A Study Guide for Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535818643

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Arcadia

Tom Stoppard

1993

Introduction

When asked once about the origins of Arcadia, Tom Stoppard replied that he had been reading Chaos, a book about mathematical theory and at the same time wondering about the contrasts between Romanticism and Classicism in style, temperament, and art. Few playwrights find source material in subjects as diverse, and unlikely, as Stoppard and his literary achievements are often considered more amazing for someone who left school at the age of seventeen and never attended a university.

For some, Arcadia represents a pinnacle in Stoppard’s career. After years of writing clever, witty plays with intellectual appeal, he managed to produce one that tugs at the heart as well as the mind. After its Broadway debut, Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times, "There’s no doubt about it. Arcadia is Tom Stoppard’s richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play of wit, intellect, language, brio, and, new for him, emotion."

Arcadia premiered on the Lyttelton stage of the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain on April 13, 1993. It opened on Broadway two years later, March 31, 1995, at the Lincoln Center Theater. Both productions were greeted with tremendous enthusiasm by critics and the public alike. In London, the play garnered the prestigious Olivier Award for best play (comparable to Broadway’s Antionette Tony Perry Award), while in America Arcadia received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Even the small handful of reviewers who found fault in Arcadia grudgingly hailed it as Stoppard’s greatest play to date.

As the action bounces back and forth in time, Stoppard explores the nature of truth and history, the conflict between Classical and Romantic thought, mathematics and chaos theory, English landscape architecture, and, ultimately, love both familial and familiar. In the words of Time reviewer Brad Leithauser: "In Arcadia we have been given a major English drama, one of those by which, ultimately, the theater of our time may be evaluated. It is a play that holds up beautifully not only on the stage but on the page."

Author Biography

Tom Stoppard is regularly cited as one of England’s greatest playwrights, alongside such national treasures as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, John Osborn, David Hare, and Alan Ayckborn. Yet, even among such lauded company, Stoppard’s place is considered unique, for he writes plays, and creates worlds, unlike other dramatists. In a career that has spanned three decades and more than two-dozen plays, Stoppard has consistently made his audiences laugh, cry, and think, all at the same time. In a New Yorker review of Stoppard’s Arcadia, critic John Lahr explained, The three-ring circus of Stoppard’s mind pulls them in at the box office, where news of the intellect, as opposed to the emotions, is a rarity. . . . Stoppard’s mental acrobatics flatter an audience’s intelligence and camouflage the avowed limits of his plotting and his heart.

Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, on July 3, 1937. When he was only two, his family moved to the island republic of Singapore. In 1942, when the Japanese invaded, he was evacuated to India with his mother and brother. His father, who remained behind, was killed. In 1946 his mother married Kenneth Stoppard, a British army major, and the family moved to England. Stoppard attended English public school from the age of nine to seventeen, then left to become a journalist. (Later reviewers suggest that his lack of a complete formal education may be the greatest asset to his work—it is often held that his lack of knowledge in areas such as history and formal literary structure allow his plays to be freewheeling dramatic escapades.) He wrote for a couple newspapers during the next few years, eventually specializing in theatre and film. His first work as a dramatist was on radio; he had two fifteen-minute radio plays broadcast on the BBC in 1964, The Dissolution of Dominic Boot and M Is for Moon among Other Things.

After only a couple minor