Arcadia (play) - Contextual Information

Contextual Information

In Arcadia, Stoppard presents his audience with several highly complicated mathematical and scientific concepts. Stoppard uses these theories and ideas within the play to illuminate relationships between characters that otherwise would not be conveyed as poignantly.

One of the main thematic concepts in the show is chaos theory. Two authors describe this extremely complicated concept within the context of Arcadia.

The first of these is Paul Edwards in his essay "Science in Hapgood and Arcadia" in the Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. "Chaos mathematics is about the recovery of information from apparently chaotic and random systems where entropy is high... It is 'asymmetric' (unlike the equations of classical physics), yet it finds regularities that prove to be the regularities of nature itself. Strikingly, this mathematics can generate patterns of amazing complexity, but it also has the power to generate seemingly natural or organic shapes that defeat Newtonian geometry. The promise, then, (however questionable it is in reality) is that information, and by extension, nature itself, can overcome the tendency to increase in entropy" (p. 181).

The second is an excerpt from the chapter on Arcadia in John Fleming's book Stoppard's Theatre: Finding Order amid Chaos. "Deterministic chaos deals with systems of unpredictable determinism, but the uncertainty does not result in pure randomness but rather in complex patterns. Traditionally, scientists expected dynamic systems to settle into stable, predictable behavior. However, deterministic chaos has shown that as many of these systems respond to variations in input... Surprisingly, within these random states, windows of order reappear... 'There is order in chaos—an unpredictable order, but a determined order nonetheless, and not merely random behavior...'"

Further scientific and mathematical concepts covered in Arcadia are the second law of thermodynamics, and in relation to it, entropy. Fleming describes these two principles. "Entropy is the measure of the randomness or disorder of a system. The law of increase of entropy states that as a whole the universe is evolving from order to disorder. This relates to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that heat can flow in only one direction, from hotter to colder. Since these equations, unlike Newton's laws of motion, do not go backward and forward, there is an 'arrow of time' that points toward the eventual 'heat death' of the universe"

By using all of these concepts within Arcadia, Stoppard exposes how "there is an underlying order to seemingly random events." The characters in the play discuss these topics while their interactions reflect them.

Some ideas in the play recall Goethe's novella Elective Affinities: Stoppard's characters "Thomasina" and "Septimus" have parallels in Goethe's "Ottalie" and "Eduard", and the historical section of the play is set in 1809, the year of the novella.