SBORNIK PRACI FILOZOFICKE FAKULTY BRNENSKE UNIVERZITY

STUDIA MINORA FACULTATIS PHILOSOPHICAE UNIVERSITATIS BRUNENSIS

S 8, 2002 — BRNO STUDIES IN ENGLISH 28

ZDENKA BRANDEJSKA

DEVISING CONSOLATION: T H E MENTAL LANDSCAPES

OF STOPPARD'S ARCADIA

Yes, they'll forget us. Such is our fate, there is no help for it. What seems to us serious,
significant, very important, will one day be forgotten or will seem unimportant [a pause].
And it's curious that we can't possibly tell what exactly will be considered great and im­
portant, and what will seem petty and ridiculous. Didn't the discoveries of Copernicus of
Columbus, let's say, seem useless andridiculousat first, while the nonsensical writings of
some fool seemed true? And it may be that our present life, which we accept so readily,
will in time seem strange, inconvenient, stupid, not clean enough, perhaps even sinful...

Vershinin in The Three Sisters by A. P. Chekhov

In 1993, Tom Stoppard finished a full-length play entitled Arcadia; in April

that year it opened at the National Theatre to become one of Stoppard's most
popular plays. Paul Delaney describes the event as 'a triumph with audiences'
(Delaney 265). Reviews of Arcadia, however, 'ranged from denunciations of
"the play's central vacuum: its fatal lack of living contact between ideas and
people" to celebrations of an "unusually moving" play in which Stoppard's
ideas and emotions seamlessly coincide' (Delaney 265). By introducing the new
play, Stoppard seems to have succeeded in forestalling the kind of uncompre­
hending criticism he had received for Hapgood. While Arcadia can be viewed
as in many ways indebted to Stoppard's previous play—especially in the scope
of the subject matter it incorporates, often concerned with highly specialized
issues—at the same time it revises and transforms the mostly ineffective strate­
gies for reading (let us say reading, even in theatre) offered by Hapgood.
As a matter of fact Arcadia—in its choice and combination of topics—goes
far beyond expectation. It proved capable of embracing topics as diverse as
English landscape gardening, chaos theory, mathematics, (post-)Newtonian
physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, English Romantic poetry, schol­
arship, population biology or the nature of time. The richness and number of
themes, which are introduced with encyclopaedic precision in Arcadia, are hard
104 ZDEftKA BRANDEJSKA

to be ignored. Unusually for a play, it seems to inspire the readers and spectators
and urge them to take up and research subjects they find appealing. On the other
hand, it embodies a whole series of uncertainties, minor secrets, or even global
mysteries, and these refer to queries of no less importance than whether there is
order in the world and in history or just chaos, or whether entropy is inevitable.
Various topics occur and are picked up by the characters as the plot unfolds; the
process is apparently brought about chiefly by several characters' professions,
or at least preoccupations. Strictly speaking, five of the play's dramatis personae
are either scholars or students, in short they are eager to know, and their activi­
ties provided Stoppard with the principal thrust of the play. Therefore, they are
able not only to propose answers and solutions, but they can also pose questions
and problems.
Generally speaking, if we allow for the tension between theatrical and literary
elements in theatre, Stoppard's plays insist on stressing or referring back to the
literary. Sometimes, since they are first presented in stage productions, dramatic
works provoke their audiences to fall back on the actual texts of the plays. There
are several instances of this fairly singular kind of reaction to a dramatic text:
there are several websites presenting information on the play's ideas from vari­
ous fields, as well as offering links to other resources. After Arcadia had been
produced in London and in New York, a high demand for the script was re­
ported. In her review of the play, Anne Barton suggests metaphorically that go­
ing 'once around the garden is not enough', and points out that a spectator's de­
sire to take the play in fully may result in his or her 'return to the theater, or a
second experience with the printed page' (Barton). This would happen not so
much for the sake of clarity, as one would perhaps expect in the case of Hap-
good, but rather to ensure a more profound enjoyment of the play, which is a
clear sign of interest exceeding normal levels on the part of Stoppard's audi­
ences. They can thus 'savor nuances and details invisible on the first occasion'
(Barton).
The basic setting of the play is extremely complicated, as it shifts its focus
back and forth between the early nineteenth century (1809 and 1812) and the
1
present. Characters from the earlier period not only become the personified
objects of study for scholars in the later period, but they also come up with ideas
that run as a thread across the centuries. The internal rhythm of Arcadia rests on
its fairly regular alternating of the two types of scenes until their different time
levels blend in the climactic Scene Seven. Also, the academic research carried out
by Hannah Jarvis, the author of a popular book on Byron's mistress, Lady Caro­
line Lamb, and Bernard Nightingale, a strikingly arrogant Sussex don, progresses
little by little and despite difficulties, misled or lost as they sometimes get.
The play's contradictions, if not conflicts, arise partially from the juxtaposi­
tion of two perspectives—one showing in fragments how the events in question
really took place, the other examining what aspects of the past are preserved and

