I wrote this as a speech for my honors english course junior year...
It’s about Math, its about Literature, it’s about time and space, history and the future, order and chaos, learning and love. It’s a play called Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. All those themes you thought you never wanted to hear about again are woven into the fabric of the love story-intellectual quest-mystery that is Arcadia. Sounds uninviting? Not so. As one reviewer put it, Ideas have never been as sexy.
If your first thought is that “ideas” and “sexy” shouldn’t be in the same sentence, you’ve pinpointed a key aspect of the play. Many of the dominant themes presented in Arcadia are just such classic “clash of opposites.” Stoppard expores age-old arguments – passion vs. intellect, romantic era vs. enlightenment, chaos vs. order, art vs. math. The action toggles between two time periods – the 19th century and the 20th. The characters from each era occupy the same room of the same English Manor House – Sidley Park. In their various searches and struggles for knowledge – carnal or academic, Stoppard’s characters in turn embody these clashing ideologies. As the story unfolds, even the progression of the plot exemplifies some of the conflicts presented. The plot pivots around the relationship between mathematical genius and child prodigy Thomasina Coverly and her tutor Septimus. As she is discovering new theories of the nature of the universe, she is also searching for more primal knowledge – and she finds her tutor as intriguing as her ideas. Stoppard brilliantly weaves the mathematical idea that the actions of bodies in heat will be the undoing of the universe with the theme that sexual passion is the undoing of intellectual pursuits. The audience watches as the characters from the present attempt to uncover what has happened in the past. The audience knows what has really happened, and watches how it can be misintepreted. Stoppard uses this plot device to pose profound questions about the nature of history and truth.
More amazing than his penetrating inquiries into the nature of the universe, his complex interconnected ideas or even his wickedly funny script is the way that Arcadia incarnates the themes it espouses. Thomasina forsees that the world is spiraling into disorder – the action of the play itself spirals as past and present come closer and closer until they occupy the stage at the same moment. Stoppard does note merely entreat that the clash passion and intellect be reconciled – his work is the reconciliation. As columist Jon Carroll put it, “He does not merely affirm possibilities…he becomes the possibilities himself. His is his own rocket ship, and he flies himself to the moon.”
The disputes explored in Arcadia – Math/Art, Intellect/Passion are as ancient as love. They will always exist and never cease to be pondered. Tom Stoppard has created the place where these opposites come together at last. He has proven that they are not mutually exclusive. He has written a play driven by passion and intellect, passion FOR intellect – a piece that is as much art as it is math. Even with the world spiraling into disorder and chaos, Stoppard has made meaning. Which of course, is the goal of both disciplines. As one of the characters, researcher Hannah Jarvis puts it, “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter.”
Bibliography
Carroll, Jon They Know It About Engines
Notices of the AMS November 1995, Love and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Steven Winn’s Review of Arcadia San Francisco Chronicle
Stoppard, Tom Arcadia