after its premiere were more mixed. The daily reviewers may at first be divided roughly into two groups: those who “got” the play, and those who did not. Arcadia’s references to various complicated, intellectual subjects obviously make it something of a challenge. Some reviewers, like Michael Coveney, confessed themselves, “enthralled … but frankly perplexed” (Coveney, p. 57). Coveney went so far as to title his article “Head-Scratching in Stop-pard’s Arcadia”

There were still differences of opinion among those critics who did get the play’s difficult concepts. Some found the play clever but emotionally dry: “It is elegant, complicated, densely argued, serenely inconclusive and cold as ice,” writes John Peter in The Sunday Times (Peter, sec. 9, p. 12). Others found Arcadia to be a romantic and spiritual experience: “[T]ears prick the eyes… . [The] production achieves an emotional resonance that goes too deep for words,” confessed Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph (Spencer, p. 18). This division—between thinking and feeling—is actually a theme of Arcadia itself. In fact, the deepest divide over Tom Stop-pard’s work as a whole concerns whether he is capable of touching an audience’s heart as well as its brain.

In any case, critical consensus was quickly reached: Arcadia is currently thought to be Stop-pard’s finest play. Charles Spencer spoke for many when he wrote, “I have never left a new play more convinced that I’d just witnessed a masterpiece” (Spencer, p. 18).

—Francesca Coppa

For More Information

Alwes, Derek B. ‘“Oh, Phooey to Death!’: Boethian Consolation in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.” Papers on Language & Literature 36, no. 4 (fall 2000): 392-405.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Tom Stoppard. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 2000.

Byron, (George Gordon). “The Waltz; An Apostrophic Hymn.” In The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. London: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Coveney, Michael. “Head-scratching in Stoppard’s Arcadia” The Guardian, 18 April 1993, 57.

Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. London: Penguin, 1988.

Gussow, Mel. Conversations With Stoppard. London: Nick Hern, 1995.

Jenkins, Anthony. The Theatre of Tom Stoppard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Lahr, John. “Blowing Hot and Cold: Chaos Meets History in a Brilliant New Play.” New Yorker, 17 April 1995, 112.

Nathan, David. “What’s Tom Stoppard’s New Stage Play All About?” Sunday Telegraph, 28 March 1993, 13.

Peter, John. “What Time Is It?” The Sunday Times, 18 April 1993, sec. 9, p. 12.

Spencer, Charles. “Stoppard’s Thrilling Workout.” The Daily Telegraph, 26 May 1994, 18.

Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.