Arcadia

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Arcadia

TOM STOPPARD 1993

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Tom Stoppard is regularly cited as one of England’s greatest playwrights, alongside such national treasures as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, John Osborn, David Hare, and Alan Ayckborn. Yet, even among such lauded company, Stoppard’s place is considered unique, for he writes plays, and creates worlds, unlike other dramatists. In a career that has spanned three decades and more than two-dozen plays, Stoppard has consistently made his audiences laugh, cry, and think, all at the same time. In a New Yorker review of Stoppard’s Arcadia, critic John Lahr explained, “The three-ring circus of Stoppard’s mind pulls them in at the box office, where news of the intellect, as opposed to the emotions, is a rarity. . . . Stoppard’s mental acrobatics flatter an audience’s intelligence and camouflage the avowed limits of his plotting and his heart.”

Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, on July 3, 1937. When he was only two, his family moved to the island republic of Singapore. In 1942, when the Japanese invaded, he was evacuated to India with his mother and brother. His father, who remained behind, was killed. In 1946 his mother married Kenneth Stoppard, a British army major, and the family moved to England. Stoppard attended English public school from the age of nine to seventeen, then left to become a journalist. (Later reviewers suggest that his lack of a complete formal education may be the greatest asset to his work—it is often held that his lack of knowledge in areas such as history and formal literary structure allow his plays to be freewheeling dramatic escapades.) He wrote for a couple newspapers during the next few years, eventually specializing in theatre and film. His first work as a dramatist was on

radio; he had two fifteen-minute radio plays broadcast on the BBC in 1964, The Dissolution of Dominic Boot and “M” Is for Moon among Other Things.

After only a couple minor productions of his first stage plays were performed in 1965-66, Stoppard became a sort of overnight sensation in 1967 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a seriocomic absurdist farce about two minor courtiers in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The play was given a major staging by the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain and has been playing on stages around the world ever since. In many ways, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern set the standard by which Stoppard’s future work would be judged. By most critics’ estimation, it contains all of the hallmarks of a “Stoppard play.” It is intelligent and fiercely philosophical, yet at the same time witty, sometimes physically farcical, and it often appears to not take itself too seriously.

These same qualities are found in other Stoppard successes, such as The Real Inspector Hound (1968), in which two theatre critics are murdered on stage by characters in the play they are watching; Jumpers (1972), a farcical parody of modern philosophy; and Travesties (1974), a fantasy play that imagines the results if communist forefather Vladimir Lenin, author James Joyce, and Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara all lived together in Zurich during World War I. In all these plays, Stoppard examines similar themes: the relationship of art to life, the frustrating quest for knowledge and ultimate truth, and the fragile bonds formed between all sorts of human beings. They are the same ideas that are brought to fruition in his 1994 work, Arcadia. With the debut of this play, many critics heralded Stoppard as one of the most influential and revered playwrights of the twentieth century.

PLOT SUMMARY

Act I, scene 1

The action begins in April, 1809. The setting is Sidley Park, the Derbyshire, England, estate of the Coverly family. Thirteen-year-old Thomasina Coverly is studying with her tutor, the young Septimus Hodge, in a large room facing a garden. Thomasina is exceptionally intelligent for her age, and her current project is a search for proof of Fermat’s last theorem, an algebraic conundrum that has perplexed mathematicians since the seventeenth century. Meanwhile, Septimus is reading “The Couch of Eros,” a particularly horrible poem written by one of the manor’s current guests, Ezra Chater.

Thomasina has an insatiable curiosity, and her main interest for the day, other than her math lesson, is in a phrase she overheard: “carnal embrace.” Septimus comically tries to spare his young pupil the adult explanation and convince her that it simply means “hugging a side of beef,” but Thomasina is not fooled. She overheard some of the house staff talking about Mrs. Chater, who was discovered in “carnal embrace” in the gazebo. Septimus relents and explains the alternate meaning of the phrase (“sexual congress”); he does not admit, however, that he was the culprit embracing Mrs. Chater in the garden.

As the two resume their studies, Jellaby, the manor’s butler, delivers a note from Mr. Chater, calling upon Septimus to meet him immediately to fight a duel over the honor of his wife. Septimus slips Mr. Chater’s invitation into the pages of “The Couch of Eros” and returns a message suggesting he will be available later that day, after his lesson with Thomasina. Undeterred, the enraged Chater bursts in, demanding satisfaction.

Chater is boisterous, passionate, and vain but not very bright. Septimus sends Thomasina from the room, then disarms the cuckholded husband by flattering his poetry and praising his wife. He admits making love to the woman but convinces Chater that she did it out of loyalty, in order to persuade Septimus to write a glowing review of her husband’s poetry. Septimus lavishes compliments on Chater’s writing and promises to publish a review that will make him one of England’s most prized poets—though not if he is forced to kill him in a duel. Chater is fooled—and so excited at his good fortune that he inscribes Septimus’s copy of his book with the words, “To my friend Septimus Hodge, who stood up and gave his best on behalf of the Author—Ezra Chater, at Sidley Park, Derbyshire, April 10th, 1809.” (Chater’s note between the pages of the book, and his inscription inside the cover, become important clues in the mystery that unfolds later in the play.)

As the two men settle their compact, other members of the household burst into the room, arguing loudly. Lady Croom and her brother, Captain Brice, are protesting the plans of Richard Noakes, a landscape architect who Lord Croom has hired to refashion the grounds of Sidley Park. Noakes has assembled a series of watercolor paintings that depict the gardens of the country house “before” and “after” his recommended treatment. At the moment the gardens are a vision of classical splendor—trees neatly and symmetrically grouped on the hillside and a lake surrounded by meadows “on which the right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged.” Noakes’s new design transforms Sidley Park into a Gothic wilderness—the Romantic style of the era—complete with gloomy forests, artificial ruins, rampant briars, and a rustic hermitage. Lady Croom and Captain Brice are mortified but young Thomasina, who heard the commotion and returned to the room, judges Noakes’s scheme perfect.

The sound of gunfire is heard outside, where the poet Lord Byron is hunting with Lord Croom and his young son, Augustus Coverly. The group marches out of the room to meet the hunters and continue debating the transformation of the Croom estate, leaving Septimus and Thomasina alone again. Innocently, she draws a picture of a hermit in Noakes’s hermitage and hands Septimus a note from Mrs. Chater, which he reads then inserts into the pages of “The Couch of Eros.” (Both the drawing and the note also become essential clues later in the play.)

Act I, scene 2

The next scene takes place nearly two centuries later, at the present day Sidley Park. The room remains the same but its inhabitants change. Hannah Jarvis, an author in her late thirties, is visiting the estate, which still belongs to the Croom family. She has written one bestselling book already and is conducting research for her next work, which she thinks will focus on the breakdown of the Romantic Imagination in the early-nineteenth century.

Hannah’s hosts are the current children of the Croom family, who wander in and out of the room throughout the scene, preparing the house for a big costume garden party. The children are Valentine Coverly, an Oxford postgraduate student conducting mathematical research on the number of grouse reported killed in the family’s game books over the years; Chloe Coverly, the Crooms’ eighteen-year-old daughter; and Gus Coverly, the fifteen-year-old, apparently mute, youngest son.

The mysteries which are at the root of Arcadia’s, plot develop with the arrival of Bernard Nightingale, a Sussex professor who has come seeking information about Lord Byron. Bernard has stumbled across Septimus’s copy of “The Couch of Eros” and discovered the notes and inscription inside. Because the book was found in Byron’s personal library, Bernard has taken a few creative—and erroneous—mental leaps. He has developed the theory that Lord Byron, who was visiting the Croom estate at the same time as Chater in 1809, killed the hapless would-be poet in a duel and fled the country. A mistake of sorts is also at the root of Hannah’s work. Finding Thomasina’s drawing of the “hermit” in Noakes’s landscape sketches, Hannah assumed the figure was a real person, who died on the estate in 1834. She is making the “Sidley hermit” the metaphorical centerpiece for her book about the decline of Romanticism in England.

Hannah and Bernard get off to a rocky start when she discovers that the pompous professor is actually the same man who wrote an insulting review of her first book. Two heads appear better than one, however, as they each have information to offer that helps them piece together the clues of their separate puzzles. They declare a truce and spend the day ransacking the estate’s library for proof of their theories. At the same time, Chloe expresses an interest in Bernard and tells Hannah she plans to ask him to the party that evening; and young Gus seems to have developed a similar crush on Hannah. At the end of the scene, the silent boy presents her with an apple, freshly picked from the orchard.

Act I, scene 3

The scene changes to the past. It is 1809 once more, a day after the previous skirmish between Septimus and Chater. Thomasina is once again studying in the great garden room, attempting to translate a poem from Latin into English. Septimus is writing his review of Chater’s “Couch of Eros.” Again Jellaby delivers a note from Chater, which Septimus chooses to ignore. Thomasina reveals that her mother, Lady Croom, is angry with Lord Croom for allowing Noakes to destroy the garden and has become interested in their houseguest, Lord Byron.

Thomasina continues to insist, over Septimus’s objections, that the universe can be reduced to a mathematical formula. In order to prove it, she offers to plot the leaf off an apple (the same piece of fruit, left on the set from the previous scene, that Gus gave to Hannah) and deduce its equation.

Chater storms in with Captain Brice, once again demanding a duel with Septimus. He has heard about Septimus’s scathing review of his previous work, “The Maid of Turkey,” and is convinced the tutor means to insult him again when he writes about his new book. Before the men can take steps to settle the matter, Lady Croom appears and borrows Septimus’s copy of “The Couch of Eros” to give to Lord Byron. Byron wishes to satirize Chater and his awful poetry in the next edition of his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. (An important plot development: This is how Chafer’s book ends up in Byron’s library for Bernard to find generations later.) Lady Croom remarks with some concern that Byron intends to leave Sidley Park and go adventuring through Europe, right in the middle of the Napoleonic wars.

Lady Croom rushes off with “The Couch of Eros,” leaving the quarrelsome men alone again. This time Septimus agrees to duel. He will meet Chater behind the boathouse at five o’clock the next morning, followed by Chater’s subsequent duel with Captain Brice five minutes later (the naval officer has also been dallying with Mrs. Chater). Afterward, Hodge rails angrily: he will leave the country, Byron can remain behind to tutor Thomasina, and everybody will be happy.

Act I, scene 4

Present day Sidley Park: Hannah and Valentine are poring over books in the garden room. Hannah is examining Septimus’s math primer, while Valentine leafs through Thomasina’s lesson book. They have discovered a note Thomasina wrote in the margin of the primer, similar to Fermat’s last theorem, that suggests her intent to explain nature through numbers. The graphs in her lesson book, Valentine explains, are primitive iterated algorithms, created using the same mathematical theory Valentine is applying to his study of the grouse population in the game books. He is surprised by the find, since iterated algorithms weren’t widely known until computers made them practical, late in the twentieth century.

Bernard sputters into the room, excited about a recent find. He has discovered a copy of Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers with a penciled inscription insulting Chater’s poetry. To Bernard, this is proof positive that Byron killed Chater. Hannah adds fuel to the fire by telling him about a discovery of her own. She ran across a letter from Lady Croom to her husband that describes the marriage of Captain Brice to Mrs. Chater, again suggesting that Mr. Chater had been recently killed. More crucial, if misleading, information comes from Valentine, who affirms that Lord Byron was indeed a guest at Sidley Park; the game books he has been studying record that Byron shot a hare there in 1809.

Bernard rushes off in search of the records, while Valentine leads Hannah to a new revelation in her own work. He notes that it would take innumerable pencils, stacks of paper, and years and years of concentrated time for someone to complete the iterated algorithm that was started in Thomasina’s lesson book. To do so, Valentine wryly remarks, someone would have to be insane. Hannah’s thoughtful look suggests she is putting some new pieces together—linking the Sidley hermit to Thomasina’s discovery.

Act II, scene 5

Bernard’s theory about Lord Byron has rocketed from speculation to spectacular find in a single afternoon. Armed with the “facts” he has been provided by Hannah, Valentine, and the books in the Coverlys’ library, he has already prepared a lecture he plans to read at the Byron Society, prior to publishing his version of history in pursuit of wealth and academic fame. He reads the lecture to the smitten Chloe, who listens adoringly; to Valentine, who listens semi-attentively while feeding his turtle; and to Hannah, who punctuates his address with continuous objections to his findings. In the end, she warns him, “You’ll end up with so much fame you won’t leave the house without a paper bag over your head.”

In the course of arguing about his research, Bernard manages to offend everyone in the house except Hannah, who knows his insults and intellectual bullying are only tools of rhetoric—he uses them to win points, not to seriously hurt people. Bernard packs up his research and heads off to town in a cab, promising to return that evening to accompany Chloe to the costume party. On his way out he drops another piece of Hannah’s puzzle in her hands: a small book, written in 1832, that describes the hermit of Sidley Park and his pet tortoise, Plautus. She adds this to a letter she found, announcing the death of the hermit at the age of twenty-seven, and is more convinced than ever that the hermit and Septimus Hodge are one and the same, but she has yet to find the final clue that will prove it.

Act II, scene 6

The briefest scene of the play describes how the events of 1809 came to a climax in the middle of the night at Sidley Park. It is early in the morning, just before dawn, and Septimus returns from the boat-house, where he was supposed to have dueled Chater but instead shot only a rabbit. He is met by Jellaby, who explains that Mrs. Chater was caught leaving Byron’s room the night before, and in the tumult that followed, Captain Brice, the Chaters, and Lord Byron all left the estate. Lady Croom interrupts the gossip, sending Jellaby off to work. She is infuriated at Septimus for leaving behind two letters to be read in the event of his death. One was a love letter, addressed to her, the other a note of encouragement from teacher to student, addressed to Thomasina.

