2. ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’

3. ‘Momento Mori’

4. In Classical Antiquity ‘Arcadia’ was a region romanticised as a terrestrial paradise, unspoiled nature and whose inhabitants lived in blissful harmony. Arcadia was also the homeland of the God Pan, inventor of the bucolic pipe: instrument of the pastoral song. But Pan, of course, also adds an erotic dimension to Arcadia The ideal of ‘Arcadia’ introduced into literary imagination through Virgil’s Eclogues, a series of poems that take place in Arcadia, in which shepherds converse and perform songs suffering or embracing revolutionary change or happy or unhappy love. Includes the myth of the elegiac poet Gaius Gallus imagined as dying of love in Arcadia.

5. Arcadia as Biblical Eden Genesis 2 8 And the Lord God planted a garden eastward, in Eden; and there He put the man whom He had formed. 9 And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 15 And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’’

6. Man’s fall and expulsion from Eden - eating from the Tree of Knowledge - sexuality and mortality

7. Thomasina’s Coming of Age -Play begins with Thomasina’s question, “Septimus, what is carnal embrace?” -Prodigiously intellectual character gains in knowledge about love and passion in the course of the play. -Later on in the scene, Septimus juxtaposes the physical passion and the intellectual exercise of reason as he explains ‘sexual congress’ and Fermat’s Last Theorem in the same breath. p.6 -‘attraction that Newton left out...All the way back to the apple in the garden’ p.100 -‘action of bodies in heat’ p. 114

8. Landscape architecture, Science, Literary History …are all metaphors for questions about the human endeavour to acquire knowledge and the different models for understanding ourselves in relationship to one another and to the world in which we live. This search is both noble and futile as Hannah concludes when speaking to Valentine about the trivial nature of his grouse research, her hermit and Bernard’s Byron in Chapter 6: “Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going in the way we came in.”(p. 102) There is also the false opposition between art and science that Stoppard illustrates through the debate between Bernard and Valentine in Act 2 sc 5: Bernard: ‘Parameters! You can’t stick Byron’s head in your laptop! Genius isn’t like your average grouse. Valentine: ‘Well, it’s all trivial anyway…Personalities.’ (p.82) Later Stoppard has Hannah quoting Byron: “I had a dream which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air…” (p.107) which is a poetic rendering of the same idea of entropy (universe is cooling towards extinction which Thomasina prefigures in her heat equation).

9. Epistomology Arcadia explores through the characters and each of their personal quests: how we know and the nature and limits of knowledge. Art vs. Science: apparent opposition between literary sensibility/intuition/emotion and scientific proof, evidence, equations. Obstacles to knowledge over time : Bernard and Hannah’s research and investigation is impeded by lack of evidence, evidence having disappeared or been destroyed over the centuries. We also see the accidents of time which lead to disturbance in course of events... Historical circumstances limit individual’s attainment of knowledge: Thomasina’s hunches which prefigure later theories but she doesn’t know the mathematics (p.119) Models or paradigms of knowledge are supplanted by new ones with time: Newtonian Model of the Laws of Motion, supplanted by Chaos Theory, Second Theory of Thermodynamics, Einsteins’ theory of Relativity.

10. Arcadia interpreted by Lady Croom as a pastoral idyll of peace and cultivated beauty embodied in the English landscape architecture of Capability Brown: ‘familiar Pastoral refinement of an Englishman’s garden…right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged as God intended’ p.18-19

11. Landscape Architecture: From the Pastoral to the Picturesque... Giving way of reason to emotion inspired by the paintings by Salvatore Rosa. ‘Irregularity is one of the chiefest principles of the Picturesque style.’ p.19) Hannah’s research on the Sidley Hermit: ‘The nervous breakdown of the Romantic Imagination 1750-1834.’ p.35 ‘The Genius of the Place’... the decline from thinking to feeling.’ p. 39-40 Later, ‘The Age of Enlightenment Banished into the Romantic Wilderness... the genius of Sidley Park living in a hermit’s hut’. p.90

12. Literature: -Bernard’s desire to shape literary history of Byron through his breakthrough discovery of the inscriptions and letters in the ‘Couch of Eros’. -Hannah’s book on Caroline Lamb-finding a place for the underestimated contribution to literary history by woman poet who is overshadowed by the Romantic hero of Byron.

13. Science: Evolution of Scientific Knowledge. Determinism/Chaos/Deterministic Chaos/Entropy Newton’s Laws of Motion (determinism); Second Law (equation) of Thermodynamics; Algorithms and Chaos Theory Mandelbrot ‘s fractals // Thomasina’s ‘New Geometry of Irregular Forms’ (p. 51,52 & 59-65) // The Coverly Set (p. 103)

14. Bottom from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t'expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called ‘Bottom's Dream', because it hath no bottom, and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke.”

15. p.89, 107 are allusions to Shakespeare : “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact” Duke Theseus, the voice of rationality and authority, comments disapprovingly about the goings- on that the four lovers report: Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold: That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

16. Geniuses, Lunatics and Poets -Septimus’ fate as the Sidley Hermit for 20 years after Thomasina’s death could be considered both as the expression of genius and lunatic, reason and emotion. -He is called in Peacock’s letter, ‘a savant among idiots, a sage of lunacy’. -Does he finish his days contemplating Thomasina’s equations about the fate of the world or of her death? -Is he finally the Romantic hero of the play? Giving in to his love for Thomasina and passion for her genius?

17. 1. ‘The only certainty we can have is that there is no certainty’. How far does this statement reflect your understanding of the play? 2. In what ways is ‘Arcadia’ a comedy of ideas? 3. How far would you agree that ‘Aracadia’ is all about ‘catastrophe and loss’. 4. To what extent is this an ‘intellectual’ play? 5. ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’. Explore in what ways this is a central concern in ‘Arcadia’ 6. How far would you say this play is about a search for unity? 7. ‘A chaotic disordered world’. To what extent is this an appropriate understanding of Stoppard’s vision in ‘Arcadia’? 8. To what extent can the play be described as a ‘celebration of human knowledge’? 9. Explore in how far and in what ways ‘Arcadia’ is a meditation on time. 10. ‘The attraction that Newton left out’. What is the role of sexual play in ‘Arcadia’?