A Look at Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia": Misinterpretation of the Past

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is set partially in the present, and partially in the early nineteenth century. In the play, Stoppard means to show the audience that, though history repeats itself in cycles, the present always has a clouded view of the past, and history can never be accurately re-told. His characters routinely misinterpret the past, while at the same time continuing a cycle in which history repeats itself. This is augmented by the fact that in some of Stoppard's scenes, history repeats, and simultaneously seems to overlap. As a consequence the audience, who sees what happens in both eras, can also see how easy it is not only to distort information, but also to draw the wrong conclusions.

Since the play takes place in both the present, and in 1810 (for the most part), there is almost a two hundred year gap between settings. However, both time periods are set at Sidley Park, giving common ground to the separate eras and sets of characters, and allowing the different time periods to "interact" with each other. This interaction is the vehicle for Stoppard's criticism of the interpretation of history. For instance, Hannah and Bernard both attempt to discover what really happened in the past, but they both narrowly miss the truth by adding their own false insights to their facts. They find the letters written by Mr. Chater for Septimus concerning Mrs. Chater's affair with Septimus. However, Bernard and Hannah assume that the letters are addressed to Lord Byron, leading Bernard to the assumption that Byron killed Mr. Chater and consequently left the country. Hannah also finds a letter written by Lady Croom that leads Hannah and Bernard to believe that Mrs. Chater was a widow: "Her brother, Captain Brice, married a Mrs. Chater. In other words, one might assume, a widow" (Act 1, Scene 4). This letter helps to support Bernard's assumption only when it is misinterpreted. Bernard's entire hypothesis is disproved when Hannah finds that Mr. Chater was not killed, only after he has foolishly made his assumption public - appearing on "The Breakfast Hour" (Act 2, Scene 7). Meanwhile the audience, who is more omniscient than either set of characters, can only collectively shake its head as it watches Bernard and Hannah make these mistakes.

The nineteenth century characters attempt several times to make impressions upon the future. Thomasina creates a formula for predicting the population of birds in the future. She manages to accurately predict the population for a number of upcoming years, only hindered by the fact that she does not have a calculator. Lord Croom impacts the future by ordering Noakes to design a new plan for the garden at Sidley Park. The hermitage that Noakes designs eventually becomes the focal point of Hannah's studies in the late twentieth century.

The twentieth century characters constantly put their own mark on the past just as the past makes an impression on the present. Stoppard symbolically presents his audience with this idea by using a table as a linking object. Objects that the characters set on the table remain there, even when the group of characters switches, although they are "deemed to have become invisible" (Scene 2, stage directions). The fact that the objects "become invisible" is just another symbol of the ignorance that exists in interpreting different times. The audience can see that all of the objects are on the table, and also notices that the characters do not perceive some of the objects, just as they fail to perceive some historical truths.

Some occurrences also cause the audience to doubt the accuracy of the past characters, just as the present characters are often wrong. Stoppard shows that people are constantly wrong, and that one misinterpretation is not likely to be the last. When Thomasina comes up with her equation for predicting the population of rabbits, Septimus says, "Yes, as far as I know, you [Thomasina] are the first person to have thought of this" (Act 1, Scene 1). The audience is able to take his word for it, until Act 2, When Valentine uses the same type of formula for grouse, he tells Hannah that the equation, an iterated algorithm, "hasn't been around for much longer than, well, call it twenty years" (Act 2, Scene 4), even though Thomasina developed it over one hundred and fifty years before. Then, the audience is prompted to reevaluate the accuracy of Septimus's claim. If Valentine, and other people in the twentieth century believe that the equation is only two decades old, then any number of unknown people in the past, Thomasina for instance, could have developed the formula unbeknownst to the characters of the twentieth century.