It turns out that Septimus’s real passion all along has been for Lady Croom—Mrs. Chater was merely a diversion. For her part, the Lady has always been fond of Septimus and merely toyed with Lord Byron. She reveals that her brother, Captain Brice, has enlisted the help of Mr. Chater to serve as an amateur botanist on an expedition to the Indies. His ulterior motive, of course, is to be near Mrs. Chater. Septimus and Lady Croom agree to put the events of the past few days behind them. To please her, Septimus even burns a letter he received from Lord Byron without reading it. Grateful for his discretion, Lady Croom invites Septimus to come to her room later that morning. When she is gone, the young tutor burns the two letters he wrote as well, leaving no clues for future detectives like Bernard and Hannah.

Act II, scene 7

The final scene of the play combines the past and present on stage at the same time. In the present, it is the night of the costume garden party, hosted by the Coverlys. Chloe, Valentine, and Gus are all dressed in Regency clothes, typical of Byron’s era. Bernard’s “discovery” has landed him in all the newspapers, while Hannah still struggles with her hermit. Valentine has fed Thomasina’s equations into a computer, taken them a few million steps further than she was able, and produced beautiful pictures out of simple numbers. While looking over Valentine’s shoulder at his computer-generated model, Hannah reveals the most startling surprise of the play: Thomasina died in a fire at Sidley Park the night before her seventeenth birthday.

While Valentine and Hannah continue their work in silence, Thomasina and her little brother, Augustus, run onstage. A few years have elapsed in the nineteenth century setting. It is now 1812, and Thomasina is sixteen and nearing her birthday. Septimus joins the children for the daily lesson, which Augustus chooses to abandon. Left alone, Thomasina insists that Septimus should make good on his promise to teach her how to waltz. The piano has been playing in the next room throughout the scene. At the keys (though unseen) is Count Zelinsky, Lady Croom’s new piano tuner and, apparently, her new lover. When she whisks into the room Septimus treats her coldly. She ignores his jealousy and remarks on her new dahlias, which Captain Brice recently brought back from his expedition to the Indies, where Mr. Chater died of a monkey bite and Mrs. Chater subsequently became Mrs. Brice.

Switching to present-day action, Bernard appears for his date with Chloe and is hounded immediately by Hannah, who has found the last, and fatal, piece of his puzzle. In one of Lady Croom’s garden books, Hannah ran across an entry describing the dahlias and Chater’s unfortunate accident in the Indies. Since he was killed picking flowers by a monkey, he obviously could not have been killed in a duel by Lord Byron. Bernard finally realizes he should not have rushed to judgment and that his newfound fame will soon be over when Hannah reports her find in the press. Life, for the moment, goes on, and Chloe assembles a costume for Bernard to wear to the party.

A few hours pass and it is evening. In the offstage room, the Count is playing piano for Lady Croom. Septimus is studying Thomasina’s work when she appears in her nightgown for her waltzing lesson. The work she has drawn in her lesson book, it turns out, is a diagram of heat exchange. It suggests what hadn’t been discovered yet by scientists: that heat could not work backwards. The second law of thermodynamics, as described by Thomasina, meant the universe must someday wind down, grow cold, and die. Disturbed by the implications, Septimus takes his young pupil in his arms and begins to dance.

While Septimus and Thomasina waltz, and stop to kiss, the action in the present day continues around them. Bernard suddenly rushes in, adjusting his clothes, followed by Chloe. They explain to Valentine and Hannah that Chloe’s mother caught them together in the hermitage. A little embarrassed but not very repentant, Bernard dresses himself and prepares his escape, leaving a crestfallen Chloe behind. On his way out the door Hannah tells him she thinks she knows who the hermit of Sidley Park was but still lacks proof. Still his impetuous self, Bernard advises her: “Publish!”

Septimus and Thomasina stop their dancing. He returns her lesson, lights her candle, and tells her she should go off to bed, being careful of the candle’s flame. Too in love to leave, she asks for another dance. As they twirl around again, Gus enters with a folio for Hannah. It contains a drawing of Septimus and Plautus, the final piece of her puzzle, linking the tutor to the hermitage. In a gesture of gratitude, she dances, awkwardly, with Gus. The final haunting image of the play is of the past and present dancing together.

CHARACTERS

Captain Edward Brice

Captain Brice is the bold and blustery brother of Lady Croom. He is not as refined or witty as his sister, but he can be equally as stubborn. When on duty, he serves in the British Royal Navy. While off duty, he has been staying at Sidley Park with his sister and pursuing Mrs. Chater, the wife of Ezra Chater. Because Mr. Chater is even less perceptive than he is, Captain Brice has been able to conduct his love affair with Mrs. Chater right under the poor man’s nose. At one point, faced with the possibility that Septimus Hodge might be dallying with Mrs. Chater as well, Captain Brice offers to stand up for Mr. Chater in a duel for her honor. The twice cuckolded Chater never realizes he is caught between two of his wife’s lovers. When the Chaters are finally thrown off the property for their scandalous behavior, Captain Brice offers Mr. Chater a job as a botanist on an expedition he is leading to the Indies. Once there, the hapless Mr. Chater dies from a monkey bite, and Captain Brice finally gets to marry the object of his affection.

Ezra Chater

Ezra Chater is one of the play’s greatest fools and one of literature’s biggest cuckolds. He is quick-tempered, slow-witted, vain, and married to a woman who cannot stay faithful. He ended up at Sidley Park as the guest of Captain Brice who, in amorous pursuit of the lusty Mrs. Chater, flattered his poetry and paid fifty pounds to have him published. Chater views Brice as his doting patron, and Brice views Chater as a nit-wit.

When Chater hears that Septimus Hodge, the estate’s tutor, has been seen in “carnal embrace” with his wife, he quickly challenges Septimus to a duel. He changes his mind, however, when Septimus falsely praises his poetry and offers to write a glowing review in a London periodical. Later he discovers he has been fooled again, and reissues his challenge. He is prepared to meet Septimus behind the Coverly’s boathouse at dawn, but is rushed off the property in the middle of the night when his wife is caught with yet another man, the rakish poet, Lord Byron. Sometime later, while accompanying his wife and Captain Brice on a voyage to the Indies, Chater is bitten by a monkey and dies abroad. Hardly pausing a day to mourn, the widowed Mrs. Chater marries Captain Brice.

Augustus Coverly

Augustus Coverly is seen only briefly, near the end of the play. He is Thomasina’s younger brother, fifteen years old in 1812, and a student at Eton. The first time he appears he is taunting his sister and is rude to Septimus. He returns briefly, however, penitent and hoping the tutor will have a brotherly talk with him about sex.

Chloe Coverly

Chloe Coverly is the daughter of the modern day Croom family at Sidley Park. She is eighteen, extremely impressionable, and immediately falls for Bernard’s flamboyant appearance and insistent intelligence. Though not as academically inclined as her older brother, Valentine, or as intuitively gifted as her younger brother, Gus, she manages to supply one of the play’s more interesting ideas. While everyone seems determined to find sense, some kind of ordering theory, in chaos, Chloe suggests that sex is the wrench in the works. “The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it’s trying to be,” Chloe claims, “but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that part of the plan.” The human element, as unpredictable as anything chaos could muster, is what the others weren’t considering. In the end, Chloe is caught up in the chaos, when her mother finds her in “carnal embrace” with Bernard at the family garden party.

Gus Coverly

At fifteen, Gus is the youngest of the modern Coverly children, the descendants of Thomasina and Augustus Coverly. He is an autistic and mute, given to shyness with unpredictable spurts of sociability. Valentine, his brother, tells Hannah that Gus spoke until he was five, then he mysteriously went silent. The modern day Lady Croom (unseen in the play) believes he is a genius. After spending months, and hiring experts, to help her find the foundations of an old boathouse on her property, Gus led her right to it. The enigmatic boy seems to function as some kind of symbol in the play, perhaps as a representative of intuition over reason. Near the end, it is Gus who provides Hannah with the final clue she needs to solve the puzzle she has been working on: a sketch of Septimus holding Plautus the tortoise.

Thomasina Coverly

The progress Thomasina Coverly makes in Arcadia is from precocious to poignant. She begins the play as the nearly fourteen-year-old daughter of Lord and Lady Croom, owners of Sidley Park. Young as she is though, Thomasina knows—and guesses at—truths far beyond her years. While studying her mathematics, she asks her tutor, Septimus Hodge, with mock innocence, “What is carnal embrace?” She is undeterred when he tells her it is “the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef,” and proceeds to relay a story she heard about one of the house guests caught in carnal embrace in the gazebo. Sometimes she is childlike and impish, while at other times her deadly seriousness is disarming.

In many ways, Thomasina is the central character of Arcadia. She searches for truths, in people, in mathematics, and in poetry, and her ideas send the other characters scurrying for answers—or scratching their heads. Her genius is intuitive. She struggles to learn things, such as Latin, by rote, but she can perceive things and draw conclusions that others cannot. For example, she realizes while eating her rice pudding that the jam can be stirred outward and into the pudding, “making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas.” But, she notes, you cannot stir backward and bring the jam together again. From this experiment, Thomasina concludes that if every atom in the universe could be momentarily stopped in its place and examined, a brilliant mathematician could write a formula for all the future, just by predicting the motion of matter.

Thomasina spends much of the play trying to prove her theory to Septimus, who simply tries to keep up with his young protege and continually challenge her with new ideas. It is not until three years later, during the final scene of the play, that Septimus finally begins to understand what his student has stumbled upon. In trying to explain chaos and thermodynamics, Thomasina has produced a theory that suggests the universe is spiraling outward, cooling off, and will someday grow cold and die. By this time, teacher and student have begun to develop a physical relationship. In the play’s haunting final moments, they dance and kiss, just hours before Thomasina’s seventeenth birthday, when she is destined to die in a fire in her bedroom.

Valentine Coverly

The oldest of the modern Coverly children, Valentine is a postgraduate student at Oxford, studying biology, mathematics, and, recently, chaos theory. Although he is capable of some dry humor (he jokes, for example, that Hannah is his fiance, and he takes his pet turtle “Lightning” out for a “run”), Valentine is mainly a serious-minded, analytical individual. He draws his inspiration from the wonders of science, and finds Bernard’s pursuit of Lord Byron’s history “trivial,” because, he says, personalities don’t matter, it’s the knowledge they produce that is important.

While Hannah tries to find a reason for the collapse of Romanticism as well as a connection to the Sidley Park hermit, and Bernard flails about, grasping at straws to support his wild theories about Lord Byron’s escape from England, Valentine occupies himself with cold, clear, calculated statistics—his family’s game books. The books are a centuries-old record of all the animals that have been hunted and killed on the estate, and Valentine is analyzing the data to find a pattern for the life cycles of grouse in the area. A formula describing the cycles, he explains, must exist, and it would create some order out of chaos. Like Hannah, Valentine gets caught up in the research Thomasina was conducting in the house two centuries before, though he initially cannot believe she knew what she was doing, since science had yet to discover the theories she put forth. “There’s an order things happen in,” he insists, “You can’t open a door till there’s a house.” In the end, though, his scientist’s resolve is shaken, and he recognizes Thomasina’s ideas for genius—and the consequences her ideas have for the rest of the universe.

Lady Croom

Lady Croom is the archly witty resident aristocrat of Sidley Park in the 1809 scenes. Highborn and highbred, she still manages to misquote the painter Nicolas Poussin, insult all her guests, and stoop as low as any other character in the play to satisfy her desires—mostly with any man willing to dally in her dressing room. Lady Croom’s principal objective in the play is to prevent Richard Noakes from ruining the countryside around her home with Lord Croom’s vision of a Romantic wilderness. She is happy with the current arrangement, which includes trees neatly grouped on the hillside and a winding creek flowing from an artificial lake in the middle of neatly trimmed meadows with just the right amount of sheep “tastefully arranged.” In short, she says, “It is nature as God intended.” As her view of nature demonstrates, she is often unaware of contradicting herself, despite her cleverness in conversation and incisive wit.

Lady Croom’s other objective seems to be casual affairs. In the course of the play she manages to find her name connected with no fewer than three of her guests—Lord Byron, the poet; Septimus Hodge, her daughter’s tutor; and Count Zelinsky, an expatriate Polish aristocrat hired as Sidley Park’s piano tuner. Septimus seems to take his relationship with Lady Croom seriously, for he wrote her a love letter, to be opened in the event of his death, before going off to duel with Chater and Captain Brice. Like others before him, however, he is abandoned when the Lady’s affection turns toward Count Zelinsky at the end of the play.

Septimus Hodge

After studying mathematics and natural philosophy at Cambridge, where Lord Byron was one of his classmates, Septimus Hodge came to Sidley Park to work as the tutor for the Croom family’s daughter, Thomasina Coverly. Septimus is young, intelligent, clever, and apparently attractive. He begins the play aged twenty-two. His brief encounter with Mrs. Chater in the estate’s gazebo is choice gossip among the servants, and he is conducting an ongoing affair with Lady Croom, his protege’s mother.

For Septimus, the passions of the flesh compete with the quest for knowledge as his most important defining characteristics in the play. His first responsibility is to Thomasina, who is an exceptionally gifted student, and it often takes all his resources to keep up with her questions and ideas. While studying mathematics and trying to find proof for Fermat’s last theorem, for example, Thomasina wonders about the meaning of “carnal embrace.” Septimus cleverly dodges the uncomfortable question by providing a technically true, if somewhat misleading, answer. “Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef,” he tells his mischievous charge. Septimus’s ability to think quickly on his feet gets him out of a few scrapes in the play. When confronted by Ezra Chater, the husband of the woman he was found embracing in the gazebo, he admits to his indiscretion but turns Chater’s vanity against him. In exchange for avoiding a duel over Mrs. Chater, whose reputation, Septimus claims, “could not be adequately defended by a platoon of musketry deployed by rota,” the young tutor offers to publish a glowing review of Mr. Chater’s book of poetry, “The Couch of Eros,” which Septimus actually hates.