Stoppard used the technique of combining two periods of time for example in Where Are
They Now?, Indian Ink and The Invention of Love.
 DEVISING CONSOLATION: THE MENTAL LANDSCAPES OF STOPPARD'S ARCADIA 105

in what ways they are accessible to contemporary readers—and partially from

power struggles developing between the two archaeologists of the past. The pre­
sent-day line of the story begins with Nightingale's arrival at Sidley Park, 'a
very large country house in Derbyshire. Nowadays, the house would be called a
stately home' (Arcadia I.i.l). From the very start, Stoppard is subtly implying to
his audiences on whose side their sympathy should be. Nightingale's sudden
appearance at Sidley Park, with his red Mazda parked outside the house, some­
how disturbs the Arcadian serenity of the estate occupied by the present Lord
and Lady Croom, from what is said about them by their children (they remain
offstage) a very English, tradition-abiding couple. What is more, when he leams
that 'Hannah Jarvis the author', whose book is reviled by Byronian scholars, of
whom Nightingale is one, is on the premises, he assumes an alias, Peacock, so
as not to be immediately recognized by her (I.ii.16). Although he does not suc­
ceed in getting away with the lie, he succeeds in spreading a competitive atmos­
phere among the inhabitants of the house, altogether a source of numerous sharp
verbal interchanges. Also, there is only one person willing to side with him—
Chloe, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the house, a frivolous young lady
whose belief in 'sexual determinism' makes her easily available to Bernard.
Nevertheless, the relationship between the two researchers is not one of com­
plete animosity. In a sense, their efforts complement each other; they encounter
the same kind of problems: scarcity, contingency and incompleteness of sources,
relics and direct evidence for their respective theses. As they work in the same
depository of long-forgotten information, the needed piece of evidence can be
provided practically by anybody living in the house. Bernard is apparently
aware of the possibility, so he pragmatically asks Hannah for her co-operation in
this matter. Several moments in the play confirm the scholars' mutual depend­
ence; on several occasions Hannah or Valentine, the Croom son, actually give
Bernard the missing pieces of the puzzle: Septimus Hodge was Lord Byron's
fellow student at university, Byron did visit Sidley Park for he is once men­
tioned in game books, Mrs Chater had been a widow before she was able to
marry Captain Brice etc. In return, but only when his stay in the house is ap­
proaching its end, Bernard presents Hannah with a copy of a book containing
some momentous clues to the mysterious existence of the Sidley hermit.
Yet there are other aspects of the two contrasting characters which make Ber­
nard come out as the definitely less likeable figure of the two: the choice of
topics for their research, as well as methods they use, and the reasons behind
their endeavours. Clearly, she lives in a symbiotic relationship with the locale
and its inhabitants, whereas he intrudes on the tranquillity of 'Arcadia'. While
Hannah is trying to learn more about the enigmatic hermit who lived on the es­
tate, having found refuge in a hermitage, which was newly designed in the
fashionable picturesque style of the period, Bernard is eager to uncover a scan­
dal—a duel in which Byron is supposed to have killed the minor poet Ezra
Chater, which might have been the reason for Byron's sudden flight to the Con­
tinent where he stayed for two years. 'Probably the most sensational literary
discovery of the century,' Bernard fore'sees the event (II.v.58). Whereas Hannah
106 ZDEflKA BRANDEISKA

first finds it hard to define her object of study by naming it (she wants to use the
hermit as a symbol of 'the whole Romantic sham'), Bernard unsuccessfully
masks Byron's name by substituting him with fashionably marginal subject
matter: Ezra Chater, a second-rate poet of uncertain fate (I.ii.27). Ironically,
their topics turn out to be virtually the same in the end, embodied as they are by
one and only person, i.e. Septimus Hodge: he had been both the hermit and
author of most of the things Bernard so prematurely ascribed to Byron.
For Hannah the final disclosure is a happy occasion: it is the third Croom off­
spring named Gus who brings a drawing by Thomasina Coverly called
2
'Septimus holding Plautus' to her, wordless. Not entirely surprised, she re­
sponds: 'I was looking for that. Thank you' (II.vii.97). As if the hunt for all sorts
of evidence had stopped, the unexpected arrival of the information elicits no
sign of sensation. What it does affect is not her thesis, but rather it intensifies
her sentiments towards the previous inhabitants of the house—for she has fa­
miliarized herself with fragments of their lives, thoughts and doings during her
stay at Sidley Park—especially as two representatives of the past are present on
stage at that moment (Thomasina waltzing with Septimus), and yet irrevocably
absent. The moment functions similarly for the audience. Nonetheless, their
gaze is all-embracing, capable of synthesizing the whole number of themes that
echoed throughout the text. There is an element of wish-fulfilment in the final
scene: it is possible to feel gratification for Hannah's eventual significant prog­
ress in her efforts to know more, i.e. to equal the spectators' level of knowledge.
On the contrary, Bernard's egotistic interest in Byron takes a radically differ­
ent course. When he enters the house his hypothesis is all but confirmed. He
fabricated a story out of three letters found in Byron's library (concerning Sep­
timus Hodge, not Byron; readers of Arcadia are aware of the fact long before
Nightingale even appears on stage) that neatly fits into Byron's biography.
Moreover, the revelation should explain a specific, as yet unresolved, blank spot
in the biography. However, Bernard's mental construct soon proves to be a par­
ticularly shaky structure.
As a literary character, Bernard continuously resembles his namesake from
Virginia W o o l f s The Waves, who imposes plot on a particularly unaccountable
matter: the story was never there. Stoppard's Bernard assumes Byron's journey
to Europe must have had a reason, or even must have been an outcome of a
cause-and-effect narrative. On the contrary, Lady Croom, worrying that Byron
will leave (her), suggests obscurity in his behaviour, quite suitable for a man of
genius:

