The symbolic use of Arcadia in Tom Stoppard''s Arcadia

Introduction

The audience of dramatic performance is often provided with more information, a larger perspective of events, than the characters on the stage. Typically, viewers gain this knowledge through one character's asides or soliloquies of which other characters are unaware or through the use of a chorus commenting on events as they unfold on the stage. Usually, the effect of this privileged perspective on an audience is either one of superiority--if the unenlightened character is a comic figure--or anxiety--as the tragic protagonist unwittingly approaches his/her doom. In Arcadia, Tom Stoppard confers an almost transcendentally privileged perspective on the audience by freeing them from the constraints of time to which his characters are so thoroughly (and self-consciously) subjected, and the effect is ultimately one of consolation.

As the plot unfolds, the scene shifts back and forth between the early nineteenth century and the present day, juxtaposing alternate but equally time-bound perspectives, and in each time frame, Stoppard has at least one character comment on the linearity of historical time. In the opening scene, Septimus Hodge remarks that time cannot run backward; and in a later scene, the twentieth-century character Valentine insists that "there's an order things can't happen in" . These reminders of "normal" linear time, however, serve primarily to provoke in the audience a recognition that these constraints do not apply to them. The play we are watching does "run backward," as events repeatedly happen out of "order," until the two historical time periods seem to merge into simultaneity at the end of the play.

Discussion

The repeated overlapping of the two time periods allows the audience to experience historical time as an unchanging tableau, an experience with extraordinary philosophical implications. To stand outside of time, to see the flux of human history as an eternal instant, is to adopt a godlike perspective, as described by the Roman philosopher Boethius in the sixth century: "since God has an ever present and eternal state, His knowledge also, surpassing every temporal movement, remains in the simplicity of its own present and, embracing infinite lengths of past and future, views with its own simple comprehension all things as if they were taking place in the present" (64). Boethius composed The Consolation of Philosophy while in prison awaiting execution, a situation that applies (at least metaphorically) to the characters in Stoppard's play who contemplate time and mortality, challenge one another to a duel, suffer tragic loss, and repeatedly recognize (more or less "cheerfully") that "we are all doomed" . Awaiting death in prison also metaphorically describes the human condition in general, and Boethius's attempts to forge philosophical consolations for the human condition by accounting for the problem of evil and the suffering of the innocent have direct applications for Stoppard's play.

That Stoppard may have had Boethius's work in mind as he wrote Arcadia is suggested by the repeated references to "free will" and "determinism" in the play, since The Consolation of Philosophy is perhaps best known for the way it ...