Like Valentine in the modern scenes, Septimus is initially skeptical of Thomasina’s attempts to create order out of chaos in the universe through a simple mathematical theory. He doesn’t doubt her creativity or intelligence, but he is more comfortable when she sticks to traditional lessons from her books. Though he doesn’t immediately recognize it in Thomasina, Septimus does believe genius exists. To him, it is a property shared by humanity across the ages, and great ideas are part of the continuum of life. “The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece or be written again in another language,” he reassures Thomasina. “Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” In the end, he realizes Thomasina is right, and her theory suggests the eventual end of the universe. What he mourns, however, is not the end of life but the loss of innocence. “When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore,” he laments before joining Thomasina in her first, and last, waltz.

Hannah Jarvis

Hannah Jarvis is a cool, capable, and seemingly impenetrable historian who has been invited to Sidley Park by the current Lady Croom to research landscape changes on the estate over the past two centuries. Her specialty area of study is landscape and literature between 1750 and 1834, and she has already written Caro, a best-selling book about Lord Byron. Because she is not an academic, but an actual field researcher and writer, her success has infuriated professors and would-be literary pundits around England. Now she is on to something new. While rooting around the libraries and landscape of the Croom estate she has discovered a new topic, a sort of mystery, to work on. She is trying to find clues about the Sidley hermit, who she calls “my peg for the nervous breakdown of the Romantic Imagination.”

Hannah’s search intensifies when she is joined by an unlikely ally—Bernard Nightingale, a snooty college don who published a scathing review of her last book and has turned up looking for clues to a Lord Byron scandal. Though they seem to be opposite personalities, and quarrel continuously, Hannah and Bernard manage to help one another find pieces to their respective puzzles. One of the biggest differences between them, however, is a proper respect for the process of research and the reporting of history. While Bernard is prepared to rush off to press with his story without all the necessary information, Hannah bides her time, looking for more and more information that will link a small sketch of a hermit found in one of Lady Croom’s garden books to Septimus Hodge, author, tutor and, in Hannah’s mind, a symbol of the descent of Romanticism into the age of scientific reason.

Jellaby

Jellaby is the butler at Sidley Park in the 1809 scenes. He says little, and his principal part in the play is delivering various notes between Ezra Chater, Septimus, and Mrs. Chater. At one point, Septimus bribes Jellaby into telling him about the events of the previous night, when Mrs. Chater was caught leaving Lord Byron’s room and everyone was ushered off the property.

Bernard Nightingale

In his New Yorker review, critic John Lahr called Bernard Nightingale “a whirlwind of spurious intellectual connections” and “a literary climber of the first order.” Other reviewers have called him greedy, self-centered, and a loose cannon. He is all these and more. Bernard is a professor at Sussex University, though his real passion lies in publishing, not in the classroom. When asked if teaching shouldn’t be the first priority for a professor he snidely retorts, “Good God, no, let the brats sort it out for themselves.”

In a way, Bernard is a satirical portrait of the worst kind of scholar academia has to offer. He is an irresponsible intellectual snob who is willing to string together scattered clues on the tiniest shreds of evidence in order to produce grand theories that will make him famous and his colleagues jealous. What’s worse, he dresses the part. Bernard appears at Sidley Park wearing the typical garb of a Sussex don—suit, tie, and large leather satchel—along with some flamboyant touches of his own, like a peacock-colored display handkerchief bursting out of his jacket pocket.

He has come to assemble evidence for his most recent ambitious theory: a connection between the famous Romantic poet Lord Byron and one of the guests at Sidley Park in 1809. He manages to enlist the help of Hannah Jarvis, a writer who is also studying the history of the estate, and the manor’s current occupants, descendants of Thomasina Coverly. One of these, eighteen-year-old Chloe Coverly, he finds time to seduce along the way. Together, they find a series of clues that may or may not support Bernard’s idea that Byron shot and killed a shoddy poet in a duel at Sidley Park in 1809, then fled the country for two years. Heedless of Hannah’s warning that he doesn’t have enough proof yet to take his findings public, Bernard presents a lecture for the Byron Society and even appears on a morning talk show. Immediately afterward, Hannah finds another clue that proves him wrong, and his dreams of lifelong academic fame disappear—for the moment.

Richard Noakes

The part Richard Noakes plays in the plot of Arcadia is quite small, only a few lines, yet his presence embodies the Romantic sentiment of his age. He is a landscape architect, hired by Lord Croom to transform the grounds at Sidley Park from their current state, an orderly pastoral paradise in the style of Capability Brown, into a chaotic, Gothic wilderness, in the picturesque fashion of Salvator Rosa, a popular Romantic painter. While the unseen Lord Croom seemingly supports Noakes and his designs for unkempt, “natural” surroundings, the rest of the household is barely civil toward him. Lady Croom continually hounds him, complaining of the noise his new steam engine makes and insulting his design ideas, and Septimus refers to him as the Devil, sniping, “In the scheme of the garden he is as the serpent.”

THEMES

Enlightenment vs. Romanticism

By setting much of Arcadia in 1809, Stoppard pits two opposing historical epochs against each other: Enlightenment and Romanticism. The eighteenth century age of Enlightenment stressed orderly, rational thought, and conformity to accepted rules and forms, and looked to the Classical Greeks and Romans as models of simplicity, proportion, and restrained emotion in culture, art, and literature. Romanticism of the early nineteenth century was a deliberate revolt against Enlightenment ideals. Romantic philosophers and artists experimented with literary forms and stressed individuality, freedom, and the wildness of nature in their work.

The characters in Arcadia, in both the past and present scenes, represent both kinds of thought. Lady Croom wants to preserve her classically-inspired gardens where, “The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage. The rill is a serpentine ribbon unwound from the lake peaceably contained by meadows on which the right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged.” Her adversary in taste is the landscape architect Richard Noakes (hired by the unseen Lord Croom), who is prepared to tear down the neatly manicured shrubbery and carefully groomed hillsides and convert Sidley Park into a Gothic wilderness, complete with a waterfall, gloomy forest, and picturesque hermitage. He defends himself, saying simply, “It is the modern style.”

The battle fought between Lady Croom and Noakes over the condition of Sidley Park’s gardens is reflected in some of the play’s less tangible ideas as well. In the contemporary scenes, Bernard Nightingale and Valentine Coverly line up on each side of

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Like many playwrights who write about ideas, Stoppard relies on symbolism to convey deeper levels of meaning. In Arcadia, one of the more important symbols is the landscape of Sidley Park, which undergoes several changes in the course of the play and is talked about by all the characters, past and present. Examine the ways the landscape at Sidley Park is viewed by the people who stay there and explain how it becomes an important symbol in the play.
One of the principal themes in Arcadia is a collision between passion and reason, the heart and the head. The Romantic movement of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries influenced all of Europe. Explore Romanticism by investigating some of the great Romantic literary figures of the age like Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, and Victor Hugo. What are some of the great Romantic works of literature written by these artists? What is the Romantic view of the world? How do these Romantic artists express this view in their work?
Very few plays rely on mathematics and scientific theory as essential plot elements, yet they are essential to Arcadia. Investigate the most important scientific theories of the play: Fermat’s Last Theorem, Chaos Theory, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (brief information about each is available in most encyclopedias). What do each of these theories suggest? How or why is each theory symbolically important to the events, characters, and themes of Arcadia?
In Arcadia, Stoppard uses a technique known as juxtaposition to place characters and thoughts next to each other for the audience to compare and contrast. This happens each time the scene changes from the historical past to the contemporary present. It seems there are characters in Sidley Park’s past (the 1809-12 scenes) who have counterparts in the modern scenes. They may share personality traits, express similar ideas, or share the same interests. Who do you suppose is Septimus’s counterpart in modern day Sidley Park? How about Ezra Chater’s? Does anyone in the present come close to resembling Thomasina and her powers of intuition? Compare two or three sets of character counterparts and explain how the juxtaposition of these characters helps your understanding of the play.

the debate between intellect and emotion. Bernard is acting on instinct and emotion, pursuing the unlikely theory that Lord Byron left England in 1809 because he killed a minor poet in a duel. He persists in his notion, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because of “Gut instinct. The part of you which doesn’t reason. The certainty for which there is no back-reference.”

Valentine, on the other hand, is a graduate student at Oxford, studying chaos theory, and trying to find a pattern in the rise and fall of numbers in his family’s centuries-old hunting books. To him, Bernard’s interests are trivial. “The questions you’re asking don’t matter, you see,” he tells the arrogant professor, “It’s like arguing who got there first with the calculus. The English say Newton, the Germans say Leibnitz. But it doesn’t matter. Personalities. What matters is the calculus. Scientific progress. Knowledge.”

In the end, each combatant learns a lesson about the other’s viewpoint. Bernard rushes ahead to publish and promote his theory before learning all the facts and is publicly embarrassed to discover he was completely wrong. A little more analysis and a little less gut instinct would have served him well. For his part, Valentine must admit to the existence of genius, a human impulse that surpasses science, when he works his way through Thomasina’s lesson book and finds she perceived a theory for chaos long before scientists knew one existed.

Genius

A genius is someone with natural talents, possessing exceptional intelligence or creative ability. Their powers of perception may be broad and encompass many areas of study and craft, or they may be gifted in a very particular area, such as writing, math, or communications. A couple characters in Arcadia are referred to as geniuses while others are trying desperately to gain that status. Others doubt the existence of genius in the same way they don’t believe in fate or God.

Thomasina Coverly is probably a genius. At thirteen, she is seeking proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem and trying to devise a numeric formula that will describe the shape of a leaf. She perceives things others do not and can match wits with anyone at Sidley Park. When she asks Septimus, her tutor, if she is more clever than her elders, he admits: “Yes. Much.” For his part, Septimus believes genius is a primal ability, existing somewhere in all human beings of every age. When Thomasina laments the loss of the historic library at Alexandria, Septimus reassures her, “You should no more grieve for the rest [of the lost Greek tragedies] than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.” Lost plays, mathematical theories, and creative inventions will all be discovered again by geniuses of the future, who will appear, Septimus believes.

Thomasina’s counterpart in the present day is Gus Coverly. Like the ancient prophets, ironically struck blind by the gods in order to “see” the future, fifteen-year old Gus is a genius who can’t speak and shies away from most human contact. The nature of his ability is not as apparent as Thomasina’s, though he is described as someone with great powers of intuition, capable of guessing the needs of others. He found the ruined foundations of the estate’s boathouse for his mother, after experts spent months searching; and he provides Hannah with her most important clue: a sketch of Septimus Hodge, the Sidley Park hermit, and his pet tortoise, Plautus.

Valentine doubts the nature of genius when it reaches beyond what he feels are ordinary limitations. After studying Thomasina’s lesson books with Hannah and considering the stacks of algebraic illustrations left behind by the Sidley Park hermit, he still can’t bring himself to believe someone could have imagined such a theory years before the existence of calculators. “There’s an order things happen in,” he insists, “You can’t open the door until there’s a house.” Hannah has a unique definition for genius. To her, genius can be found not only in extraordinary abilities but in the rigorous pursuit of knowledge. “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter,” she stresses to Valentine, “Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.”

STYLE

Juxtaposition

While Arcadia is set in only a single location, a large room in the Sidley Park manor, the action of the play occurs in two very different time periods: 1809-1812 and the present day. Setting the play in both eras allows Stoppard to use a literary device known as juxtaposition to cleverly compare and contrast characters and ideas. Juxtaposition occurs when two things are placed side by side, or on top of one another, and their dominant qualities are compared.

In Arcadia, pairs of characters are sometimes juxtaposed and compared this way. For example, Ezra Chater is a vain, would-be poet, given to fits of overreaction. In some ways, he finds his counterpart in Bernard Nightingale, the flashy, blustery Sussex don who, though he is vastly more intelligent than Chater, is still easily led astray by his pride and search for glory.

The continuation of ideas through both time periods is another effective use of juxtaposition in the play. By experimenting with primitive chaos theory, Thomasina seems to be following a natural human tendency to try to explain and bring order to her world. Though she dies before completing her work, her experiments are picked up in the present by Valentine Coverly, who feeds them into a computer and takes them leagues further than the young Thomasina could ever have done with pencil and paper. In the process, he learns a lesson about present human condition from the past.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of juxtaposition in Arcadia is the dramatic irony it provides the audience, who are allowed the omnipotent ability to see events of the past take place and then watch characters in the present attempt to reconstruct them. Dramatic irony occurs when the audience of a

play, or the reader of a novel, knows something the characters do not. Stoppard’s audience knows that it is Septimus, and not Lord Byron, who was supposed to have dueled Ezra Chater in 1809. When contemporary scenes are juxtaposed on the scenes of the past, the guessing-game nature of historical studies is highlighted. The audience gets to watch Bernard and Hannah try to piece together the clues, repeatedly coming up with the wrong answers. From this, they can assume that history is often put together through such lucky (and unlucky) guesses, and that at best it is, like Thomasina’s formula for chaos, only a theory.

Symbolism

In literature, a symbol is something that represents something else. Symbols are often used to communicate deeper levels of meaning. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel The Scarlet Letter, for example, the red letter “A” worn by Hester Prynne is a symbol not only of her supposed crime (adultery) but also of her neighbors’ bigotry and her own courageous pride. Like many playwrights who write about important ideas, Stoppard relies on many symbols in his work to communicate deeper levels of meaning to his audiences.