L A D Y C R O O M : He says he is determined on the Malta packet sailing

out of Falmouth! His head is full of Lisbon and Lesbos, and his portman­
teau of pistols, and I have told him it is not to be thought of. ... He says

'Plautus' is a turtle. Together with frequently mentioned rabbits it reminds one of the philo­
sophical animals from Jumpers.
 DEVISING CONSOLATION: THE MENTAL LANDSCAPES OF STOPPARD'S ARCADIA 107

his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, per­
haps.
(I.iii.41)

Bernard of the lyrical modernist fiction, who is rather a subjective voice,

found his appropriate physical, dramatically 'objective' representation in Stop-
pard's play. Instead of verifying his evidence, Stoppard's Bernard hurries on to
publish his findings before they can be refuted. And they are, eventually, if only
to a certain extent. Partly recalling Hapgood's concerns, reality comes out as a
paradox in Arcadia. Bernard's thesis is grounded on the presumption that one
can possess only one kind of identity. Since nothing is known about Ezra Chater
after 1809 ('he disappears completely'), he is literally dead, though not as the
result of any duel (I.ii.31). As the readers might be informed, having themselves
acquainted with the play Hapgood, a person can consist of several, often mutu­
ally contradictory, personalities. Bernard's presupposition is profoundly wrong:
the poet transformed himself into a botanist and lived on to describe the dwarf
dahlia in Martinique, get credit for it and die there of a monkey bite (I.ii.22).

B E R N A R D : (Wildly) Ezra wasn't a botanist! He was a poet!

H A N N A H : He was not much of either, but he was both.
(II.vii.89)

When Bernard is faced with the truth, as pronounced by Hannah, he exclaims:

B E R N A R D : Of course it's a disaster! I was on 'The Breakfast Hour'!

V A L E N T I N E : It doesn't mean Byron hadn't fought a duel, it only means
Chater wasn't killed in it.
B E R N A R D : Oh, pull yourself together!—do you think I'd have been on
'The Breakfast Hour' if Byron had missedl
H A N N A H : Calm down, Bernard. Valentine's right.
B E R N A R D : (Grasping at straws) Do you think so? You mean the Pica-
dilly reviews? Yes, two completely unknown Byron essays—and my dis­
covery of the lines he added to 'English Bards'. That counts for some­
thing.
(II.vii.89)

What is ironic about Bernard's self-consolation is the fact that his 'last resort'
(his fatally diminished discovery) is finally exposed as altogether incorrect.
While the readers immediately see Bernard's error owing to the perspective they
are granted by the playwright, the character leaves the stage consigned to igno­
rance. In a way, Bernard's extreme pragmatic approach is reminiscent of Hap­
good's 'You get what you interrogate for', and critical of it, too. Seemingly,
Bernard's 'defeat' is only a question of linear time; inevitably he is bound to
leave the house with a paper bag over his head, as Hannah warns him. There­
fore, the viewers' attention is not directed solely at his 'punishment'. The world
108 ZDEftKA BRANDEJSKA

in which his blunder could occasion serious consequences is sufficiently distant

from that of Sidley Park.
After his arrival Bernard did not keep his real objectives and incentives secret
for long. Early on, he had stated them quite bluntly to Hannah:

B E R N A R D : Hannah, this is fame. Somewhere in the Croom papers there

will be something—
H A N N A H : There isn't, I've looked.
B E R N A R D : But you were looking for something else!
CI.ii.31)

Encouraged by initial promising progress in his colonization of the past, he cries

out frenetically: 'And there'll be more. There is always more. We can find it!'
(I.iv.50). But this was not the last time the reader encounters the pronouncement
of Bernard's conviction: later in the play it even seems to be moderately adopted
by Hannah. Following a devastating argument with Bernard in Scene Five, when
she already suspects that there is a crucial connection between the hermit and
Septimus, she echoes Bernard's own words, saying: 'Somewhere there will be
something ... if only I can find it' (II.v.66). Although nothing much is revealed
of Hannah's motives for the research—she is a professional in every respect, but
awkward regarding emotions—Stoppard seems to be in favour of those able to
use their intuition. As characters they get rewarded: verging on the metaphysi­
cal, things give out their mysteries, silences speak out. That Hannah receives her
final comforting 'absolution' from the hands of Gus, himself mute and autistic,
is a fine example.

