Some of the following material explicitly discusses the play but some of the works provide a scholarly background for exploring the themes of this multi-dimensional play. You are encouraged to refer to the original sources. Scholarly and popular material which is already available on the www can be reached through the Hot Links page.
Around the Grounds Twice
Anne Barton provides a detailed and insightful review of Arcadia
as text and performance.
Richard Brustein's Analysis of
Arcadia
Brustein, a well-respected American theatre director and
critic, is one of the few people who are unsympathetic to the dramatic merits of Arcadia.
This piece can be read fruitfully as a contrast to Anne Barton's Around the Grounds
Twice.
I Shall Never Leave England
This is a brief account of Lord Byron's role in Arcadia.
English Bards & Scotch Reviewers
Leslie Marchand's biography of Byron is a classic, and well worth
reading by anyone interested in Arcadia. This account of Byron's life in
1808-1809 is especially relevant. And the last part of the chapter contains the details
which Stoppard brilliantly appropriates as a mechanism to develop Arcadia's
dramatic action. Byron's fictional visit to Sidley Park becomes ever so believable.
Geometry and The Garden
Here is an interesting discussion of the way artistic and
political ideas mix in the landscaping fashions which appear in Arcadia.
The Geometry of Flowers
This is a brief backgrounder to Thomasina's exclamation that
"if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one
like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?"
From Newton to Chaos
Here is a brief exposition of the contrast between
"deterministic" conception of the universe implied by Newton's linear equations
and the one implied by "chaos theory" and its interpretation of non-linear
equations.
Arcadia: Discovery Of A Spiritual
Landscape
Bruno Snell's classic analysis of why Virgil should be
considered the discoverer of "Arcadia" provides the perfect scholarly
backgrounder to Hannah's exclamation: "Look -- Capability Brown doing Claude, who was
doing Virgil. Arcadia!" This is not light reading.
Richard Payne Knight
Stoppard does not model Richard Noakes, the landscape gardener,
solely on Sir Humphrey Repton. For Noakes holds to the more radical views of Richard Payne
Knight who once engaged in a dispute with Repton about the status of Capability Brown.
Noakes has the professional standing of Repton but he thinks more like Knight.
Virgil's 10th Eclogue
In Virgil's tenth Eclogue the poet sings the love of his friend
Gallus for a mistress who had deserted him. It takes place in Arcadia because
"Arcadians only know how to sing," a line that illuminates the dialogue of the
19th century scenes in Stoppard's play.
English Opinion of Claude Lorraine
This is an account of how English travellers on "the grand
tour" in the 18th century fell in love with the paintings of Claude Lorraine and made
Lorraine an important figure in the cultural life of England in the late 18th and 19th
century.
English Opinion of Salvator Rosa
From the same turn of the century book (20th century), English
Taste and Italian Landscape in 18th Century England, a similar description of the
role of Salvator Rosa is given. The ideas of Richard Noakes as well as Thomasina on
"irregularity" are nicely clarified.
The Picturesque Landscape
Here is an excellent analysis of how the concept of the so-called
"English garden" evolved into the reality of Capability Brown.
A Geometry of Nature
If you want to understand Thomasina's "Geometry of
Irregular Forms" you can find a brief explanation in "Geometry of Flowers,"
but this is a classic detailed exposition of the history of this idea.
Life's Ups & Downs
If you want to understand what Valentine is doing with Sidley
Park's "grouse books" as a mathematical biologist, this is just what you want.
The Picturesque Controversy
Fermat's Last Theorem
Arcadia Homepage