In Arcadia, one of the prominent symbols is the landscape around Sidley Park, which represents, among other things, the battle between Enlightenment and Romanticism, or intellect and emotion, that is raging among the characters inside the house. Heat becomes another important symbol. Early in the play, Thomasina is considering the effects of motion and friction on the jam in her rice pudding. By the end, she has perceived the Second Law of Thermodynamics which insures that Mr. Noakes’s steam engine will always take more energy to operate than it is capable of producing. Ultimately it is heat, in the form of a terrible fire, which kills Thomasina. By then, the symbolism is clear: Eventually the loss of heat will be the end of the entire universe; Thomasina perishes by that which she sought to understand.

Pastoral Poetry

While Arcadia is not itself a pastoral poem, the title is taken from the tradition of pastoral writing, and the play shares many of the form’s best known qualities. Arcadia was a region in ancient Greece that was regarded as the ideal of rural simplicity and happiness. Pastoral poetry is a form of literature in which an author uses simple shepherds and country folk, such as those who may have dwelt in Arcadia, and presents an idyllic vision of rural life in marked contrast to the misery and corruption of life in the city. The Roman poet Virgil is known for pastoral poetry in the first century B.C., and the Italian writer Sannazzaro is credited with reviving the form during the Renaissance.

The characters in Stoppard’s play, like the farmers and shepherds in pastoral poetry, live in the countryside, away from the chaos of city life. Lady Croom even brags to her daughter,” ‘Et in Arcadia ego!’ ‘I too have lived in Arcadia,’ Thomasina.” Whether Sidley Park is a paradise, however, is questionable. In the present day, Hannah laments that even the grounds as Lady Croom knew them were becoming unnatural: “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.”

In either event, the pastoral setting becomes essential if the arguments the characters make are to have their full impact. Like simple country folk, proud of the peaceful lives they lead, the characters at Sidley Park, both past and present, all seem to be searching for ideals—in mathematics, science, poetry, and love—and Arcadia’s rural setting, far removed from the bustle of civilization, helps magnify the importance of their quests.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

History is practically a character itself in Arcadia. The play takes place in England in two different time periods, the early nineteenth century and the present day. While the scenes in the present day often seem disconnected from the world outside, other than scattered references to advancements in math and science and television as the modern day mass media of choice, they are intensely interested in the past. The entire plot, in fact, hinges on the events of 1809-1812, when, in the world of the play, a young girl was formulating theories decades ahead of their time, Lord Byron was writing the poems that would make him famous, and Europe was transforming itself through wars, experiments in art, and the inventions of science.

The period Stoppard chose to contrast with the present has been labeled a transformative era in world history, the twilight of one age and the dawn of another; much of the creative energy and tumult of the period can be found in Arcadia. Three of the most important historical influences on the play are England’s Industrial Revolution, European political upheaval and empire building, and Romanticism in art and literature.

Britain’s Industrial Revolution

The first Industrial Revolution in Britain began late in the eighteenth century and almost immediately altered the way products were manufactured, what products were created, the location of industry, and the transportation of goods around the country and around the world. Because greater production efficiency could be achieved when the resources required by industry were centrally located, the population of Britain began a gradual shift from scattered rural dwellings to primarily urban communities.

In England in the Nineteenth Century, David Thomson noted: “Most Englishmen in 1815 still worked on the land or in trades connected with agriculture, though within the next generation most Englishmen became townsmen engaged in industry: sixteen years after Waterloo probably half the population already lived under urban conditions. . . . During the first thirty years of the century Birmingham and Sheffield doubled in size, Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, and Glasgow more than doubled. London, in 1815, was above the million mark, and five years later numbered 1,274,000.”

The people who moved to the new centers of industry found working conditions quite different from what they had known before. Individual craftsmanship was superseded by collective manufacturing efforts: Instead of handling goods from start to finish, workers were taught a particular part of the job, given the tools necessary, and placed in a factory setting where, by sheer force of numbers, they could produce greater amounts of goods than ever before (a process that came to be known as the “production line”). Britain very quickly became the workshop of the world and a major exporter of

COMPARE & CONTRAST

1809-1812: Britain’s Industrial Revolution makes it the workshop of the world. England transforms from a primarily agricultural society to an increasingly skilled working class system built on venture capitalism. Inventions like the steam engine, patented in 1769 by Englishman James Watt, make possible industrial marvels like the locomotive, which first appears in 1804.
Today: Another technological revolution, the “Information Age,” is sweeping the globe. The work of industry is increasingly handled by automated machines run by computers. Automation and high speed information gathering, storage, retrieval, and dissemination came about through a series of technological discoveries beginning with the transistor in 1948, followed by integrated circuits in the 1960s, and the microprocessor in the 1970s. Automated machinery and sophisticated communications tools such as personal computers, cellular telephones, fax machines, and paging devices rely on more and more powerful microprocessors. By 2010 the computer industry is expected to be the largest industry on earth.
1809-1812: The Romantic style dominates the literature of Europe. Authors such as William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley rely on imagination, freedom of thought and expression, the creation of new forms, and an idealization of nature.
Today: Postmodernism defines the literature of the late-twentieth century. These works often invoke or borrow from earlier periods, using a technique known as pastiche. Another technique found in postmodernist literature, music, art, and, the postmodern medium of choice, film, is montage. Rather than telling a story in traditional, linear fashion, montage often presents a series of seemingly unrelated, sometimes contradictory images that defy explanation. Traditional elements like plot, character, and language are fragmented and disoriented.
1809-1812: Women in England are treated as second-class citizens and widely regarded as intellectually inferior to men. They receive only limited schooling, no higher education, and have access to a limited number of vocations. They are subjected to an extremely rigid, conservative code of sexual behavior and hold almost no legal rights, especially once married.
Today: After an arduous, sometimes violent suffrage movement, women received the right to vote in Britain in 1918 and now enjoy equal rights under the law as well as equal access to education and employment. Margaret Thatcher became the first female Prime Minister in 1979, serving until 1990.
1809-1812: Although it lost its colonies in America in 1783, Britain is still building its worldwide empire. By the end of the nineteenth century the empire stretches across all seven continents, in countries as far-flung as Trinidad, Newfoundland, South Africa, and Hong Kong.
Today: Territories in the British Empire began resisting colonial rule after World War I. Egypt, India, Malaysia, and a host of other holdings have reverted back to their citizens during the past few decades. In 1997, Britain returns control of Hong Kong, one of its last colonies, back to the Chinese.

all sorts of goods from furniture to textiles to fine china.

Exporting goods, of course, relied heavily on transportation, both within the country, to transfer goods from factories to shipping centers, and without, to get goods from rail stations and ports to their foreign destinations. To accomplish this, enormous improvements and advances were made in the country’s transportation system. In England in the Eighteenth Century, J. H. Plumb wrote:

The canals, the roads, the ships of England were the nation’s pride. Inexpensive Irish labor was used to cover Britain with a network of canals. By 1815, 2,600 miles of canal had been built in England; 500 in Scotland and Ireland. They cheapened production and lowered prices. . . . But the revolution in road transport was more vivid, more exciting, to contemporaries. Road engineering did not begin to improve until the last quarter of the century, and it was given a strong stimulus, in 1784, with the introduction of the mail coach for the rapid transport of letters and passengers. The stage coaches responded to the threat of competition and road surfaces were improved to help faster travel. In 1754 it took four and a half days to travel from London to Manchester; in 1788 the journey had been reduced to 28 hours.

At the same time, Britain’s ports and shipping abilities were being improved to handle all the additional trade. By 1810 the total freight weight of ships using British ports reached 2 million tons. Between 1800 and 1810, thirty acres of new iron docks were built in London, along the Thames River, making Britain’s capital the greatest port in the world.

All this industry was accompanied by equally important gains in efficient agricultural techniques. Researching and perfecting new methods of tilling, the rotation of crops, and improved stock-breeding relied on capital and returned their investments a thousandfold, which meant that England’s rich were getting richer. Landed aristocrats, like the Coverlys bearing the Croom lordship title in Stoppard’s play, owned more and more land, which they would let to tenant farmers or hire laborers to farm for them. Through this method, they became the “leisure class” in England, allowing their money to work for them, while they enjoyed comfortable lives in elegant country houses, such as Sidley Park.

One of the residents of Sidley Park, Lady Croom, considers herself cursed by the advancements in industry and technology, particularly by Noakes’s new steam engine, which she feels is systematically ruining her garden. “If everybody had his own I would bear my portion of the agony without complaint,” she wails. “But to have been singled out by the only Improved Newcomen steam pump in England, this is hard, sir, this is not to be borne.”

Military Conflict in the Nineteenth Century

At the same time that they were radically improving transportation methods, agriculture, and manufacturing techniques, Britons, along with most of Europe, were embroiled in a series of wars that shaped the modern European continent. Two of history’s greatest revolutions had already been fought: the American Revolution (1775-1783) and the French Revolution (1789-1799). By the following century, the fallout from these great wars was still echoing through the politics and social structure of Europe. The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century was the age of Napoleon and the infancy of America. At various times during this period England fought against the forces of the French, the Spanish, and the Americans. Some of Britain’s greatest victories were achieved—such as Lord Nelson’s triumph over the French-Spanish fleets in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and Napolean’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815 by British general Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington.

Although the armed conflicts of Europe do not intrude directly into the peaceful lives of the residents at Sidley Park, they are certainly aware of them. Lady Croom, upon hearing that one of her favorite house guests, the poet Lord Byron, is planning an adventure abroad warns, “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 into billets and the fashion for godless republicanism not yet arrived at its natural reversion.”

The Romantic Age

Coursing throughout the action of Arcadia, and somehow affecting the lives of all the characters, past and present, is the spirit of the Romantic Age. Broadly speaking, Romanticism was a movement that bridged the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, affecting the literature of most European countries, the United States, and Latin America. Romantic writing is characterized by a reliance on imagination and subjectivity of approach, freedom of thought and expression, unfettered by traditionally accepted forms of literature and an idealization of nature in its pure form—a marked contrast from the increasingly mechanized and industrial world that surrounded Romantic writers. It also contrasted severely with the preceding Enlightenment era, which stressed orderly, rational thought, strict adherence to form, and a reliance on Classical Greek and Roman models. In essence, Romanticism was, for a time, the triumph of feeling over thinking, the heart over the head.

This battle between intellect and emotion rages through Arcadia. Stylistically, Lady Croom continues to live in the past. She adores her well manicured gardens, steeped in the balance and order of Classical Greece and the Enlightenment age. The unseen Lord Croom, however, is pitching headlong into the new age and has brought in the landscape architect Noakes to sculpt Romanticism into the countryside. In the present, Hannah, Valentine, and Bernard quarrel over the efficiency of science in the face of the intuition of genius. Bernard “feels” his theory about Lord Byron is right. He advocates “a visceral belief in yourself. Gut instinct.”

Young Thomasina, of course, is central to the debate, as she is central to the play. In her can be found the best elements of both logic and emotion. She is as comfortable seeking a solution for Fermat’s Last Theorem and plotting the shape of a leaf with numbers on a graph as she is reveling in the poetry of the age. She laments the loss of the library at Alexandria and in the same breath scorns Cleopatra for not being more sensible and logical. Like the age in which she lives, Thomasina is filled with marvelous contradictions. In the final scene of the play, after happening on what would one day become the Second Law of Thermodynamics governing the exchange of heat between objects, she quickly discards the thrill of discovery, longing only for the pleasure of learning to waltz and her romantic love for Septimus.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Arcadia premiered at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain in 1993, won the prestigious Olivier Award for best play then transferred to London’s West End for a lengthy and successful run. In London, everything about the play was praised—its plot, characters, fascinating ideas intricately woven into witty dialogue, the scenery, the acting, and the directing. The play received its American debut at New York City’s Lincoln Center Theater in 1995, where—in spite of actors who were generally considered less fit for their roles than their English counterparts and a theatre with poor acoustics—the play earned acclamation from excited Stoppard aficionados. The work also earned the playwright newfound respect from some of his severest critics. “Arcadia is wonderfully inventive and funny, full of the epigrams, puns, and verbal pyrotechnics characteristic of this dramatist,” wrote Anne Barton in the New York Review. Clive Barnes crowed in the New York Post,“It is a work shot through with fun, passion and, yes, genius.”

Michael Feingold, a longtime critic of the playwright’s work, admitted in the Village Voice: “Until Arcadia, you couldn’t have convinced me that Tom Stoppard was a playwright. At best, I’d have called him a sometimes diverting entertainer, whose show-offy, cerebral houses of cards usually turned up a few ace witticisms before collapsing into a litter of pasteboard. Arcadia changes all that.” Other critics welcomed Stoppard back into popular consciousness. Donald Lyons suggested in the Wall Street Journal that “Arcadia is Mr. Stoppard’s happiest invention since 1974’s Travesties.” In Variety, Jeremy Gerard said, “Arcadia fulfills the promise of Stoppard’s 1983 boulevard comedy, The Real Thing. In Arcadia, he gets everything right.”

Many reviewers remarked on Arcadia’s collection of eccentric characters—a schoolgirl genius and her handsome, romantic tutor; insultingly witty members of the aristocracy; a flamboyant, puffed-up university professor and his antagonist, a no-nonsense historian as comfortable in garden trenches as she is at her typewriter. Typical of Stoppard’s critical reception, however, even more attention was paid to the thoughts of the characters and the themes of the play.

“This is one of Stoppard’s guessing game plays,” Howard Kissel wrote in the Daily News, where the interest lies less in the characters’ changing relationships than in the ideas the playwright so adroitly juggles.” Barnes noted, “Nothing is safe from the intoxicating whirl of ideas which it draws into a vortex, be it English landscape gardening, Newtonian physics, Byron’s mysterious flight from England in 1809, the classicism of Claude and the Gothic romanticism of Salvator Rosa, Horace Walpole and Thomas Love Peacock, the second law of thermodynamics, the conundrum of Fermat’s mathematical theorum of numbers, the lost plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus, even dwarf dahlias in the botanically unlikely region of Mazambique.”

