The Arts, the Sciences, and the Making of Meaning: Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia as a Post-Structuralist Play

Abstract

Tom Stoppard, whose early works dealt with questions also addressed by the Theatre of the Absurd, takes up similar philosophical issues again in bis recent play Arcadia (1993) and discusses them in a way that links the arts and the sciences, thus bridging the gulf between the two cultures. Set at an English country house both in the early nineteenth Century and in the present, the play investigates various ways in which the characters try to invest with meaning and to find truth in the world they find themselves surrounded by. This leads to a confrontation of rivalling approaches which alternately see the universe äs a regularly structured and ordered one or äs an irregulär and chaotic one without ultimate meaning or truth. This is discussed by the characters in the play both with reference to the theory of gardening, where classicist and romanticist models are confronted with each other, and with regard to the theory of chaos and to thermodynamics (particularly the concept of entropy) in the sciences. The result in the play is a highly interesting post-structuralist approach to our anthropological set-up äs pattern-building animals and to our attempts at understanding the world. 1 Cf. for example Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama (Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 1992) 325.