Et in Arcadia ego

At the heart of the mythological Arcadia lies a mystery: is it a pastoral utopia or does it embody the anarchy and chaos of nature? Virgil’s classical phrase "et in Arcadia ego" inspired Poussin’s famous pastoral landscape but suggests a darker thread: that even in the midst of beauty and life and growth remains an awareness of our mortality.

Stoppard’s play meditates on similar themes and also contains a mystery, literally an academic whodunit, in which present-day scholars, left with ambiguous and contradictory clues, try to interpret the events that occurred at Sidley Park over 150 years previously, culminating, apparently, in Lord Byron’s surprising and permanent departure from England. Byron never appears in the play, but his scandalous affairs with Lady Caroline Lamb and his half-sister set the stage for the play’s passionate and unexpected love connections.

Stoppard, who left school at 17, has some fun at the expense of the myopic and at times misguided scholars, who, in the play’s contemporary scenes, miss the past’s pattern as they scramble the details or skew the details to fit a pattern of their own making. Their predecessors, on the other hand, send visions far into the future even as their proofs accurately predict the world’s cooling and demise. Their imaginative responses to Fermat’s last theorem and iterated algorithims, lead to an understanding of chaos theory in which random repetitions lead to a concrete order. In the play, young Thomasina is set the task of solving Fermat’s last theorem. Historically, an 18^th century French woman, Sophie Germain, who hid her gender to work on the problem, provided much of the significant work towards the solving of the theorem. Interestingly, mathematician Andrew Wiles finally solved the 350 year-old mathematical mystery in 1993, the year in which Arcadia was first produced.

The changing landscape just outside the doors of Sidley Park echoes these motifs of chaos and order, natural regeneration and human reason. Landscaping, particularly as seen in the manicured and refined gardens of the 18^th century, requires constant and intentional upkeep to maintain its intended pattern. Lady Croom, ironically, seeks to change the gardens into controlled rusticness, the Romantic style that attempted to create naturalness and decay through a sustained artifice- down to the "ha-ha" that ensures that the picturesque cows and sheep will remain at a discreet distance.

The play encourages us to embrace chaos and to trust in the presence of a pattern after ten or fifty or one hundred thousand iterations, to believe in the continuum of existence rather than forcing a pattern from our own limited reason. The final pattern of the play is a waltz, a dance considered scandalously heated in 1812, but decorously structured in the current day: "The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It’s the way that nature creates itself on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm."

Clues to watch for: the hermit; the candle; the letter; the portfolio; the dahlia

-Lisa A. Wilde, Production Dramaturg

LORD BYRON (1788 - 1824)

I had a dream which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air

Byron is thus the perfect poet to stand behind Tom Stoppard’s brilliant meditation on how we can and cannot know the past, on how chaos both creates and undercuts our intellectual systems, on how erotic desire pushes us on, we know not where.

"There’s no such thing as certainty, that’s plain . . ./ So little do we know what we’re about in / This world, I doubt if doubt itself be doubting." (Don Juan)

[Adapted from an essay on Byron by Prof. Anne K. Mellor]

add-ins: Repton, Darkness, Fermat’s theorem, the fern, Poussin

Byron (1788-1824) George Gordon, Lord Byron was a poet, satirist and revolutionary whose lifestyle and writings embodied the Romantic ideals of rebellion, hyperbolic imagery, exotic locales, imaginative flights of fancy and actions based on emotion rather than reason. His many sexual scandals, including an affair that allegedly resulted in a child by his half-sister, his frequent bankruptcy and his passionate commitment to republicanism resulted in his permanent self-imposed exile from England in 1816. One of his most famous creations was the Byronic hero – a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable past—think Byron’s own Don Juan or Bronte’s Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights.

from "Darkness"
         by George Gordon, Lord Byron

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went — and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:

Lancelot "Capability" Brown (1715-1783) and Sir Humphrey Repton (1752-1818) were fashionable landscapers (Repton was Brown’s protégé) instrumental in changing England gardens from the formal, geometrical style seen, for example, at the gardens of Versailles, to natural English landscapes – often more rural than his clients might have wanted. His trademarks were clumps of trees and "natural" lakes – perhaps like our own planned public spaces. Repton also emphasized natural landscapes, but focused on gradual transitions between houses and gardens through the use of terraces and steps. Noakes uses books with overlays similar to Repton’s famous Red Books.

Chaos Theory and Iterated Algorithims; Chaos theory (discovered by Edward Lorenz in the 1960s) suggests that seemingly chaotic events and systems will reveal a pattern if mapped over a tremendous amount of time (iterations or repetitions). The sheer number of iterations necessary to discover the pattern was virtually impossible until the creation of computers but Thomasina imagines the concept long before its actualization.

In the play, young Thomasina is set the task of solving Fermat’s last theorem. Historically, an 18^th century French woman, Sophie Germain, who hid her gender to work on the problem, provided much of the significant work towards the solving of the theorem. Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles finally solved the 350 year-old mathematical mystery in 1993, the year in which Arcadia was first produced.