The way Stoppard successfully assembled such a range of characters and ideas in one place struck some critics as an amazing feat. John Lahr noted in the New Yorker:“The brilliance of Arcadia is not so much in the wordplay as it is in the construction.” Lahr explained Stoppard’s use of two different time periods, set in the same household, and suggested, “By crosscutting the Coverly family story and the story of the contemporaries trying to reconstruct it, Stoppard utilizes the ironies of history—the symmetries and accidents that lead, nonetheless, to a kind of order—as a way of demonstrating the outcome of chaos theory.”

The New York Review’s Barton appreciated that, while the play is a whirlwind of ideas and emotions, Stoppard did not resort to some of the theatrical tricks employed by his previous plays. “In theatrical terms . . . Arcadia is muted by comparison with most of Stoppard’s previous work,” she wrote, “No yellow-suited gymnasts dangerously construct and implode human pyramids (Jumpers); nor does an entire troupe of traveling actors stow away and improbably contrive a musical performance inside three barrels (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1967); no drama critic gets surprised and killed by the play he is reviewing (The Real Inspector Hound, 1968), nor is there any equivalent to the public librarian in Travesties, who seems to strip on top of her desk while delivering a heartfelt panegyric on Lenin.”

Despite the majority of praise, at least one critic found some major problems with Arcadia, mainly with the way the play pushes the boundaries of probability. Comparing Stoppard to his popular predecessor, Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest), in New York, John Simon complained, “[Wilde] would not have an Englishman in 1809 use the Yiddishism tush, or have two characters—including the 13-year old Thomasina-interpret Poussin’s famous Et in Arcadia Ego (“I too have lived in Arcadia”) as being spoken by Death, i.e., the skull in the picture, a theory first proposed by Erwin Panofsky a century and a half later.” Simon also regretted that some of the more interesting characters (such as Lord Byron and Mrs. Chater) never appeared on the stage while the more foolish ones (Chater and Captain Brice) did. In summary, Simon felt, “There are goodly chunks of the play that seem to have been written for the delectation of graduate students in literature and science, and you often wish Stoppard would rein in his parade.”

In spite of its possible faults, the dominant opinion of Arcadia was that it is one of Stoppard’s finest works. It is “pure entertainment—entertainment for the heart, mind, soul and all those interstices between we forget about,” wrote Barnes. “It’s brief candle lighting up a naughty world.”

CRITICISM

Lane A. Glenn

Glenn is a Ph.D. specializing in theatre history and literature. In this essay he examines Stoppard’s critical reputation as a wordsmith, and his use of language in Arcadia as a means of creating humor, identifying characters, and exploring themes in the play.

In his Poetics (c. 335 BC), Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher and literary theorist, suggested six elements that are crucial to theatre: plot, character, thought (or theme), diction, music, and spectacle. He explained each element in what he felt was its order of importance and devoted to each a corresponding amount of space in his treatise. When he arrived at “diction,” the words the playwright places in the mouths of his characters, Aristotle explained the difference between common and elevated vocabulary, riddles, and jargon. He suggested: “The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius—for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.”

In more than two-thousand years of plays, playwrights, and players since Aristotle, different eras have found one or the other of his six elements to be more important than the rest. The Neo-classicists of the eighteenth century, for example, prized plot like the Greeks. Writers of “problem plays” in the late-nineteenth century, like George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen, often emphasized important themes in their work. Many twentieth century dramas are noted particularly for their characters, while modern musicals often draw crowds for the spectacle they offer audiences. From every era, however, it is the playwrights with a masterful command of language—the greatest gifts for metaphor—who are passed along to the generations that follow.

The Greeks gave Aristophanes to posterity—a writer of satire and wit so dexterous, politicians of his day avoided him for fear they would appear in one of his plays. In sixteenth century England, the Elizabethans loved language. They experimented with it. They played games with it (“quibbling” was a pub pastime that relied on clever wordplay). And, of course, they produced William Shakespeare, who managed to create a great deal of it.

While there are several contenders poised to represent the twentieth century as the era’s great master of dialogue and dialectics, Tom Stoppard

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) is a play about the absurdity of life as seen through the eyes of the two minor courtiers in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Like Arcadia, the work is noted for its ferocious wordplay and lofty ideas.
Also by Stoppard, Travesties (1974) is a comedy-drama that imagines three of history’s quirkier characters—Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara—all living together in Zurich during World War I.
Other playwrights with a distinctively British flair for characters and comedy include Alan Ayckbourn, whose series The Norman Conquests: A Trilogy of Plays (1988) is an hilarious family farce packed with witty one-liners, and Alan Bennett, the author of The Madness of George III (1992), which became a popular film a year later (retitled as The Madness of King George), and Talking Heads (1993), a collection of six unique monologues that were originally broadcast on the BBC.
The Selected Poems of Lord Byron, available in a variety of editions, is a wonderful introduction to the poetry of the Romantic era. For a wider sampling, try English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology (1996), edited by Stanley Appelbaum, which contains poetry by six of the best-known Romantics: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.
Foolscap: A Novel (1991) is Michael Malone’s satirical take on the research of literary history and the pursuit of academic fame. Like Bernard Nightingale in Arcadia, Theodore Ryan, the protagonist of Foolscap is out to make a name for himself in the cutthroat world of academic scholarship. Since no one will produce his play about Sir Walter Raleigh, Theodore devises a way to pass the play off as Raleigh’s own work and have a forged copy “discovered” by a well-known Renaissance scholar.

appears at the top of many critics’ lists. In Tom Stoppard’s Plays: A Study of His Life and Work, Jim Hunter observed:

Perhaps it is the words one notices first, in Stoppard. Later the sense of theatre, the craftsmanship, the thinking and the caring may seem more important; but at first one is dazzled—the cliché; seems accurate—by the brilliance of the verbal polish. Stoppard comes across as fluent to the point of facility, gifted with the gab of the Irish: Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, and perhaps through these if not directly, Swift. The brilliance also seems to have an academic element: he might well be taken for a University Wit.”

High praise indeed for an artist who left school at seventeen, received no university education, and is whose facility with letters is largely self-taught. Yet the praise is entirely apt. Throughout his thirty-year career as a playwright, critics and scholars have attuned themselves to the language in Stoppard’s plays. Writing about the debut of Stoppard’s 1974 play Travesties in Plays and Players, Garry O’Connor observed, “Clever, all this stuff, and occasionally very funny indeed: full of acrostics, limericks, parody, absurdity; quite exhilarating: altogether a relief to be teased and dazzled by words for once.”

Stoppard’s unique talent for language lies in his ability to turn words upside-down and inside-out in a search for ambiguities, contradictions, double-meanings, humor, and half-hidden truths. Not since Shakespeare has an English playwright so strenuously exercised his native tongue. In an article Stoppard wrote for the Sunday Times early in his career, he admitted:

[I have] an enormous love of language itself. For a lot of writers the language they use is merely a fairly efficient tool. For me the particular use of a particular word in the right place, or a group of words in the right order, to create a particular effect is important; it gives me more pleasure than to make a point which I might consider to be profound. On the other hand, when one does concentrate mainly on the language itself, with luck this appears to have some meaning, often in a general sense and, when one is very lucky, in a universal sense.

Stoppard’s love of language is extremely evident in his 1994 work, Arcadia. The first words of the play, in fact, are the set-up for a pun. “Septimus, what is carnal embrace?” the youthful genius Thomasina asks her harried tutor. “Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef,” comes the carefully chosen reply. It is a simple, clever piece of verbal humor, with layers of meaning lurking beneath the surface. As John Lahr noted in his review of the play for the New Yorker,“The question mirrors the image of Paradise about to be lost, and Stoppard’s play goes on to answer her question. To embrace the flesh is also to embrace all the sins that the flesh is heir to—the sins to which Stoppard’s labyrinthine plot, whose ingenious twists and turns involve greed, rapacity, vainglory, skullduggery, cruelty, delusion, confusion, and genius, bears ample witness.” All this promised, and the play has only just begun.

Each of the characters in Arcadia is recognizable for his or her own idiosyncratic style of speaking. In the presence of his student, the tutor Septimus Hodge is the picture of propriety, as when he delicately explains the truth about “carnal embrace” or scolds his young protegé for her unique take on her homework, saying, “A fancy is not a discovery.” For her part, Thomasina Coverly is precocious but in the very best ways. She is clever beyond her years and responds to Septimus appropriately by returning, “A gibe is not a rebuttal.” Their dueling dialogue escalates through the play until finally, by their final scene, Septimus is bested by his student, struck silent, and his only recourse is to dance with her.

Their present-day counterparts are Bernard Nightingale, the flamboyant university professor, and Hannah Jarvis, the best-selling, no-nonsense author. Nightingale flaunts his gift for language and, when pressed, uses it as a weapon. Upon meeting Hannah walking up from the “ha-ha” (a sort of scenic moat used in landscape architecture) he corrects her pronunciation as “Ha-hah!” and explains, “A theory of mine. Ha-hah, not ha-ha. If you were strolling down the garden and all of a sudden the ground gave way at your feet, you’re not going to go ‘ha-ha’, you’re going to jump back and go ‘ha-hah!’” Hannah is unimpressed, and later tells Valentine Coverly that Bernard’s verbal jousting is just for show. “[His] indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television,” she quips.

In reviewing Arcadia, critics found themselves praising Stoppard’s use of language and comparing him to other great writers. In Time magazine Brad Leithauser wrote, “It is a play that holds up beautifully not only on the stage but on the page. When Thomasina, hungry for a new mathematics, exclaims, ‘If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell,’ we might have stepped into an Auden poem. When a formidable lady [Lady Croom] silences her brother [Captain Brice] by snapping, ‘Do not dabble in paradox, Edward, it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit,’ we can hear Wilde whispering, ‘I wish I’d said that.’ As for concentrated lyricism, the scene in which Thomasina bewails the burning of the classical library of Alexandria—a doomed girl genius lamenting the conflagration of ancient genius—is absolutely stunning.”

In the New York Post Clive Barnes noted, “Stoppard pays his audience the sensible compliment of assuming we know more than we do, while his language ranges from gutter-chic to epigrams that sound Wildean, but without Wilde’s smug sense of gotcha-self-congratulation.” Anne Barton wrote in the New York Review of Books, “Arcadia is wonderfully inventive and funny, full of the epigrams, puns, and verbal pyrotechnics characteristic of this dramatist. From the interchange between thirteen-year-old Thomasina Coverly and her tutor with which the play begins. . . to the end, Stoppard’s highly individual love affair with the English language never slackens . . . Stoppard’s puns, far from being drearily Derridean, are something Shakespeare would have understood. He loves to demonstrate how exciting it can be when two meanings. . . lie down together irregularly in the same bed: as they do when Thomasina’s ‘carnal,’ meaning ‘sensual,’ cohabits disconcertingly with its other connotation of ‘meat.’”

For all the careful craftsmanship that goes into writing a play with such a marvelous flair for language, sometimes, Stoppard has admitted, his gift for metaphor and symbolism is happy circumstance. In a conversation with critic Mel Gussow, Stoppard revealed how he stumbled upon the name for Bernard Nightingale, Arcadia’s eccentric Sussex don, then chanced into a clever bit of character confusion: “The odd thing about these names is that they kind of detonate in a way that looks pre-planned,”

Stoppard explained. “In Arcadia, Hannah makes reference to Thomas Love Peacock. She believes Bernard’s called Peacock and she says, ‘Your illustrious namesake.’ He says, ‘Florence?’ If I’d called him Thrush, God knows what he would have replied. There’s a wonderful element of good luck in these things.”

Stoppard’s wordplay may not be for everyone. In reviewing Arcadia for New York magazine, John Simon complained, “Stoppard—who never went to university and has an autodidact’s infatuation with his homemade erudition—overdoes it: There are goodly chunks of the play that seem to have been written for the delectation of graduate students in literature and science, and you often wish Stoppard would rein in his parade.”

For the playwright, however, there is no other way to work. “I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself,” he once cleverly revealed to Gussow in the New York Times. “I’m the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation. Forever. Endlessly.”

Source: Lane A. Glenn, for Drama for Students, Gale, 1999.

Tim Appelo

In this essay, Appelo positively reviews Arcadia, placing the play among Stoppard’s best work. Of particular note to the critic is the vibrancy and emotion of the central characters.

In Ulysses, there is an Oxford don who goes around pushing a lawnmower that chuffs “Cleverclever-clever.” Though he quit school at 17 and ran off to the circus of newspaper journalism, Tom Stoppard has always been very like Joyce’s professor, forever cramming his head with arcane books and emitting their more entertaining notions in clipped, endlessly articulate, witty disputations. The question has always been whether Stoppard is anything more than clevercleverclever—is he simply a prestidigitator of prose and a joke mechanic, a whiz kid staging fantastically elaborate intellectual collisions as if they were toy-train wrecks? Or is he in it for deeper satisfactions than the transitory sparks a nice crackup tosses off?

Stoppard himself has admitted that his early play The Real Inspector Hound (1968) was “a mechanical toy,” but his work has been getting more human ever since. There’s more of him in his later work, too; he is a recovering drama critic who began as a playwright by occupying other people’s plays like a hermit crab. Pre-fame, he aped Robert Bolt and Arthur Miller; in Rosencrantz and Guilden stern Are Dead it was Beckett and Shakespeare; in Hound, Agatha Christie; in Travesties, Oscar Wilde. Starting with Night and Day (1978), he’s tended to cling less to coattails and be more his own man, owning up to real emotions. He retains a perverse sense of humor akin to Beckett’s; he’s debate-besotted like Shaw, but he can see both sides of most questions; he’s unearthly fluent and funny like Wilde, though he’s grown more earnest. Yet his dramatic ideal remains what it was back in 1960, when he raved Richard Attenborough’s The Angry Silence because it fused “entertainment and education as completely as a row of chorus girls explaining Einstein’s theory of light.” His plays are, I think, a highly refined, mutant strain of journalism.