***

Critics were particularly disturbed by Gus, linking him with Thomasina or his
nineteenth century mirror image, the eloquent Augustus, Thomasina's brother;
these two male characters were actually played by one actor both in the London
and New York productions. Gus's inability to gain access to discourse, or possi­
bly his purposeful refusal to use it (he spoke until he was five) qualifies him as a
peculiar kind of relic from the past. However, he occupies a firm and tenable
position within the contemporary Sidley Park household, as well as in Stop-
pard's dramatic layout. As opposed to Henry from The Real Thing, a character
whose dramatic existence was based on holding onto the 'real', steady and pro­
nounceable, Gus is the embodiment of an enigma, an incarnation of the invisible, a
guardian of the lost: not only does he produce the drawing out of the blue, which
was, as we learn in the final scene of Arcadia, in the possession of Augustus Cov-
erly, but also he was able to identify the foundations of an old boat-house in the
garden when no one else could. That is why his mother calls him a 'genius' (Gus
could, after all, be an abbreviation of both Augustus and genius).
Occupying an area beyond language, Gus is playing the piano offstage while
Hannah and Val are striving to grasp what it was that Thomasina did or did not
 DEVISING CONSOLATION: THE MENTAL LANDSCAPES OF STOPPARD'S ARCADIA 109

discover almost two hundred years ago. Val goes as far as to explain to Hannah
that what the girl was doing now looks like the rudiments of iterated algorithms.
Still there are a number of phenomena which seem to be fairly unpredictable,
irreducible to mathematical theory:

V A L E N T I N E : We can't even predict the next drip from a dripping tap

when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the
smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredict­
able. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on
the screen. The future is disorder. V and H trying to figure out something (math
thingy) is reflected by G, in his music, since
(I.iv.48)
that's impossible to guess too (the tune and
the math problem/ theory)
Inadvertently, Gus provides a non-verbal comment on the subject:

H A N N A H : What is he playing?
V A L E N T I N E : I don't know. He makes it up.
(I.iv.48)

In his improvised play it is impossible to 'guess the tune'—which is roughly

what Val's research is about, as he is trying to detect a mathematical rule behind
the changing population of grouse—each tone in a way 'sets up the conditions
for the next'. At a larger level, Gus plays an important role in Stoppard's in­
triguing juxtaposition in this scene, as well as serving as a many-layered meta­
phor throughout the whole play. It is he who presents Hannah with an apple, out
of empathy, at the end of the second scene, the first 'contemporary' scene. The
object is a part of the decoration; it is left on the table as a prop (Septimus nib­
bles at it in the following scene, while Thomasina—and later Hannah as well—
ponders the apple leaf) and as an intentionally all too multifunctional symbol.
Barton mentions the fruit as 'an object that gradually comes to symbolize New­
ton's discovery of the law of gravity, the late twentieth-century geometry of
natural forms, the perils of sexuality, any paradise that is lost, and the introduc­
tion of death into the world after the Fall' (Barton). In a recent analysis of the
play, Derek B. Alwes objects to taking the apple symbolism 'as serious theo­
logical or moral allusions' because the context works against it (Alwes 397).
The introduction of the conspicuously ambivalent apple should in fact warn
against theories made out of nothing, the type that Bernard is practising in front
of the audience's very eyes.

Anne Barton points to a certain muted quality discernible in Arcadia. In con­

trast with Stoppard's other plays, which—apart from being verbally exquisite—
also explored the theatrical, Arcadia possibly makes a decisive step towards
what we imagine under the concept of the 'play or comedy of ideas'. 'Not only
do two of the most important guests at Sidley Park, Lord Byron and the lascivi-
110 ZDEflKA BRANDEJSKA

ous Mrs. Chater, remain tantalizingly offstage; all the really arresting events are
invisible' (Barton). Nonetheless, I am far from saying the play is distanced from
the material world of theatre. Although some of the play's elements can be en­
joyed only if read more than once (especially the numerous, subtle paradoxes
well-developed in the plot structure), the text appears to be heavily dependent
on the possibility of being staged. If the alternating between the two different
epochs is to make an impression on the audience, it has to be materialized on
stage, it needs to present real people, both 'living' and 'dead', yet all actually
present. This becomes all the more obvious as we hear Bernard relativize the
accessibility of truth, shouting: 'Proof? Proof! You'd have to be there, you silly
bitch!* (I.iv.49).
Only through a world of fiction is Stoppard able to manipulate time at his
own will, the structure of the play thus undermines and reverses the prominent
issue Arcadia raises, which is the arrow of time, the natural order of things we
are all familiar with. By placing the two periods into the same room, and even
making it crowded with individuals living out 'the same sort of morning' (the
two groups of people representing characters separated by time closely coexist
on stage, especially in the last scene), Stoppard celebrates the theatrical, the
unmediated presence of actors (I.ii.15). The irreversibility of time remains a
persistent theme throughout the whole play.
From the very beginning Thomasina feels enthralled by the mystery, rightly
observing that if she stirs her rice pudding backward, 'the jam will not come
together again' (I.i.5). The occasion foreshadows her prefiguration of the law of
entropy she fabricates, using an enigmatic diagram, towards the end of the play.
Val, who elucidates most of the play's science, both past and present, notes that:

