David Humphrey
Hutchings
EH 427
4/25/17
The Power of Time: The Ever-Changing in Stoppard’s Arcadia
Time is essential for change. Progress, development, and learning all cannot occur
unless there is something for them to take a path through. As a result of time, there is
history, and history affects the present; it affects people, it affects reality. Often, the events
of the past influence current life, and create the now. The two, past and present, are
inherently tied together in a symbiotic harmony. In Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia, Stoppard
demonstrates the power that time has over the present in a way that links the past, 1809,
with a very modern time period, 1993, by displaying the influence, motivation, and intrinsic
relationship between the past and present as they overlap in two different worlds, as well
as in the way that the movement of objects that are shared in them, in a declaration of
causality and influence that highlights universal connection.
Arcadia’s two worlds, that of the romantic period and that of the late twentieth
century, slowly work toward each other in the play forming a bridge across time. In his
article “Stoppard’s Arcadia” David Guaspari explains how the connectedness between the
two periods builds throughout the play saying, “Until the play’s finale these two stories
alternate. Then they race along side by side… the dialogue so intertwined that speeches
seem to respond to one another across the years. The shared objects become…’doubled by
time,’ so that a modern character may be reading an aged manuscript even as we see its
author inspect the fresh original” (223). As the separate timelines become more and more
in sync, so does the audience’s realization of how actually similar two periods of history
that one would think would be totally different can be. Stoppard shows that there are
certain events that transcend time and run constant, due to their fundamental relationships
to human nature, while also highlighting the way objects are tied to certain emotions, and
even how they inspire similar actions at different points in their existence. In “‘Postmodern
Science’: Normalizing Radical Epistemologies in ‘Hapgood’ and ‘Arcadia’” Daniel Jernigan
offers insight into the relationship of objects in the play as being related to Chaos Theory,
which Stoppard applies heavily, writing, “…a central tenet of chaos theory is that predicting
the behavior of physical objects is complicated by the fact that even small events can have
very large effects”(20). The audience in Arcadia is allowed to watch objects as they move
through time and influence characters. Because of the two time periods, a difficult task, that
of measuring the impact of objects on their surroundings, is now possible. Stoppard shows
that time influences more than just people, it also plays a role in the movement of the
inanimate, shown as objects in the play pass from character to character. Stoppard uses
these objects, whether manuscripts, table objects, journals, or an apple, to act as links
between the two eras. In Enoch Brater’s article “Playing for Time (and Playing with Time)
in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia” Brater explains this tradition in theater and relates Stoppard’s
use of time traveling objects to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest. Brater
explains, “So too does Wilde allow a fan, in his case Lady Windemeres, to carry so much
temporal weight. Its changing location moves us forward from one scene to the next, from
one potential liaison to the next; and it is not until that same prop is placed back in the
innocent hands…that time is finally allowed to stand still as the curtain slowly falls”(160).
Brater realizes that not only do objects link different moments in time together, but they
also have a way of slowing, and even stopping, it as well. Time in Arcadia, as in real life, and
unlike in a lot of more traditional theater, is relative, it changes speed throughout the play.
Stoppard is showing us the power of objects to act as resistance to the speed built up
during dialogue that moves the perceived amount of time faster. By focusing on an object,
by observing it as it passes and is transferred across people, time, and space, the audience
moves from a run to a crawl taking on details and experiencing more of the action. Brater
continues later in the article explaining, “Each act is paced differently, as are the separate
periods evoked in the coordinated temporal realities. All action, divided as it is, nonetheless
takes place in the same {place}…In Arcadia props cross time, as the tortoise does,
enhancing the visualization” (163-164). Though the play is set in one room, there is so
much action, even some that is painstakingly slow, and that movement is never really lost.
In a way the room that is the entire set is a time machine itself, one powered by its lifeless
object’s journey across time, as well as its inhabitants interactions with each other, and
their parallels to other periods.
Time is identified as cyclical in the play, an idea championed by Valentine when, in
response to a challenge about whether or not the current world is destined to fail that is
posed by Hannah, she says, “ No, its still doomed. But if this is how it [life building upon
itself from nothing] started, perhaps its how the next one will come”(78). Stoppard uses
Valentine to speak to the circle of events, that life can be assumed to remake itself and
repeat the same process as before. The similarities between the two different times in the
play can be explained as just part of a smaller, but ultimately fundamental, principle—that
people, society, and the universe are destined to repeat the past, traveling on lines that
curve into a circle over time. And, therefore, the past is often relived, as the characters in
the twentieth century do in the play, not because the future has some seemingly impossible
influence on the past, but because the patterns, trends, motions, thoughts, and actions of
humanity revolve; they get recycled, re-found.
A particularly interesting strategy that Stoppard uses to warp time inside of the actual
running time, making the play seem to slow down and speed up, is by using a displacing, almost
farcical, method of writing that flips traditional play writing on its head, and makes the ordinary
interesting. In Gabriele Scott Robinson’s article, Plays without Plot: The Theatre of Tom
Stoppard, Robinson states, “…he [Stoppard] performs theatrical feats in playing with
contemporary concepts; he is sensitively attuned to the ideas of his time. He initiates us into a
world in which the commonplace is seen as absurd and absurdity accepted as
commonplace”(48). This confusion of the normal changes the perceived time in the play. It
disorients the audience, and also makes them pay attention to what would normally be
considered the boring parts of a play by many. Time not only becomes less defined in the
narrative, but also in the running of the play itself. Time affects everyone in the theater,
Audience and characters.
The distortion of the past by the present/future is dealt with in Arcadia as well. The
play shows how time can distort. Perhaps best embodying this phenomenon is Hannah’s
declaration that, “The whole Romantic sham, Bernard! It’s what happened to the
Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos
suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and false emotion” (27). Hannah speaks to
the tendency of one generation to rebel against the other, for the passage of time to destroy
and distort. In this particular example, she speaks to the undoing of scientific and logical
thinking coming out of the eighteenth century by romantic spiritualism and naturalism.
The great accomplishments of the last century were abandoned by the next one that saw a
lacking somewhere in an earlier time that meant/means so much to so many, including
Hannah. Stoppard realizes that time is about change, as well as repetition and cyclical
motion. He shows that in rebelling against the ideas of the past growth can occur, but then
so also is the stage set for the next generation to revert back, thus completing the circle.
Though purely logical and monolithic perceptions of the world are under attack in the
play as well, there is a harsh criticism of the romantic philosophies in Arcadia championed most
by Hannah. Leigh Joyce Harbin, in her article “Curably Romantic: Romance, Romanticism, and
Emerging Feminism in the Plays of Tom Stoppard” states that, “The unsentimental Hannah
Jarvis in Arcadia…rejects the romantic in both her personal and her professional life. She resists
the romantic literary, philosophical, or architectural movements as well as resisting romance in