If all we had to go on was Hapgood, the 1988 faux-spy thriller that recently closed at Lincoln Center after a smash production, we might think the old rap on Stoppard still had some currency. The gratuitous beauty of the staging and the performances by David Straithairn as a droll physicist-philosopher and Stockard Channing as the eponymous spymaster heroine (whose name, according to Stoppard scholar Katherine E. Kelly, refers to turn-of-the-century Russian literature translator and Nation contributor Isabel Florence Hapgood) might blind us to the fact that Hapgood is lively without being good. Stoppard seems not to give a rip about his incomprehensibly intricate le Carré-pastiche plot, let alone his characters. (“I’m no good at character,” he once confessed, amazingly. “It doesn’t interest me very much.”) What has interested him lately is post-Newtonian physics, and Hapgood is a physics essay masquerading as a play. As Updike said of Bellow’s, The Dean’s December, a novel that began as an essay, “This book has swallowed the earlier one but has transparent sides, so that we can see the non-fiction book inside the novel and can observe how incomplete the digestion process has been.”

Incomplete intellectual digestion is a besetting sin of authors who read too much. Stoppard has been the chief of sinners in this regard, conducting his education at public expense; but he now redeems himself with Arcadia, at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center, his most important work since The Real Thing (1983). Unlike the spy-jive mac-guffins he juggles in Hapgood, the mystery addressed in Arcadia is one to which Stoppard is fully emotionally committed. If all those cigarettes kill him shortly,

“THE MYSTERY ADDRESSED IN ARCADIA IS ONE TO WHICH STOPPARD IS FULLY EMOTIONALLY COMMITTED. IF ALL THOSE CIGARETTES KILL HIM SHORTLY, ARCADIA IS ALMOST GOOD ENOUGH TO SERVE AS THE CAPSTONE TO HIS CAREER”

Arcadia is almost good enough to serve as the capstone to his career.

The setting, nicely realized by Mark Thompson, is the English country house of the Coverlys (I assume Stoppard alludes to Addison’s squire Roger). There are two dueling story lines, exhilaratingly orchestrated by director Trevor Nunn, concerning the Coverlys of 1809 and of today. In the earlier frame, we are introduced to chaos theory by teenager Thomasina Coverly, who is based on its modern prophet, Benoit Mandelbrot, whose “Mandelbrot set,” infinitely iterated images of the order lurking within nature’s seeming disorder, you have seen depicted in a million articles about chaos. Like Mandelbrot, Thomasina (fetching but conventionally so, as played by Jennifer Dundas) is no math prodigy, but she can actually see the subtle geometry of chaos in her head. Her tutor is the Newtonian college math major Septimus Hodge. (Hodge was the name of Samuel Johnson’s spoiled, oyster-eating cat, and this cat, smartly portrayed by Billy Crudup, is the spoiled, horny house guest of the Coverlys.) Hodge is baffled by Thomasina’s dazzling musings about how post-Newtonian physics demolishes determinism. Forget Euclid and his lovely inviolable rules, Thomasina pouts, and let’s look at the real world: “Mountains are not pyramids and trees are not cones.”

Hodge is more preoccupied with brassiere cones, and the calculations necessary to remove them while dallying with another’s wife in the gazebo by night. His machinations after being discovered inflagrante with fellow house guest Charity Chater by her sputtering husband, Ezra, propel the Feydeau-style Restoration comedy that leavens the mathematical debate. But the sex farce isn’t purely frivolous—in Stoppard’s mind, romance is the welcome snake that saves Eden from the overdetermination of natural law. As one character puts it, illicit sex is “the attraction that Newton left out. All the way back to the apple in the garden.”

Arcadia’s twentieth-century scenes are devoted to two interrelated detective stories about the 1809 characters. In the first, Thomasina’s modern relative and fellow mathematician Valentine (the vulnerably lovely Robert Sean Leonard of Dead Poets Society fame) incredulously discovers Thomasina’s eerily prescient equations (just as Mandelbrot rediscovered Gaston Julia’s World War I-era documents in 1979), and, like Mandelbrot, uses a computer to extend and validate the earlier work.

Thomasina’s vindication is a foregone conclusion, because her “New Geometry of Irregular Forms” is simply modern physics, and because her theme is the point of the play: that determinism is false, that fate and free will are like waltzing mice, that life is messy, so eat it over the sink. A similar lesson is learned by the second set of modern-day detectives: two literary historians, Hannah Jarvis (brassy Blair Brown) and Bernard Nightingale (vainglorious Victor Garber), who have descended on the Coverlys’ Arcadia to mine the place for career advancement. Nightingale’s ingeniously erroneous theory about what really happened in the house in 1809—he believes Lord Byron shot Ezra Chater dead in a duel—is the entertainment engine of Arcadia, a tour de force of scholarly folly that sets up Garber as the star of the show. We may have to struggle to keep the rest of the plot straight, but since we’ve seen what really happened in 1809, we can have great fun watching Nightingale pump up his ego until it explodes. “Is the universe expanding?” he demands. “Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing ‘When Father Painted the Parlour’? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you.”

In making a laughingstock of Nightingale, a Euclidean type without a trace of humility in the face of nature, Stoppard is really recanting his old line about maintaining “the courage of my lack of convictions” through a scrupulous aestheticism. Now he seems more on the level, less distanced from his material, as the art-for-art’s-sake, inflexibly arrogant argument loses big.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Arcadia’s deeply moving final scene, where the worlds of 1809 and the present do not so much collide as coincide. It is the night before Thomasina’s 17th birthday, and if she knows something about the future of physics that nobody else does, the modern Valentine and Hannah (and we in the audience) know a terrible secret about her future that she does not. I can’t indicate on the page just how he does this, but Stoppard blends the dialogue and actions of modern and long-vanished characters in a way quite different from his usual comic convergences. He’s long been the master of people talking past each other, but here their conversations embrace across the centuries. Valentine finally figures out Thomasina’s immortal discovery—that she, and we, are demonstrably, mathematically, doomed—but instead of going for the sixties-style cosmic laugh, Stoppard makes the revelation a moment of rueful acceptance. The dialogue pointedly echoes Eliot’s Four Quartets, and the vibe is that of the late Shakespearean fables, spectral but deeply charged with feeling.

David Merrick, the producer of Stoppard’s first hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, complained that if you took the main characters and put them on a graph, “they would all come out as one line.” Arcadia’s plots may leave the play with more characters than it can comfortably handle, but the main ones describe an elegant arabesque worthy of Mandelbrot himself.

Source: Tim Appelo, review of Arcadia in the Nation, Vol. 260, no. 17, May 1, 1995, pp. 612–13.

John Lahr

In this laudatory review of Arcadia, Lahr calls the work Stoppard’s “best play so far,” finding brilliance in the construction and deft wordplay. The critic ultimately termed the drama “brave and very beautiful.”

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Source: John Lahr, “Blowing Hot and Cold” in the New Yorker, Vol. LXXI, no. 8, April 17, 1995, pp. 111–13.

SOURCES

Aristotle. Poetics, S. H. Butcher; translation in Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski, edited by Bernard F. Dukore, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974, p. 50.

Barnes, Clive. Review of Arcadia in the New York Post, March 31, 1995.

Barton, Anne. “Twice around the Grounds” in the New York Review, June 8, 1995, pp. 28-32.

Canby, Vincent. Review of Arcadia in the New York Times, March 31, 1995.

Feingold, Michael. Review of Arcadia in the Village Voice, April 11, 1995.

Gerard, Jeremy. Review of Arcadia in Variety, April 3, 1995.

Gussow, Mel. “Stoppard Refutes Himself, Endlessly” in the New York Times, April 26, 1972, p. 54; reprinted in File on Stoppard, edited by Malcolm Page, Methuen, 1986, p. 87.

Hunter, Jim. Tom Stoppard’s Plays: A Study of His Life and Work, Grove Press, 1982, p. 93.

Kissel, Howard. Review of Arcadia in the Daily News, March 31, 1995.

Lahr, John. Review of Arcadia in the New Yorker, April 22, 1995.

Leithauser, Brad. Review of Arcadia in Time, April 10, 1995.

Lyons, Donald. Review of Arcadia in the Wall Street Journal, March 31, 1995.

O’Connor, Garry. Review of Travesties in Plays and Players, July, 1974, p. 34; reprinted in File on Stoppard, edited by Malcolm Page, Methuen, 1986, p. 50.

Plumb, J. H. England in the Eighteenth Century, Penguin Books, 1990, p. 147.

Simon, John. Review of Arcadia in New York, April 10, 1995.

Stoppard, Tom. “Something to Declare” in the Sunday Times, February 25, 1968, p. 47; reprinted in File on Stoppard, edited by Malcolm Page, Methuen, 1986, p. 85.

Thomson, David. England in the Nineteenth Century, Penguin Books, 1991, pp. 11-12.

Winer, Linda. Review of Arcadia in New York Newsday, March 31, 1995.

Arcadia

views updated May 21 2018

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.

Year	Starting Population (x)	Δ	Ending Population (y)
1995	10,000	Δ	15,000
1996	15,000	Δ	13,000
1997	13,000	Δ	12,000
1998	12,000	Δ	19,000
1999	19,000	Δ	21,000

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.

World Literature and Its Times: Profiles of Notable Literary Works and the Historic Events That Influenced Them

Arcadia

views updated May 18 2018

Arcadia

by Jacopo Sannazaro

THE LITERARY WORK

A pastoral romance—consisting of alternating poetry and prose—set within the legendary realm of Arcadia in ancient Greece, during an unspecified time; published in Italian in 1504, in English in 1904.

SYNOPSIS

A community of shepherds in Arcadia sings, composes poetry, discusses the merits of its art, and discourses upon the ills of the world.

Events in History at the Time of the Romance

The Romance in Focus

For More Information

Jacopo Sannazaro was bom to a prominent family’s of Naples, Italy, in 1458. Two distinguished classical scholars, Lucio Crasso and Guiniano Maio, educated him. Young Sannazaro showed great promise as a student, pursuing his education despite the death of his father in 1462. In 1470 Sannazaro’s mother moved the family’s to the Picentine Mountains, north of Salerno, where they could live more economically. By 1478 Sannazaro had returned to Naples, where he joined the Academy of Naples, an intellectual and cultural institution. Sannazaro probably began his pastoral novel, Arcadia, in the 1480s; he also acquired a friend and patron in Prince Frederick of Aragon, who acceded to the throne of Naples in 1496. When competition between France and Spain led to the invasion of Naples in 1501, King Frederick was forced to flee to France; Sannazaro voluntarily followed his king into exile. After Frederick’s death in 1504, Sannazaro returned to Naples to discover that an unauthorized and incomplete edition of his Arcadia had been printed in 1502. He published his approved version in 1504. Sannazaro also became well known for his Piscatorial Eclogues (1526), which transposed the themes of the pastoral to a community of fishermen, and for his Rime (1530), a collection of love poems after the style of Francesco Petrarch’s Canzionere (also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times). Though written in a vernacular dialect (combining Tuscan and Neapolitan elements) rather than Latin, Sannazaro’s Arcadia is not widely read today. The work nevertheless remains historically significant because it embodies the pastoral mode so popular during the Renaissance.

Events in History at the Time of the Romance

Naples during the 1490s

For half a century after 1442, the Aragonese royal family’s controlled the much-contested Kingdom of Naples. The founder of the line, Alfonso I (also known as Alfonso V of Aragon), ruled Naples until 1458, leaving the kingdom to his son Ferdinand 1, who reigned from 1458 to 1494. Both monarchs were enthusiastic patrons of the arts and capable rulers. They brought stability to a kingdom that had suffered its share of dynastic struggles over the years.

That stability ended, however, when Ferdinand I died unexpectedly in 1494. His son, Alfonso, succeeded him but, less than a year into his reign, chose to abdicate. He left the throne to his son, Ferdinand II and retired to a Benedictine monastery. Meanwhile, Charles VIII of France claimed his right to the Neapolitan throne—based on his kinship with the Angevins, a French dynasty that ruled Naples before the Aragonese annexed the kingdom. Charles invaded Naples in February 1495, with fleeting success; within a few months, his former allies, the pope and the Catholic monarchs of Spain (King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile), joined forces against Charles. Ferdinand II, who had fled into hiding when Charles invaded, returned to Naples in July, and he expelled the French by November 1495.

In 1496, Ferdinand II died of natural causes and his uncle, Frederick, acceded to the throne of Naples. Once again, France and Spain set their sights on Naples, this time forming an alliance. Hoping to obtain protection from both countries, Frederick made overtures to Turkey, ruled by the powerful Islamic Ottomans. The gesture prompted Pope Alexander VI to excommunicate Frederick for treason against Christendom. On August 4, 1501 the pope invited the new French king, Louis XII, to take over the Kingdom of Naples; the French accepted the invitation, invading Naples. By year’s end, Frederick surrendered his kingdom to France in exchange for the county of Maine (part of today’s Maine-et-Loire) and a pension of 30,000 ducats per year. The erstwhile king went into exile in France and died there in 1504. Meanwhile, France disagreed with Spain on how to apportion the kingdom of Naples; Spain ultimately forced the French to retreat in 1504, going on to rule the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily through viceroys until 1707.

