"Before" and "After" in Stoppard's Arcadia

"Before" and "After" in Stoppard's Arcadia HANNA SCOLNICOV The title of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, seemingly unconnected with its plot, provides the most important clue for the reading of the play. Arcadia is the neoclassical cultural site par excellence. By choosing to call his play by that name, Stoppard places his work within a rich tradition of art works in various medial by various artists, from Virgil to Poussin and beyond. Some of these works are explicitly alluded to in the play; others are referred to only obliquely. The title positions this very modem drama within an almost infmite line of backward-looking, neoclassical regressions, hearkening back all the way to classical antiquity. In what follows, I provide an intertextual and intermedial reading of the play in relation to this environment of ideas and works on the landscape of Arcadia. Arcadia not only is the implicit focus of many of the discussions of landscape gardening in the play but also serves as the unseen vanishing point of the play's theatrical space, and the et ill Arcadia ego motif is finally discovered to provide a model for the plot. The unchanging theatrical space of Arcadial is seemingly conventional: an eighteenth-century Palladian room in a stalely English house. Outside, in the theatrical space without,' lies the vast park, and the proposed improvements to its appearance provide the topic for much of the conversation that goes on inside the room. The suggested changes in the unseen landscape outside are thus a function of the changing cultural tastes of the characters inside the room. The room itself serves as a constant. The paradoxical changeability and artificiality of the unseen landscape outside forms one of the dominant themes of the play, while the stable point of reference is the fixed, visible theatrical space within. Within its strict observance of the unity of place, Arcadia takes very unconventional liberties with its treatment of time. It uses a double time scheme, moving back and forth between the beginning of the nineteenth century and tile present. I argue that this unique double-exposure technique is a brilliant Modem Drama, 47:3 (Fall 2(04) 480 "Before" and "After" in Stoppard's Arcadia transposition into the theatrical medium of the innovative graphic technique used by the English landscape architect Humphry Repton (1752- 1818). Repton developed a clever method for representing his proposed improvements to park landscapes, exhibiting the view of the "after" beneath that of the "before." Stoppard refers briefly to Repton's method in the stage directions, acknowledging the indebtedness of Mr. Noakes, his fictional landscape architect , to Repton. However, Stoppard's own indebtedness to Repton for his use of the visible room as a constant and the landscape outside as a function of fashion has not as yet been explored.' THE THEATRICAL SPACE Large French windows that overlook the park fill the upstage wall, but the playwright specifies that "nothing much need be said or seen oj the exterior beyond." The stage directions seem indecisive or even purposely evasive: "[pjerhaps we see all indication" of the park, but "perhaps only light and air and sky" (t). Although the park cannot be seen by the audience, it is the subject of much debate in the play. Thus, it is the dialogue, rather than the view through the windows, that is entrusted with the task of constructing for the spectators a mental image of the outlying grounds of Sidley Park' The room itself is sparsely furnished with a large table and chairs. Three stage properties are singled out. The fust two are the landscape architect's tools - his stand and his theodolite - and the third is a tortoise. The architect uses the stand to display his plans for remodeling the park and the theodolite to survey the grounds and calculate their measurements. The presence of these tools onstage underlines the importance of the architect as the agent of change in the outlying grounds. In the last scene of the play, a portable computer is placed on the table, alongside the vintage theodolite, as a fitting symbol of the spirit of our own times. Humphry Repton, the great landscape architect who serves as the model for the...