V A L E N T I N E : There's an order things can't happen in. You can't open a

door till there's a house.
H A N N A H : I thought that's what genius was.
V A L E N T I N E : Only for lunatics and poets.
(II.vii.79)

To oppose Val's scepticism, Hannah quotes Byron's poem, in which he envis­

aged, in poetical terms, a kind of entropy. By implication, one belongs most
probably to either of these categories if s/he is gifted enough to be capable of
transgressing the reasonable order things happen in, to have the future and the
3
past run in both directions. But the assumption can be misleading, such as when
Hannah immediately notices logical inconsistencies in Bernard's hypotheses:

H A N N A H : Nobody would kill a man and then pan his book. I mean, not
in that order. So he must have borrowed the book, written the review,
posted it, seduced Mrs Chater, fought a duel and departed, all in the space
of two or three days. Who would do that?

Implicitly, the two categories include Stoppard as well.

 DEVISING CONSOLATION: THE MENTAL LANDSCAPES OF STOPPARD'S ARCADIA 111

B E R N A R D : Byron.
(II.v.59)

Stoppard's brilliant heroine, Thomasina, can be counted among the unruly

spirits. Both the nineteenth-century scenes and Hannah and Val's investigations
imply that if Thomasina hadn't exactly flung the door (of chaos theory and of
the Second Law of Thermodynamics) open, she must have at least peeked
through it. By analogy, she also violates the 'natural' order in the first scene,
which she opens with her question: 'Septimus, what is carnal embrace?' (I.i.l).
When she forces the answer out of her tutor after a while, she becomes aware
not only of her minor transgression, but also of the system underlying it. In front
of her mother, she plays ignorant:

T H O M A S I N A : It is plain that there are some things a girl is allowed to

understand, and these include the whole of algebra, but there are others,
such as embracing a side of beef, that must be kept from her until she has
a carcass of her own.
(I.i.ll)

Nevertheless, the system she has just discovered by infringing upon it is a social
one and far from natural. Despite the fact that the play—mainly for its verbal
playfulness—was clearly influenced by the comedy of manners, it is rather the
natural 'manners' ruling the world that constitute Stoppard's prime interest. In
the end, Hannah and Val are close to acknowledging that, from what they know,
Thomasina was a genius after all. But while Byron is a marginal (and yet in a
way, the central) figure of Arcadia—never truly appearing—and at the same
time a major poet and a leading spirit of the era, Thomasina as the chief figure
and the clairvoyant thinker of the play is swept away from historicity, along
with her experiments and discoveries, when she is burnt to death on the eve of
her seventeenth birthday.

V A L E N T I N E : ...she'd be famous.
H A N N A H : No, she wouldn't. She was dead before she had time to be
famous . . .
V A L E N T I N E : She died?
H A N N A H : ...burned to death.
V A L E N T I N E : (Realizing) Oh ... the girl who died in the fire!
(II.vii.76)

Nonetheless, Hannah's intuitive conclusion is nothing new when compared to

the fact that it was Septimus who first realized the genius in the girl, back then
in 1812, when he calls her a prophet (II.vii.81). Furthermore, Thomasina herself
implies the possibility, explicitly drawing the parallel: 'You will be famous for
being my tutor when Lord Byron is dead and forgotten' (I.iii.37). But since she
couldn't, being a character in a play, cross the boundaries of the fictitious world,
112 ZDEflKA BRANDEJSKA

to the readers she becomes an epitome of all that has been lost and wasted, an
embodiment of grief.
Although time cannot run backwards—a phenomenon naturally understood,
but not quite scientifically explained until today—Arcadia's elaborate shifting
between the two time periods seems to suggest that the law is not unconditional:
purely hypothetically, one can trespass the time boundary to and fro. However,
this is not an absolute privilege: it is available only to the subjects outside the
play, in other words the spectators.

It is a common feature of dramatic literature that individual characters are de­

prived of a total, unifying perspective usually possessed by the audience. The
overall sum of information flowing from the stage to the spectators witnessing
the performance is often built on, and at the same time fragmented into, solilo­
quies, asides, or comments of a chorus, as mentioned by Derek B. Alwes (Alwes
392). While traditionally, viewers enjoyed a position of either superiority (with
comedy) or anxiety (with tragedy), Alwes recognizes a third aspect applicable to
the audience's experience of Arcadia—that of consolation (Alwes 392). He is
right to notice that whereas every play is bound to solve, if unwittingly, its rela­
tion to those who are to perceive it, few do so in such a degree as Stoppard's
Arcadia, self-admittedly and by reflecting some of the viewers'/readers' inter­
pretative activities in the very texture of the plot. According to Alwes, who re­
fers to ideas of the sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius, we adopt a
timeless, godlike perspective while watching Arcadia. 'Like God, we see the
two historical moments as a single moment on stage—an eternal present'
(Alwes 394). His main argument is that the play is less about the inaccessibility
of the past than about its accessibility. Consolation arises from among various
examples; it is primarily the recognition that 'we can recover much of what has
been lost' (Alwes 398). Against the 'ultimate heat death of the universe' caused
by entropy, Alwes hails other fairly optimistic aspects of the play—however
time-bound and at the same time oblivious of time—the human imagination and
sexuality (Alwes 399).
The first scene of Arcadia can be taken as an allusion to The Real Thing and
its opening scene, which tested the audience's capacity to surrender to illusion.
In Arcadia, the communicative potential of the play is less deceptive, although
the viewers' relation to the stage action radically changes when the second
scene begins to unfold. Whereas in the earlier play, the opening scene turns out
to be a kind of text within a larger text, commented on, even mocked at, entirely
locked in the metatextual framework of the play, the first scene of Arcadia pres­
ents action which becomes an object of interest for the characters in the second
scene, and by extension for the viewers as well. 'Arcadia entices, intrigues, and
only gradually mystifies its audience with the sense that there is more to be
known' (Delaney 266). Besides the fact that the second scene does not concern
the same people, it soon proves to have a life of its own so that the two direc-
 DEVISING CONSOLATION: THE MENTAL LANDSCAPES OF STOPPARD'S ARCADIA 113