Sannazaro’s fortunes became tied to Frederick and the Aragonese rulers in Naples. In 1481 h joined the court retinue of the future Alfonso II. However, it was with Alfonso’s scholarly younger brother Frederick that Sannazaro formed a more intimate relationship. By the time Frederick acceded to the Neapolitan throne in 1496, he and Sannazaro were close friends. It was also during these decades—the 1480s and 1490s—that Sannazaro was especially prolific, writing court entertainments, Italian lyrics, Latin elegies and epigrams, and his pastoral novel, Arcadia. In 1497 Frederick invited the poet to become godfather to his son; two years later, Frederick conferred upon Sannazaro the villa of Mergellina, located on the bay of Naples. When the king suffered his reversal of fortune in 1501, Sannazaro voluntarily accompanied Frederick into exile and remained with him until his death in 1504. The poet then returned to Naples. It is perhaps no co-incidence that one of Arcadia’s recurring themes is exile, since family’s circumstances, political upheavals, and deep personal loyalties prompted Sannazaro’s departure from Naples, not once, but several times during his life.

Humanism and the Academy

From the ninth century onward, there developed the intellectual movement of humanism. Humanism’s basic goal was “to put scholarship at the service of contemporary experience,” to treat all aspects of existence as subjects worthy of serious study (Shinn, p. 14). Called humanists, followers of the movement explored such disciplines as language, literature, history, science, and moral philosophy. They concentrated in particular on ancient Greek and Roman texts, rediscovering and interpreting them, and adopting many of their ideas and values.

Spreading throughout Europe, the humanist movement reached its apogee during the High Renaissance (c. 1480–1520). It was an intensely intellectual movement, appealing most strongly to a small minority—the scholars, writers, artists, and architects. Altogether there were perhaps 1000 humanists in the Italian peninsula from 1420 to 1540. The movement was vigorous nonetheless; humanist circles and societies flourished in various Italian states, including Naples. One such society, Accademia Antoniana (often known simply as the Academy), was founded by Antonio Beccadelli, ambassador, secretary, and historian to the first Aragonese king, Alfonso I. Members of the Academy studied science and literature, encouraging each other’s efforts in these and other fields. Naples attracted formidable minds because of the Academy—including writers Lorenzo Valla, George Trebizond, and Giovanni Pontano. After Beccadelli’s death in 1471, Pontano became leader of the Academy (eventually Accademia Pontaniana). Like his predecessor, Pontano attracted many learned scholars and aspiring poets to the Academy, including young Jacopo Sannazaro, who was inducted into its society by the early 1480s. The induction ceremony required that Sannazaro adopt a Latinate name to demonstrate his devotion to the classical humanities; he chose “Actius Sincerus,” possibly derived from the Latin words “acta” (“seashore”) and “sincerus” (“sincere”). Thereafter, he generally used the name “Sincero” in his signatures.

Sannazaro’s deep affection for the Academy and its members, especially Pontano, who was a friend, mentor, and even a father figure, manifests itself in several places in Arcadia. Some of its characters are deliberately modeled after members of the Academy. The revered shepherd Androgeo, at whose tomb the others gather, is a stand-in for Beccadelli, the founder of the Academy, while Meliseus—the widowed shepherd whose lamentation comprises the final eclogue—reflects Pontano after the death of his wife Adriana. This conceit, however, has a two-fold significance: while paying tribute to his friends and mentors, Sannazaro also adhered to the pastoral tradition of placing the author and his associates—thinly disguised as shepherds—in the work.

Reviving the pastoral

Humanism, as noted, revived interest in classical language and literature. Many of the early humanists tried to reconstruct elements of ancient Greece and Rome, including their original languages. By the mid-fifteen century, however, the humanists doubted whether this endeavor was possible, since the surviving ancient texts were incomplete and inconsistent. Several scholars, including Lorenzo Valla and Leon Battista Alberti, argued that the passage of time and the evolution of language itself thwarted a full recovery of the past. Therefore, while the ideas of antiquity still resonated for humanists, many believed that a new mode of literary expression was required. For several writers, that mode was the vernacular, or familiar everyday language: true, the vernacular varied by state and even by local area, but the Tuscan and Florentine dialects were among the most widely known and used. Fourteenth-century writers Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch all composed works in the vernacular (see The Divine Comedy, Decameron , and Canzoniere , all also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times). During the 1480s, the young Jacopo Sannazaro followed suit in his Arcadia. Later in life he would reverse direction, choosing to write in Latin rather than his native Italian—a hybrid vernacular of the Tuscan and Neapolitan dialects. Arcadia was an experiment for Sannazaro in fusing classical tradition with the modern vernacular.

At the same time Sannazaro was attempting to revive a genre—the pastoral eclogue—which had lain dormant for many centuries. Used by the Greek poet Theocritus and, later, the Roman poet Virgil, the traditional pastoral poem was at once elaborate and conventional: a nostalgic expression of an urban poet’s yearning for the peace and simplicity of a rural shepherd’s life, depicted in an idealized natural setting. Conventions of the pastoral included shepherds reclining beneath trees and meditating upon their rural muse, playing upon wooden pipes, engaging in singing contests with comrades, relaying tales about their fortunes in love, engaging in rustic sports, or mourning the death of a fellow shepherd. Any resemblance of a shepherd to an authentic “dirt-poor and unlettered” rustic was entirely coincidental; often the shepherds were thinly disguised versions of the poet and his literary colleagues (Lee, p. 11).

Well-acquainted with the pastoral form, Sannazaro favored this mode partly because it was a mixture of monologue, dialogue, narrative action, philosophical rumination, and satirical observation. He also appreciated the form for its archaeological importance: the rediscovery of a genre with such a long history would lead to improved understanding of antiquity in general. Finally, he valued the pastoral for its connection to ancient language. The form stemmed from ancient roots; using it entailed a study of the structure and expression of the ancient language.

Sannazaro’s experiments are most visible in the Arcadian eclogues themselves, which include several poetic forms, including terza rima, the frottola, and the sestina. The sestina, for example, consists of 11-syllable lines arranged into six stanzas of six lines, each followed by a concluding three-line verse (or envoy). Within any given stanza, the lines do not rhyme, but all the stanzas after the first one have lines that finish with the same end words as the first stanza, only in different orders. The concluding three-line verse contains all of the end words, three at the finish of its trio of lines and three inside them. In Arcadia, the seventh eclogue—spoken by Sannazaro’s fictional counterpart, Sincero—is a sestina; the recurring end words are in dark print.

ARCADIA: FACT OR FANTASY?

The ancient Greek poet Theocritus (c. 310-250 b.c.e), credited with creating the pastoral, set his Idylls in the remote countryside of his native Sicily. Virgil, however, transferred the pastoral setting to Arcadia—a convention followed by most subsequent imitators, including jacopo Sanriasaro and England’s Sir Phitip Sidney. Ancient Arcadia was a landlocked area in Peioponnese, the peninsula that formed the southern part of the mainland of Greece, Cut off by mountains from the rest of Greece, Arcadia developed a pastoral civilization, supported by the raising and herding of cattle, sheep, and goats. Of course, real shepherds did not spend their time composing poems and participating in singing contests. Rustic, poor, and unlettered, the real shepherds spent their time making sure their livestock had enough to eat and protecting their charges from wolves, foxes, and other predators, Nonetheless, the shepherd and the region became parts of a longstanding poetic conceit. To many ancient Greek and Roman poets, Arcadia came to represent a rural paradise where shepherds dwelt in peaceful simplicity, composing songs as they tended flocks, and worshipping Pan, Greek god of the forests. It is only this mythical Arcadia that concerns Sannazaro in his romance.

Like the nocturnal bird an enemy of the sun  
weary I go among places shadowy and black  ,
while I see daylight bright upon the earth:  
then when the world is overspread by evening  
I am not, like other creatures, soothed by sleep  
but then I wake to weep among the hills  .
If ever these eyes among the groves or hills  
(where is no splendor from the rays of the sun  )
weary from weeping then are closed in sleep  ,
cruel visions and misapprehensions vain and black  
sadden me so that verily I hesitate at evening  
for fear of sleeping to stretch myself on the earth  .
(Sannazaro, Arcadia, p. 75)

The Romance in Focus

Plot summary

Arcadia is composed of 12 prose chapters, each followed by an eclogue or poem in the pastoral mode. The plot is mainly episodic, focusing on various members of the shepherds’ community in Arcadia. The melancholy recollections of the narrator Sincero—a figure based on Sannazaro himself—lends some unity to the story. A prologue and an epilogue, both in prose, frame the text. The prologue says that the poems about to be “repeated” have been roughly hewn by the shepherds of this paradise.

Chapter 1 of Arcadia begins with a description of a plateau on Mount Parthenius where the shepherds gather for athletic and musical contests. On one occasion, the shepherds notice the melancholy of their comrade Ergasto. In the first eclogue, another shepherd, Selvaggio, offers comfort and tries to persuade Ergasto to reveal the cause of his distress. During their dialogue, Ergasto reveals his passion for a shepherdess whom he saw washing clothes by the river; she revived him when he swooned for love of her, but she abandoned him once he regained consciousness. The mountains, woods, and Ergasto’s own flock have witnessed his still unrequited love for the shepherdess. Ergasto’s comrades attempt to comfort him; thereafter, they all return to their cottages for the night (Chapter 2).

Several days later, the narrator, while leading his flock to pasture, encounters the shepherd Montano. The narrator asks to join Montano and offers a handsomely carved staff if the latter will sing to pass the time. In Eclogue 2, Montano obliges; he is joined part way through his song by another shepherd, Uranio, who has been sleeping in the valley after a night of keeping the wolf away from his flock; the two shepherds begin a contest of love poetry, in praise of their respective sweet-hearts, lasting until the evening. The other shepherds praise the song and discuss the merits of both competitors as they walk home that night.

The next day the shepherds celebrate the feast of Pales, the goddess of shepherds. They visit her holy temple, whose door is graced with elaborate carvings of pastoral scenes. Entering the temple, the shepherds purify themselves by washing their hands in running water and leaping over fires of straw. Having performed these rites, the shepherds visit a beautiful meadow, where many shepherdesses are strolling and making garlands of flowers. The sight inspires the shepherd Galicio to sing of his love (Eclogue 3). In the next chapter, two other shepherds, Logisto and Elpino, challenge each other to a singing contest. In Eclogue 4 the competitors each sing of the pains of love so skillfully that Selvaggio, the judge, declares that both deserve victory. The other shepherds concur, and again everyone returns home at sunset.

In Chapter 5, the oldest shepherd, Opico, leads his fellows to a place that he remembers fondly from his youth. Under his guidance, the company passes a roaring stream and ascends another mountain. On reaching the summit, they discover ten cowherds mourning at the tomb of the shepherd Androgeo. After one cowherd delivers a eulogy, the shepherd Ergasto sings a funeral lament (Eclogue 5).

In Chapter 6 another shepherd, Carino, joins the company and relates that he is looking for a lost heifer. His situation leads Serrano and Opico to bemoan, in song, the sorry condition of the world (Eclogue 6).

After Serrano and Opico have finished singing, Carino turns to the narrator, Sincero, and asks about his past and why he came to Arcadia (Chapter 7). The narrator then identifies himself as a youth from Naples from a good family’s, which had suffered when an unfit ruler ascended the throne. The narrator proceeds to relate the tale of his own misfortune: he fell in love with a childhood playmate and, realizing that his affections were unrequited, fled from Naples to exile in Arcadia. Homesickness and yearning for his beloved still trouble Sincero—the name by which she used to call him instead of Sannazaro—and he longs for death or a speedy reversal of his fortune. In response to Sincero’s lament, Carino offers words of consolation and an elderwood pipe, with which he hopes Sincero can eventually attain poetic greatness:

With this I trust that you, if it be not denied you by the fates, in the future will sing in loftier vein the loves of the Fauns and the Nymphs. And even as up to this point you have fruitlessly spent the beginnings of your adolescence among the simple and rustic songs of shepherds, so hereafter you will pass your fortunate young manhood among the sounding trumpets of the most famous poets of your century, not without hope of eternal fame.
(Arcadia, pp. 74-75)

Sincero then sings of the sorrows of exile, which are alleviated by a dream-vision of “my lady (of her grace),” who gathers flowers upon the hills and exhorts him to leave his dark caverns (Arcadia, p. 76).

Carino continues to offer solace to Sincero and relates his own story (Chapter 8), closely paralleling the one just told. Like Sincero, Carino fell in love with a childhood companion—in his case, a girl dedicated to the goddess Diana, On discovering Carino’s love for her, the girl grew troubled and parted from him without a word. Carino despaired, proclaimed his sorrows to the natural world, and planned to kill himself. The appearance of two white doves and the return of his beloved, who offered words of comfort and chaste embraces, persuaded Carino to abandon the idea of suicide. Carino exhorts Sincero to believe that he will find happiness and takes his leave.

No sooner has Carino departed than Clonico, another lovelorn shepherd, appears, looking wretched. Eugenio, Clonico’s dearest friend, exhorts him to tell his troubles. When Clonico reveals that he too is crossed in love, Eugenio recommends that his friend turn to his work and his art as a cure for his malady (Eclogue 8).

The next morning Clonico wishes to visit a witch who will cure his lovesickness. However Opico persuades him to accompany the other shepherds to the temple of Pan, Greek god of the forest, whose priest, Enareto, has impressive magical powers of his own (Chapter 9). On reaching their destination, the shepherds find Enareto resting beneath a tree. The priest notices Clonico’s pallor and misery. Just then a quarrel erupts between the shepherd Ofelia and a goatherd, Elenco, who had been playing his lyre to his sheep but quickly hid it when he saw the newcomers approaching. Ofelia flings insults at Elenco, who responds in kind; the two engage in a competition, singing first of their mistresses and then seeing who could deliver the most cutting insults (Eclogue 9). Montano, presiding over the contest, finds them equal in skill and declares Apollo, Greek god of music and poetry, the only victor.