One is also drawn back to Septimus' statement that "In the margin of his copy of Arithmetica, Fermat wrote that he had discovered a wonderful proof of his theorem but, the margin being too narrow for his purpose, did not have room to write it down. The note was found after his death..." (Act 1, Scene 1). Just like Fermat, Thomasina writes her notes in margins, and they are not discovered until long after her death, by which time someone else has already "discovered" the idea. In that case, any number of people could have done so before Thomasina's time, and each person would have believed that his idea was an original one only because it had not been made public sooner. After ruminating upon this idea, the audience realizes that the past continues to be veiled.

The past and present do not only confuse one another, but they also mirror one another and intertwine. In many instances, similar occurrences take place in both eras. This is most marked in the final scene of the play in which Thomasina waltzes with Septimus while Hannah dances with Gus, both couples appearing side by side, but each unaware of the other. Hannah is reading the section of Lady Croom's garden book that mentions dahlias, just as Lady Croom touches the dahlias on the table (Act 2, Scene 7). Actions like these make the reader feel that the characters are so close to realizing each other, but they barely fail to notice one another. Stoppard gives past and present mirroring images, but each time period has both an understanding, and an ignorance of the other.

As the play progresses, and Hannah and Bernard come closer and closer to the truth, the two sets of characters become more involved with one another on the stage. In the beginning of the play, each scene consists of the same set of characters trying to dig up truths. But as Hannah and Bernard learn more about the past inhabitants of Sidley Park, and Thomasina comes closer and closer to predicting future happenings, then the characters actually seem to interact with one another. They appear in the same scenes, and are simultaneously on stage. In some cases, it even seems as if the two sets of characters (Thomasina, Septimus, Augustus and Lady Croom; and Valentine, Hannah, Bernard, and Chloë) are conversing with one another, as is the case in Act 2, in which Valentine is explaining Stoppard's theme that life moves forward, and repeats, but looking backward causes misinterpretation:

Hannah What did she see?

Valentine That you can't run the film backwards. Heat was the first thing which didn't work that way. Not like Newton. A film of a pendulum, or a ball falling through the air - backwards, it looks the same.

Hannah The ball would be going the wrong way.

Valentine You'd have to know that. But with heat - friction - a ball breaking a window-

Hannah Yes.

Valentine It won't work backwards.

Hannah Who thought it did?

Valentine She saw why. You can put back the bits of glass but you can't collect up the heat of the smash. It's gone.

Septimus So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold. Dear me.

Valentine The heat goes into the mix. (He gestures to indicate the air in the room, in the universe)

Thomasina Yes, we must hurry f we are going to dance.

Valentine And everything is mixing the same way, all the time, irreversibly...

Septimus Oh, we have time, I think.

Valentine ...till there's no time left. That's what it means. (Act 2, Scene 7)

Throughout the play, Stoppard uses scientific ideas to prove his idea that history repeats, but that time only goes forward and does not clearly go back. Valentine mentions Thomasina's equation that eventually forms a graph, but he has a harder time working backwards - starting with a graph to determine the equation (Act 1, Scene 4). Stoppard often alludes to the theory of heat, in which heat is used but cannot be recaptured. The relation of idea to time is illustrated in several passages, one being that in which Thomasina describes mixing rice pudding:

When you stir rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?...You cannot stir things apart. (Act 1, Scene 1)

Septimus reacts to Thomasina's observation by comparing the rice pudding to time, and making Thomasina's remark more relevant to Stoppard's theme of the "stirring" of history: "No more than you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward, mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging, unchangeable, and we are done with it forever" (Act 1, Scene1). Here Septimus has concisely stated the entire meaning of Arcadia. Throughout the play, Stoppard tries to show the audience that the past not only permanently marks the present and the future, but also that the present can mark the past - the jam stirred backward still makes the pudding pink. Stoppard also conveys his point that there is no accurate science to plotting out history. As Septimus says, alluding to the practice of revealing history, "[It] is not science. [It] is story-telling" (Act 2, Scene 7).

Work Cited

Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia. Rptd. in Tom Stoppard: Plays. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. 7-137.