tions of the plot, substantially interwoven, appear as more or less equal, i.e.
equally conceivable to the audience.
The position of the audience as defined by Arcadia is indeed a crucial condi­
tion affecting the way the text is read and understood. The consequences it
brings about are reflected in various elements by which the play functions; for
example the communicability of its humour and frequent paradoxes is utterly
determined by the viewers' capacity to see the two kinds of action as a whole,
and almost simultaneously. The two time periods are not merely set up against
each other in juxtaposition, but they illuminate each other, a complex web of
communication develops between them. Interestingly, and quite contrary to the
above-stated linearity of time, it is a give-and-take relationship, not one-way
traffic. Not only do the contemporary characters speculate on past events, but
the nineteenth-century characters often ponder over the distant future, and fre­
quently they succeed, without intending to, in predicting their own destinies.
Towards the end of the play, without foretelling the exact circumstances of
his becoming a hermit, Septimus begins to understand that his pupil's equations
will eventually drive him mad. 'It will make me mad as you promised,' he con­
fides in Thomasina on the eve of her tragic death (II.vii.92). Not only does she
make a hermit of him, but she actually makes the hermit when she draws what
she imagines under the notion into the architect's 'picturesque' sketch book: 'I
will put in a hermit, for what is a hermitage without a hermit?' (I.i.13). The
drawing later becomes 'the only known likeness of the Sidley hermit', 'drawn in
by a later hand, of course' (I.ii.25).
The alternating scenes are in constant mutual dialogue; what is more, its gen­
eral rules are substantially undermined: the viewers often know the answers
even before they are given the status of answers, i.e. before the questions are
formulated. In Scene One, Thomasina makes a witty remark, in which she prac­
tically confirms Val's late-twentieth-century thesis that patterns are detectable
from the chaos of game books: her father 'has no need of a recording angel, his
life is written in the game book' (I.i.13). It is entirely the playwright's doing that
the characters, separated by historical time, deal with surprisingly similar topics
and parallel experiences, sometimes even uttering the same lines (the subject
matter of the modern-time researchers is partly limited by the activities of the
past savants). Thus, an area of themes common to both the periods—literally
placed among the walls of the same room—is created.
Within the confines of this specific area paradoxes, consisting of two oppo­
site statements that are both true at the same time, can thrive particularly well
(Vanek 280). It can be said that on the one hand, Thomasina and Septimus are
right in what they claim to be true (indeed, as we are allowed to know, they of­
ten are), and on the other hand, both Hannah and Bernard are right as well, in
the two groups' fatally separated contexts; Bernard, when he realizes his hypothe­
sis was wrong for the most part, and Hannah, when she finds out hers was not.
It is beyond Bernard's competence to recognize fully the extent of his failure:
Byron neither fought the duel, nor wrote the Picadilly reviews. A number of
paradoxical accounts can be inferred from the turbulent circumstances that
114 ZDENKA BRANDEJSKA

formed and formed around Bernard's research. He gives Byron credit for the
reviews, falsely, but he also claims that he discovered a few lines the poet added
in pencil to Lady Croom's copy of Byron's satire English Bards and Scotch Re­
viewers. A minor thing in itself, but he is right in this. 'I've proved Byron was
here and as far as I'm concerned he wrote those lines as sure as he shot that
hare,' he defends himself, not knowing what the audience knows, which is that
the hare was actually shot by Lord Augustus, only Byron claimed it, showing
self-assurance not unlike Bernard's (II.vii.79). There is another similarity that
relates Bernard to Byron: the reasons for their expulsion from the peaceful calm
of 'Arcadia'. The true cause of Byron's sudden fleeing the Croom estate, which
Bernard tried so arduously to find, is echoed peculiarly in Bernard's own be­
haviour before he leaves the house. Both men—the poet and his biographer—
are caught red-handed by Lady Croom, the present and the past: while Tho-
masina's mother, enamoured of Lord Byron, encountered the promiscuous Mrs
Chater 'on the threshold of Lord Byron's room', Bernard is caught with Chloe
by her mother in the hermitage (II.vi.68). Yet the final paradox concerning Ber­
nard remains implicit: there is shown to be a grain of truth in his assumptions
about the famous poet. Lord Byron did play a decisive role in the duel between
Septimus and M r Chater. In fact, he both helped to bring the duel about, as well
as prevent it. Thanks to Thomasina's account of one breakfast at Sidley Park,
we learn that it was through Byron that Chater learned of Septimus's derisive
review of his (Chater's) book.

