A Common Theme in Hardy’s "Arcadia" and Stoppard’s "Poems 1912-1913’

A common theme in both Hardy’s “Arcadia” and Stoppard’s is the presence of landscape and place. They are both equally used to explore the broader themes and the concerns that are prevalent throughout the works. For Arcadia, landscape is primarily used to present some of the common arguments and ideas throughout the play, such as classicism versus romanticism, chaos theory and how time affects us. In Hardy’s “Poems 1912-1913”, landscape and place bring past and present together and acts to demonstrate Hardy’s inner feelings about the loss of his wife Emma Lavinia Guifford on 27th November 1912. As both works use landscape and place to present these broader concerns, similarities between the usages are clearly present; however, many differences due to the nature of the work and its messages can also be found.

One of the clearest uses of landscape and place in Hardy’s poems 1912-1913 is to comprehend the death of his wife. Hardy met his wife, Emma Lavinia Guifford, in North Cornwall, while he was there to repair the church of St Juliot. However, once married, the couple grew unhappy until eventually she died expectantly and Hardy began to regret their estrangement. However, Stoppard uses landscape and place in Arcadia to demonstrate the topic of Classicism versus Romanticism, the arguments therein and what it entails. Stoppard does this by highlighting the contrast between Lady Croom’s ideal garden and Noakes”. Lady Croom describes her garden as being “a picture” “the slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage” “– in short it is nature as God intended”. Lady Croom is describing her garden as being “tastefully arranged; and ordered. This is the representation of classicism, or the “Age of Enlightenment”, the belief that everything can be solved rationally and with logic.

In contrast, Noakes proposes a garden with an “eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house”. Noakes” ideal landscape represents the Romantic Movement, which was a more artistic and emotional movement. It is ironic that Lady Croom describes her structured garden as “nature as God intended” because nature is chaotic and unordered. The romantic style addresses the chaotic way of nature, with Noakes arguing “irregularity is the chiefest principle of the picturesque style”. Hardy similarly describes nature as being chaotic; in “Beeny Cliff” Hardy describes a “wild weird western shore”. He also uses a repeated “ay” sound to demonstrate to sound of the sea and seagulls; “The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away”. However, in Arcadia, although Noakes” garden is more chaotic, as nature should be, it is still not purely natural because he is still creating the chaos and therefore it is unnatural. This could show Stoppard is arguing that as the human race we will always tend to order and that chaos and nature can not be made. He also shows a disdain for Romanticism when he describes the transition from romanticism to classicism as the “decline from thinking into feeling”, “decline” suggesting it is undesirable.

However, it could also show that there is still order in chaos, an idea that can be found elsewhere in the play when Thomasina declares to Septimus “if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell” “Do we not believe nature is written in numbers?”. She also suggests that she could plot the shape of an apple leave using an equation that would plot “a dot somewhere on the screen. You’d never know where to expect the next dot. But gradually you’d start to see this shape”. This could potentially demonstrate one of the broader concerns that Stoppard was wishing to discuss; that in order to understand the world logic and art have to function together.

Another broader concern that both Hardy and Stoppard discuss using landscape and place is death. When Lady Croom is discussing Sidley Park she declares “Et in Arcadia ego! Here I am in Arcadia”. The first noticeable thing is that Lady Croom has in fact slightly mistranslated “Et in Arcadia ego”. It is typically translated as saying “And I am in Arcadia” or “I am even in Arcadia”. This is significant because the words appeared on a famous painting by Guercino. It was entitled “Et in Arcadia ego” and depicted a skull with a hole in its left side. It implies, along with many other pieces of literature, that death is present even in Arcadia, which often represents paradise due to the idyllic region that exists in Greece named Arcadia; “I (death) am even in Arcadia (paradise)”.

This is a theme that is present throughout the play; death comes to everyone, no matter who you are or what you do. As Valentine outlined, everyone will eventually cool down (die); “heat goes to cold. It’s a one-way street”. The presence of death is further emphasised by how Stoppard writes about landscape; the garden is never seen but is there throughout the play, just as we cannot see death but is always with us until we die. Another way Hardy both use landscape and place is how the settings do not change, despite the vast amounts of time between viewing them.