by
HANNA SCOLNICOV
Theatre Studies
Tel-Aviv
University
ENGLISH LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE is
an art form that is especially well
suited to Stoppard's overriding
interest in the connection between
art and nature. Here is an art form,
the medium (but not the object) of
which is nature. Its models are paintings
and its aim, as Lady Croom puts it,
is to reshape nature “as God
intended.” In undertaking
to reshape the park, the landscape
architect attempts to imitate the Creator's
own activities in the Garden of Eden,
or to recreate an idealized Arcadia.
The title marks the land of Arcadia as
both the thematic focal point and the
spatial vanishing point of the
play. Arcadia is
an actual geographical place in the
Peloponnese, in Southern
Greece, but one that has been mythologized
and idealized since ancient times.
It was celebrated in Virgil's Eclogues as a classical Paradise, the realm
of the god Pan, where young shepherds
and shepherdesses
roam in a beautiful pastoral setting,
in an eternal springtime. Arcadia is
the fantasyland of the Golden Age,
and it has been said that “Arcadia was
antiquity's antiquity.”
Stoppard
does not revive the neoclassical
interest in Arcadia merely
for its pastoral charm. The idea
of Arcadia is
charged with depth and meaning
through the two references in the
play to the et
in Arcadia ego theme. This
well-known art-historical theme
introduces
an elegiac awareness of mortality
into the carefree pastoral life,
superimposing
the Judeo-Christian Fall from Paradise
onto the classical myth of a Golden
Age. Lady Croom eulogizes the already
doomed present look (of her about-to-be-renovated
garden):
But Sidley Park is already
a picture, and a most amiable
picture too. The slopes are green
and gentle.
The trees are companionably
grouped at intervals
that show them to advantage.
The rill is a serpentine ribbon
unwound from
the lake peaceably contained
by
meadows on which the right amount
of sheep
are tastefully arranged — in
short, it is nature as God
intended, and I can say with
the painter,
'et
in Arcadia ego!'
'Here I am in Arcadia.'
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The
description provides, in a gently ironic
tone, the essential features that characterize
Capability Brown's landscape designs.
Significantly, Lady Croom not only
describes a contrived pastoral scene
(“the right amount of sheep are
tastefully arranged”), but also
introduces the et
in Arcadia ego theme into the
play and offers her translation of
the Latin. A
different translation is offered by
Septimus, tutor to her daughter Thomasina: “Even
in Arcadia, there am I!” He is
responding to the approaching gunshots
of the hunting sportsmen, and Thomasina
exclaims, “Oh, phooey to Death!” thus
reminding the listener of the presence
of Death in Arcadia.
Clearly,
it is Septimus who has offered the
correct translation of the phrase.
Lady Croom's version attests to her
blissful unawareness of its tragic
implications. Through a pointed reference
to the interpretive crux of et
in Arcadia ego, Stoppard has
charged the play with the whole weight
of the cultural tradition that lies
behind the phrase.
It is through the reference to the et
in Arcadia ego theme that
the shadow of death enters the play.
The childish gaiety of Thomasina
and her sexual awakening, along with
the sexual cavorting of her elders,
the wit and sparkle, the comfortable
life in Sidley Park, the beauty of
its grounds, all these will vanish,
for death is also there, in the English Arcadia … poignantly
demonstrated through the accidental
death by fire of Thomasina, the night
before her seventeenth birthday.
Her death is remembered by a memorial
in the park and recounted by Hannah
Jarvis, the historian researching
Sidley Park. Recounted from the perspective
of people who did not know her and
who live many years after her demise,
the story of Thomasina's death becomes
elegiac rather than tragic. The memorial
stone in the park parallels the monument
encountered by the shepherds in the et
in Arcadia ego paintings [by
Il Guercino (1618) and Nicolas Poussin
(1627, 1638)].** The inscription
on the memorial to Thomasina awaits
the later generation of curious young
people to decipher it.
*Excerpted with the permission of
the author, and the editor of Modern
Drama, from the article “ 'Before'
and 'After' in Stoppard's Arcadia” (XLVII,
3. Fall 2004), 480 – 499.
** These paintings have been reproduced
in the article above.
Hanna
Scolnicov is Associate Professor of
Theatre Studies in the Faculty of Arts,
Tel-Aviv University. |