T H O M A S I N A : He said you were a witty fellow, and he had almost by

heart an article you wrote about—well, I forget what, but it concerned a
book called 'The Maid of Turkey' and how you would not give it to your
dog for dinner.
SEPTIMUS: Ah. M r Chater was at breakfast, of course.
T H O M A S I N A : He was, not like certain lazybones.
(I.iii.36)

Although Septimus Hodge contrives—with his masterful use of discourse—to

avert the threat of a duel when it first emerges, the second time, as it is about to
take place inescapably, it is cancelled because of Byron's (and Chater's) depar­
ture.
Since the play is closer to comedy as a genre, the humour it continually em­
ploys seems to be inextricably intertwined with its numerous paradoxical mirror
images. One should not forget that a paradox can sometimes turn into the gro­
tesque (Vanek 284). Surely, as Bernard observes, looking for signs of Byron's
presence at Sidley Park, 'it's not going to jump out at you like "Lord Byron re­
marked wittily at breakfast'" (I.ii.31-32). Nevertheless, one of the first explicit
things said of Byron in the play is included in Thomasina's comment: 'Lord By­
ron was amusing at breakfast' (I.iii.36). It is our only privilege and duty—as that
of spectators—to acknowledge the multiple subtle discrepancies of the text. In
Arcadia, Stoppard managed to dramatize the birth of paradox.
sometimes the theories are right, as well as wrong
 DEVISING CONSOLATION: THE MENTAL LANDSCAPES OF STOPPARD'S ARCADIA 115

This principle culminates in the last scene of the play, in which the different
time levels intermingle so that at several points they are compressed enough to
create a sense of a dialogic relationship between them. A l l the characters move
about the stage, undisturbed by the presence of another era. Their reflections on
the future of the universe mix to produce a complementary sequence of lines:

(He [Septimus] extends his hand for the lesson book. She [Thomasina]
returns it to him.)
T H O M A S I N A : I have not room to extend it.
(SEPTIMUS and H A N N A H turn the pages doubled by time. A U G U S ­
TUS indolently starts to draw the models.)
H A N N A H : Do you mean the world is saved after all?
V A L E N T I N E : No, it's still doomed. But if this is how it started, perhaps
it's how the next one will come.
H A N N A H : From good English algebra?
SEPTIMUS: It will go to infinity or zero, or nonsense.
T H O M A S I N A : No, if you set apart the minus roots they square back to
sense.
(II.vii.78)

The technique reappears at the very end of the play when both Septimus and
Hannah with Val are contemplating Thomasina's pioneering diagram, doubled
by time, with the half-drunk Val admitting for the first time that 'she must have
been doing something' after all (I.iv.47). While the three characters are held in
awe by what she was able to anticipate, Thomasina is completely enthralled by
the possibilities of an adult life, which is just opening before her: she yearns to
learn how to waltz ('the most fashionable and gayest and boldest invention con­
ceivable') and she is also in love with her tutor Septimus (II.vii.80).
The moment she finds out that he has been studying her old primer, she
waves it aside: 'It was a joke', recalling her own 'solution' of Fermat's last
theorem (II.vii.92). Apparently, Thomasina—despite the beliefs inscribed in her
diagram—adopted Septimus's earlier optimistic view of the universe: one is not
to grieve for the works lost in the fire of the library of Alexandria; 'what we let
fall will be picked up by those behind' (I.iii.38). Against her past conviction that
scientific progress is a great deal more important than matters of love ('let them
elope, they cannot turn back the advancement of knowledge'), she would now
prefer to elope with Septimus, letting knowledge take its own course (I.iii.37).
Septimus, on the other hand, has already started to revise his former stand­
point—as he is faced with Thomasina's calculations—and shall do so in the
hermitage till the end of his life.

SEPTIMUS: When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the
meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.
T H O M A S I N A : Then, we will dance.
(II.vii.94)
116 ZDENKA BRANDEJSKA

Gradually, however, the intellectual disputes, as if conducted in accordance with

Thomasina's wishes, give way to the non-verbal, to the theatrical reality: on the
stage two couples (Thomasina and Septimus; Hannah and Gus) are waltzing to
the distant sound of piano.
The feelings viewers might be charged with while watching the final dance,
I would argue, are not of mere consolation, as Alwes suggested. The play itself,
as well as its message, is rather similar to an iterated algorithm (Delaney 265). It
is questionable whether we can think of the Arcadia as open-ended. Our knowl­
edge of the characters from the past exceeds far beyond the moment the curtain
closes on them, though we do not know what to make of the other couple's
awkward dance. Here, time indeed runs both ways, which makes the dance
a death-defying device. The hopeful can, however, be justified only by our con­
current awareness of what is tragic and lost. Thomasina, though she is to die
within hours, is infinitely happy, and from Val we learn that the heat is not quite
gone, 'it goes into the mix.... And everything is mixing the same way, all the time,
irreversibly...' (II.vii.94). In a way he paraphrases Septimus's old assertion:

SEPTIMUS: We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry eve­
rything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those be­
hind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the
march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.
The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written
again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal them­
selves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view
will have their time again.
CI.iii.38)

The lines and especially the ambivalent atmosphere of the final scene of Ar­
cadia may even remind drama enthusiasts of the bitter-sweet speech delivered
by Olga at the end of Chekhov's The Three Sisters:

O L G A : (embraces both her sisters) The music is so happy, so confident,

and you long for life! O my God! Time will pass, and we shall go away
forever, and we shall be forgotten, our faces will be forgotten, our voices,
and how many there were of us; but our sufferings will pass into joy for
those who will live after us, happiness and peace will be established upon
earth, and they will remember kindly and bless those who have lived be­
fore. Oh, dear sisters, our life is not ended yet. We shall live! The music
is so happy, so joyful, and it seems as though in a little while we shall
know what we are living for, why we are suffering ... If we only knew—if
we only knew!
(The Three Sisters IV)

Even in Chekhov's drama, Olga's speech could not function as consolation,

immediately after they learned Irina's only potential future husband had been
 DEVISING CONSOLATION: THE MENTAL LANDSCAPES OF STOPPARD'S ARCADIA 117

killed in a duel; it was rather a highly ironic, tragicomic coda, resolving nothing.
Altogether, Arcadia can be read as an idiosyncratic, almost experimental explo­
ration of the topics that pervaded The Three Sisters a century earlier. As a mat­
ter of fact, Arcadia brings up and probes in general terms what The Three Sis­
ters seemed to be haunted by: Vershinin's obsessive dreaming of 'the life that
will come after us, in two or three hundred years' {The Three Sisters II). Stop­
pard develops the character's idle thoughts into a completely new dramatic text,
exploring the possibility of two time periods existing on one stage almost si­
multaneously, and interweaving them closely through the plot.
Despite the considerable complexity of its plot structure, Arcadia retains its
mysteries, if fairly strictly delimited. Phenomena stripped to the core, which
science is unable to comprehend, a character excluded from discourse, or the
place where the playwright refuses to control the action any longer, such things
represent poetry to Stoppard. Yet even this kind of knowledge has to be verbal­
ized:

V A L E N T I N E : The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together

to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every
scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at
the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about
the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to
clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But
they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the
elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the
things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls and
what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are
full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.
(I.iv.47-48)

Between the snowflake and the snowstorm, it is still snowing. Or to quote

Chekhov's play once more: 'Meaning ... Here it's snowing. What meaning is
there in that?' {The Three Sisters II). To encounter Arcadia and come across the
metaphysical at work is exactly the sort of incomprehensibility the audience can
bear and not feel dumbfounded by. However, the portion of nostalgia Stoppard
managed to include in this play is carefully controlled: it is already present in
the universal themes the text embraces. The characters are finding, rather than
seeking explanations; a prominent agent (the author himself) can be felt beyond
the surface of the text. It is the agent who orders the information the 'readers'
will receive and who openly prefers one of the researchers to the other
(eventually, the Fuseli painting turns out to be a genuine depiction of Byron).
A l l in all, Arcadia—with its traditional focus on language and elaborate form—
makes an island of order 'in an ocean of ashes' (II.vii.76).
The kind of consolation available to the spectators of Stoppard's play comes
only from their constant awareness of a deep-embedded contradiction, an insu­
perable split in the heart of the play: its two time-periods, its opposing and
118 ZDENKA BRANDEJSKA

shifting views and its countless paradoxes. They can thus 'see it all', which is an
extremely effective position, and flattering. A schizoid one, and very contempo­
rary, at that.

W O R K S CITED

Alwes, Derek B. "'Oh, Phooey to Death!': Boethian Consolation in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia",
Papers on Language and Literature 36, no. 4 (Fall 2000), 392-404.
Barton, Anne. 'Twice Around the Grounds", The New York Review of Books, 8 June 1995. 28
September 2000 <http://faculty.uccb.ns.ca/philosophy/arcadia/frontpage.htm>
Delaney, Paul, ed. (1997). Tom Stoppard in Conversation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michi­
gan Press).
Chekhov, A. P. The Three Sisters. 20 November 2000
<http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/ac/sisters.htm>
Nosek, Jifi a Stachova, Jif ina, eds. (1998). MyUent v paradoxu, paradox v myileni (Praha: Rlosofia).
Stoppard, Tom (1993). Arcadia (London: Faber and Faber).
(1999). Plays Five: Arcadia, The Real Thing, Night and Day, Indian Ink, Hapgood
(London: Faber and Faber).
Vanek, Jifi (1998). "Paradox v umeleckem mySlenr", in Nosek, Jifi a Stachova, Jifina, eds. (1998).