In Chapter 10 the shepherds follow Enareto to a sacred grove, then to a cave with a great altar to Pan. There Enareto tells the curious shepherds how Pan’s creation of reed pipes gave rise to pastoral poetry. Remembering Clonico’s plight, Enareto promises to cure the shepherd’s lovesickness. The rest of the company leaves. Opico requests from Selvaggio a song celebrating the present age that has brought forth such fine shepherd-poets. Just then, Selvaggio glimpses something upon a hill; it is the tomb of Massilia, Ergasto’s mother, whom shepherds regarded almost as a divine sibyl, or prophetess, when she was alive. Selvaggio proposes that the company go to the tomb in memory of Massilia, who used to judge their competitions with such evenhanded grace, and the others agree.

After the shepherds pay their respects at Massilia’s tomb, Selvaggio sings about the subject Onica had requested them to treat, the great poets of the present age. Fronimo joins him (Eclogue 10) and points out that the poets of the day are unappreciated. This leads Selvaggio to discourse upon the ills of poverty and worldly corruption that beset life. During their discussion, the shepherds mention the beauty of Naples, filling Sincero with nostalgia for his homeland.

In Chapter 11 Ergasto performs various funeral offices before his mother’s tomb on the anniversary of her death. He then presides over a series of funeral games, granting prizes to the victors in racing, wrestling, and using a slingshot. After the games, Ergasto composes and sings his own lament for Massilia to complete her commemoration (Eclogue 11).

PAN AND SYRINX

While Enareto’s long discussion on the rise of pastoral poetry appears to be Sannazaro’s own invention, most readers would have been familiar with the myth of how panpipes were created. The half-goat Pan (god of shepherds, goatherds, and the forests) loved a water nymph, Syrinx. But she was dedicated to serving Artemis, virgin goddess of the hunt, and so did not return his passion, Trying to escape the god’s attentions, Syrinx called out for divine aid and was transformed into a clump of reeds along the riverbank. The disappointed Pan noticed that the reeds made a beautiful sound when he breathed upon them, He proceeded to cut several reeds of varying length, then bound them together and turned them into a set of pipes on which he played sad songs about his lost love.

Night comes and the shepherds return to their cottages (Chapter 12). Awaking from a disturbing dream, Sincere leaves his cottage and goes for a walk through the dark countryside. On his ramblings, he meets a nymph who guides him underground through valleys and mountains until they reach the source of the earth’s rivers. When they glimpse the waves of the Sebeto River, the nymph tells Sincere to continue alone and vanishes. Mystified, he follows the Sebeto to Naples; he emerges in the hills of his homeland, where he sees a weeping god surrounded by equally sorrowful nymphs. One nymph guides Sincero to the road and cryptically informs him that his “sole Phoenix,” a reference to his lost love, lies beneath the slopes of the mountain (Arcadia, p. 140). By this, Sincero infers that his beloved has died. Overcome with grief, he curses the hour he left Arcadia and wonders where he should go now. In time, still in Naples, Sincero adjusts. He recognizes his two shepherds, Barcinio and Summonzio, who are “widely renowned in [the area’s] forest regions” (Arcadia, p. 141). Settling himself in the grass, Sincero listens to Barcinio and Summonzio sing of the great sorrows and lamentations of Meliseus, a noble shepherd whose beloved, Phyllis, has died (Eclogue 12). The two shepherds then ascend to Phyllis’s tomb and witness Meliseus’s grief firsthand.

Arcadia ends with an epilogue in which Sincero warns his sampogna—his shepherd’s pipe—that sophisticated audiences may not be receptive to its songs. He thus enjoins it to remain in the Arcadian solitudes, where its humble beauties will be best appreciated: “Wherefore you may hold it as matter true and undoubted, that he who lives the more hidden, and the more removed from the multitude, lives better. And that man may with most truth be called blessed among mortal men who, without envy of the grandeurs of others, in modest spirit contents him with his fortune” (Arcadia, p. 154).

The pains of love

Despite its idyllic setting, the overall tone of Arcadia is more melancholy than joyous. While most of the shepherds happily sing, dance, and play rustic sports, those whom Sannazaro chooses to narrate the eclogues suffer from unrequited love, bereavement, and, in Sincero’s case, a combination of lovesickness and homesickness. As one literary scholar notes, Arcadia is full of “episodes illustrating, for the most part, failures in human relationships, personal inadequacies, frustrated aspirations and hopes and trust deceived. … Arcadia is not a happy book” (Kidwell, p. 9). A general mood of melancholy pervades the twelve episodes, growing by the close of the poem into unrelieved despair.

The most common malady in Arcadia is unrequited love. More than half the eclogues deal with a shepherd’s passion for a beautiful but unattainable woman, who is either unaware of or indifferent to her lover’s devotion. Significantly, women seldom appear in Sannazaro’s romance; the lone exception occurs in the third and fourth chapters, when the shepherds, celebrating the feast of Pales, briefly find themselves in the company of beautiful shepherdesses making flower garlands in the meadow. However, despite their purported pains of love, none of the shepherds attempt to court or speak to the shepherdesses; rather the young men appear content to gaze upon the beauty of the garland makers and sing their praises.

The idealized love portrayed in Arcadia reflects a widespread literary trend of the time. Although the figure of the lovesick swain had existed since antiquity, the works of Dante and, especially, Petrarch, which deal with the speaker’s passion for an unattainable beloved, gave it new prominence. The beloved’s very inaccessibility fuels the poet’s art: “Petrarch’s lover experiences torment because his beloved is distant from him. That distance requires compensation. To achieve it the lover” gives his beloved a new value, making her the central figure of his “literary pursuit. He exists not just in order to desire her, but also in order to write about her” (Kennedy, p. 38). A similar type of logic is at work in Arcadia, especially when shepherds describe the beauty and cruelty of their respective beloveds, as in this singing contest between Montano and Uranio as they drive their flocks to pasture:

Montano: O my lovely Phyllis,
whiter art thou than lilies,
more blushing than mid-April’s mead,
more fugitive than the roe-deer’s speed
or speed of timorous fawn;
more arrogant to me
than to great Pan was she
who tired and overgone
transformed her to the tremulous pliant reed;
now for rewarding of my heavy care
ah, to the winds outspread your golden hair.

Uranio: Tirrena mine,
whose color doth outshine
the lovely morning rose
or purest milk—thou sweet
flame of my heart, more fleet
than forest does,
or woodland fawn,
and ah more cruel than she
that made in Thessaly
the primal laurel, from her limbs outdrawn:
for the sole remedy of thy riven breast
turn here the eyes where Love hath made his nest.
(Arcadia, pp. 39–40)

However removed the shepherds are from their beloved, the work is an intimate one. Arcadia’s intimacy comes not from male-female relationships between characters, however, but rather in the relationship between the work and its audience. At the center of Arcadia are the feelings of individuals, even of lowly shepherds, if one takes the writing at face value. Pastoral poetry, concerned with such feelings, is hereby revived by Sannazaro and others “after a thousand years of neglect.” It conveys values that are “by no means trivial,” and speaks to his court society, suggesting that “true happiness is enjoyed by those withdrawn from turmoil and satisfied with what they have, unenvious of others’ success” (Brand and Pertile, p. 161).

Sources and literary context

As was the frequent practice of writers of pastoral literature, Sannazaro drew upon his life experiences, as well as a variety of literary sources, for his Arcadia, Some of Sannazaro’s friends from the Academy appear in the romance disguised as shepherds; in Eclogue 12, the shepherd Meliseus—depicted as grieving over his wife Phyllis—was modeled after Sannazaro’s close friend Giovanni Pontano, whose wife, Adriana, had died in 1490. Pontano himself had written several poems of lamentation concerning his wife’s death, including a pastoral eclogue titled Meliseus. Sannazaro’s early biographers also claim that he based Sincero’s unnamed sweetheart—for whose sake he exiles himself from his beloved Naples—on a real-life love interest. Carmosina Bonifacio was a young girl whom Sannazaro had known and loved as a child. She died at 14, while the poet was in Salerno. Later scholars, however, point out that family’s finances, rather than unrequited love, led to Sannazaro’s removal from Naples as a boy.

Sannazaro’s literary models for Arcadia included the writings of the Greek poet Theocritus, considered to be the originator of pastoral literature, and the Roman poet Virgil, who composed pastorals in Latin. However, Sannazaro drew not only upon bucolic works (works dealing with shepherds, herdsmen, or rural life), but also epic poems as well, such as Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. More recent writers including Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Pontano—the latter a Sannazaro contemporary—also influenced Arcadia.

While adhering closely to the traditions of Greek and Roman pastorals by depicting an idealized natural landscape and shepherds singing and composing poems, Sannazaro introduced several innovations. First, he combined classical and contemporary motifs by introducing the popular figure of the sighing Petrarchan lover into classical-style pastorals. While shepherds in classical pastorals were often embroiled in love affairs (both happy and unhappy), the shepherds in Sannazaro’s Arcadia portrayed their relationships as sources of ceaseless torment. They were hapless victims of an all-consuming passion resembling a disease or a form of madness, a

INFLUENCE AND IMITATION

Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia shared many features with Sannazaro’s Arcadia, including experimentation with verse forms. Both poets attempted double sestinas, presented in their works as love dialogues between two shepherds:

Logisto. Shepherds, nor bird nor beast dwells in the valley
that does not know the harmony of my rhyme,
nor is there cave or grot among the rocks
that does not echo my continual plaint;
nor flower nor bush is growing in these fields
that I do not trample a thousand times a day.

Elpino. Alas, 1 know not wed the hour or day
that I was shut within this mountain valley;
nor ever do I recall running through the fields
free or unbound; but making complaint in rhyme
I have lived ever in flames; and with my plaint
I have moved to pity the very trees and rocks,
(Sannazaro, Afcadia, p. 53)

Strephon. Ye Goat-herd gods, that love the grassy mountains,
Ye nymphs which haunt the spring in pleasant valleys,
Ye satyrs joyed with free and quiet forests,
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music,
Which to my woes gives still an early morning,
And draws the dolor on till weary evening,

Klaius. O Mercury, foregoer to the evening,
O heavenly huntress of the savage mountains,
O lovely star, entitled of the morning,
White that my voice doth fill these woeful valleys,
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music.
Which oft hath Echo tired in secret forests.
(Sidney in Abrams, p. 502)

frequent Petrarchan conceit. Sannazaro also made the passion in Arcadia entirely heterosexual; his shepherds burn with love for cruel or indifferent shepherdesses, not for each other, as in some Greek and Roman pastorals. Finally, Sannazaro inserted poetry into his storyline and chose to write not in Latin, but in vernacular Tuscan (with some Neapolitan variations), as had Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Thus, Arcadia helped to establish Tuscan dialect as a standard Italian language and contributed to the popularity of the vernacular as a means of literary expression.

Publication and impact

Although Sannazaro composed many poems during the 1480s and 1490s, he apparently preferred to circulate his work privately, rather than have it published. He may have been especially reluctant to consider the publication of Arcadia, which he seems to have regarded, perhaps dismissively, as a youthful effort. In 1502, a year after Sannazaro had accompanied Frederick III—former king of Naples—into exile, a pirated edition of Arcadia, based on an old 1489 manuscript, appeared in Venice, to the indignation of Sannazaro and his friends from the Academy. This version contained only the first ten eclogues and many textual errors and inconsistencies. To counter the pirated version, Pietro Summonte—Sannazaro’s friend and the head of the Academy—published the complete Arcadia, apparently with Sannazaro’s approval, in 1504. This version contained Eclogues 11 and 12, their accompanying prose chapters, and the epilogue “To His Sampogna.”

Sannazaro’s Arcadia enjoyed immediate success after its publication. A new edition appeared about every two years during the poet’s lifetime and throughout the sixteenth century. The work inspired a renowned pastoral play, Aminta, by Italian writer Torquato Tasso; Aminta (1580), concerns a young shepherd-poet happily united with Silvia after her initial rejection. Arcadia’s popularity with Renaissance readers led to countless imitations in various countries and languages. One of the most famous was Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, on which the English poet worked from around 1580 to 1586, the year of his death. Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke, published a version of his Arcadia in 1593. Sannazaro’s influence on Sidney’s work is easy to detect; not only does the English Arcadia take place in a pastoral setting similar to that in Sannazaro’s romance, but each chapter ends with pastoral eclogues in which shepherds sing, dance, play rustic sports, and participate in song and poetry competitions.

—Pamela S. Loy

For More Information

Abrams, M. H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986.

Brand, Peter, and Lino Fertile, eds. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Kennedy, William J. Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral Hanover, Conn.: University Press of New England, 1983.

Kidwell, Carol. Sannazaro and Arcadia. London: Gerald Duckworth, 1983.

Lee, M. Owen. Death and Rebirth in Virgil’s Arcadia. New York: State University of New York Press, 1989.

Martines, Lauro. Power and Imagination. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.

Sannazaro, Jacopo. Arcadia & Piscatorial Eclogues. Trans. Ralph Nash. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966.

Shinn, Rinn S., ed. Italy: A Country Study. Washington, D.C.: Foreign Area Studies, 1987.

World Literature and Its Times: Profiles of Notable Literary Works and the Historic Events That Influenced Them

Arcadian

views updated May 23 2018

Ar·ca·di·an / ärˈkādēən/ • n. a native of Arcadia. ∎ poetic/lit. an idealized country dweller.• adj. of or relating to Arcadia. ∎ poetic/lit. of or relating to an ideal rustic paradise.

The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English

Arcadia

views updated Jun 08 2018

Arcadia a mountainous district in the Peloponnese of southern Greece. In poetic fantasy it represents a pastoral paradise the home of song-loving shepherds, and in Greek mythology it is the home of Pan.
Et in Arcadia ego a Latin phrase, meaning literally ‘And I too in Arcadia’; a tomb inscription, of disputed interpretation, often depicted in classical paintings, notably by Poussin in 1655.

The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable ELIZABETH KNOWLES