Reading Order
Arcadia Reading Order
Arcadia (1993) by Tom Stoppard is the finest British play of the last fifty years — the Sidley Park estate in two time periods simultaneously: 1809 (Thomasina Coverly, her tutor Septimus Hodge, the visiting poet Ezra Chater, and the visiting Lord Byron) and the present (researchers Valentine Nightingale, Hannah Jarvis, and Bernard Nightingale investigating what happened at Sidley Park in 1809). The play's central conceit is that the past and present share the same table and the same objects: a tortoise (now and then), a journal (now deciphered, then written), a pot of jam (now tested, then spoiled), and the movement between the two time periods becomes a meditation on the relationship between order and chaos, the nature of time, the second law of thermodynamics, the mathematics of iterated algorithms, the English Romantic landscape garden (formal geometry giving way to picturesque irregularity), and the impossibility of recovering the past. Stoppard wrote the play while working with chaos theory and complexity theory, and the play's intellectual architecture — Thomasina's intuition of entropy in the heat of a rice pudding — is one of the most sustained integrations of science and dramatic form in the theater.
Where to start
Arcadia (1993) — the complete text. Best Stoppard reading order: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead → Jumpers → Travesties → The Real Thing → Arcadia → The Coast of Utopia → Rock 'n' Roll
Complete Arcadia Book List
- 1Buy
Arcadia
Tom Stoppard·1993·The finest British play of the last fifty years — Thomasina, Septimus, Hannah, Valentine, and the Sidley Park estate in 1809 and the present. The play that established Stoppard's reputation as the foremost English playwright of his generation; the first production starred Felicity Kendal and Samuel West - 2Buy
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Tom Stoppard·1966·The companion and the play that made Stoppard's reputation — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the two minor characters from Hamlet, experiencing what happens to them in the gaps between their scenes. Both Arcadia and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are companion investigations of the relationship between determinism and free will: Ros and Guil cannot escape the plot of Hamlet; the characters of Arcadia cannot escape the second law of thermodynamics - 3Buy
The Real Thing
Tom Stoppard·1982·The companion — Henry, a playwright, and his complicated romantic life, with a play-within-a-play and the question of what authenticity means in art and love. The Real Thing and Arcadia are companion Stoppard plays organized around the relationship between the intellectual and the emotional: both are love stories concealed in philosophical investigations - 4Buy
Copenhagen
Michael Frayn·1998·Frayn's companion in the tradition of the British drama that uses the conventions of the well-made play to contain a philosophical or scientific investigation — the 1941 meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Copenhagen and Arcadia are the two British plays of the 1990s that most successfully integrated scientific thinking (quantum mechanics; chaos theory) into theatrical form - 5Buy
Middlemarch
George Eliot·1871·Eliot's companion in the literary tradition of the investigation of the relationship between intellectual ambition and the life of the emotions — Dorothea Brooke's aspirations and their collision with the reality of Casaubon. Arcadia's investigation of the relationship between intellectual ambition (Thomasina's mathematics, Hannah's scholarship) and the life of the emotions is Stoppard's version of the question that organizes Middlemarch - 6Buy
The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles·1969·Fowles's companion in the tradition of the British literary investigation of the relationship between past and present, Victorian and modern, and what is lost in the gap between them. The French Lieutenant's Woman and Arcadia are companion investigations of the Victorian past and its relationship to the present: both are organized around the simultaneous existence of two time periods and the impossibility of the present fully understanding the past - 7Buy
Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell·2004·Mitchell's companion in the tradition of the novel organized around the relationship between different time periods and the patterns that recur across them. Cloud Atlas and Arcadia are companion investigations of the relationship between time periods and the question of whether the patterns that recur in history repeat themselves or simply rhyme - 8Buy
An Experiment in Love
Hilary Mantel·1995·Mantel's companion in the tradition of the British literary investigation of the relationship between intellectual aspiration and the life of the body and the emotions. Arcadia and An Experiment in Love are companion British works of the 1990s organized around the question of what aspiration (intellectual; moral; romantic) costs the person who maintains it in the face of a world that does not reward it
Arcadia — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Arcadia by Tom Stoppard about?
Arcadia takes place in the same room — the garden room at Sidley Park, a country estate in Derbyshire — in two time periods: 1809 (when Thomasina Coverly, a mathematical prodigy, is tutored by Septimus Hodge, and the visiting poet Ezra Chater is in residence) and the present (when academics Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale are researching what happened at Sidley Park in 1809, competing theories about whether Byron was involved in a duel). The play's structural device — the two time periods share the same stage simultaneously in the final scenes — allows Stoppard to show the past and present in the same space, with objects (a tortoise, a journal, a pot of jam, a Latin primer, a hermit's sketch) moving between them. The play's central intellectual content is: the second law of thermodynamics (the heat equation that Thomasina discovers in her rice pudding, which she intuited was 'the beginning of the end of the world — because it [entropy] will always be like this'); chaos theory and iterated algorithms (which Valentine is working on, using grouse census data from the estate, and which turn out to be the mathematics that Thomasina was doing in 1809); and the English Romantic landscape garden (the picturesque movement that transformed formal gardens into apparently natural landscape). The emotional content is the relationship between Thomasina and Septimus — the student and the tutor, falling in love in 1809, with the audience knowing (and Hannah and Valentine gradually discovering) that Thomasina died in a fire the night before her seventeenth birthday.
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