About this title: Tom Stoppard's play primarily concerns Thomasina Croom, a brilliant 13-year-old who is searching for the proof to Fermat's theorem, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the rudiments of what we now know as chaos theory. All the while, her mother is pursuing Lord Byron, a guest at their estate, while her tutor is pursuing the wife of another ...
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Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780571169344ISBN:0571169341
Description: Very Good. Slight cover wear with minor scuffing to edges. Minor markings and underlining on pages. GoodwillnyBooks is committed to providing each customer with the highest standard of customer service. You may return new items within 30 days of delivery for a full refund. read more
Description: Good. 0571169341 Paperback with moderate shelf-wear, rubbing, fraying, tears, fading, chipping and bumping to the cover, edges, corners, and spine. Binding is tight and square. Inside pages are free from underlining, note taking, and/or highlighting, however, the pages have tanned with age. Book is in stock and ready to ship same or next business day. Select Expedited shipping and receive your book within 3-5 business days. Buy with confidence! Please leave feedback after your purchase. It ... read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Date Published: 1994-09-24
ISBN-13:9780571169344ISBN:0571169341
Description: New. Gift Condition, Priority Shipping recommended for prompt delivery by USPS when offered, Delivery Confirmation on all domestic items where available. read more
Edition: Reprinted with Corrections 1993
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Faber & Faber, Boston, MA
Date Published: 1993
ISBN-13:9780571169344ISBN:0571169341
Description: Near Fine. PLAY: PERFORMING ARTS: 4 7/8 x 7 3/4 inches. 97 pages. Written by the Tony-award-winning British playwright, screenwriter, radio and television writer, Tom Stoppard (b. 1937), ARCADIA is an inventive and fascinating play, full of literary illusions and puzzling riddles. The play takes us back and forth between the centuries and explores the nature of truth and time, the difference between the Classical and the Romantic temperament, and the disruptive influence of sex on our orbits ... read more
"I have never read a book like "Arcadia". I've had some dreams like it, and dreamed of writing books not unrelated to it, but I never, in twenty years, imagined a play like this could exist.
To summarize the play, I'm reminded of Richard Lovelace's line, "I sing of times trans-shifting" -- this play is all about time, the passage of time, and certainly, how we see time as we look backwards through history. The play takes remarkable twists and turns that hinges upon an unusual idea: what if what you thought about history wasn't really true? How would you ever know? He manages to take a jab at the world of academia while he's at it -- a neat trick, given the play hinges severely on selling the academic "history making" process.
The characters are all brilliant, but also funny -- Stoppard's knack for dialogue means that no opportunity for an amusing reference, a witty pun (including several translingual puns) or a hilarious misunderstanding is lost. The story is dense with allusions -- I admit a lot of the mathematical concepts were largely "over my head" but that almost seems not to matter, the crux of them got through anyway. Stoppard does not stop to explain his references -- footnotes would not be amiss for the reader who is not extremely well-read in the England of the Romantics.
I wish I could impress strongly enough upon people to read this play. It was fun, funny, but provocative, earning serious thought from me for the next few days. It seems to have a power of its own -- thoughts from the text keep surfacing, milling around, waiting to be turned upside down and examined in more depth. It's more than a play, or a satire, or a comedy -- it's also a philosophy, a love story, a tragedy. Would that more writers could express themselves so."
"My favorite play by Tom Stoppard, who's often been referred to as one of the cleverest and most literate minds currently writing for the stage - or anywhere else, for that matter. His work is unfailingly intellectual in the best sense of the word, alive with the energy of a naturally brilliant and inquisitive mind constantly in motion: gleefully absorbing new information, delighting in the juxtaposition of unlikely ideas (philosophy and gymnastics, for example) and forever doubling back to challenge and test its own conclusions. Add to that his irresistible, infectious delight in the possibilities of language - including a gift for epigram that Oscar Wilde would envy and a flair for witty, original metaphor - and you have a playwright who rewards an audience's commitment and attention more richly than any I can think of. Though he's sometimes been criticized for being too intellectual, even self-consciously so, and therefore not capable of engaging an audience's emotions, in ARCADIA I think he achieves an artistic equilibrium that no one can question, creating a kind of thinking-person's romance, a play that is both intellectually stimulating and deeply moving. Balancing modern chaos theory against a young girl's awakening sexuality, the birth of Romanticism against the absolute end of the universe, with excursions along the way into English literary history, landscape gardening, the nature of genius, and the tendency of history to shape-shift depending on who's interpreting it, for me this is the most complex and lyrical work in his very distinguished (and still expanding!) canon. Stoppard himself considers it the most successful of his plays from the storytelling standpoint, and it's perhaps also the most successful at making its cleverness intrinsic to character. The historical characters, contemporaries of Jane Austen, are witty because they live in a time when conversation is the arena for virtually every human interaction and a quick wit is valued accordingly; the contemporary characters are clever because they're so highly educated - academics all, they are almost flamboyantly articulate. In both cases, their cleverness is a function of who they are, and not of who Tom Stoppard is. But we do catch glimpses of the author in several of his creations: in the critic Bernard Nightingale, his overactive brain careening from one hypothesis to another; in the scholar Hannah Jarvis, with her belief that our humanity is defined by our restless curiosity about the universe ("It's wanting to know that makes us matter..."); even in the hilarious hack poet Ezra Chater, complaining about the inner circle of critics who so cavalierly dismiss his work as trivial while promoting their own protégés. But the truest voice of Tom Stoppard may belong to Thomasina Coverley, the 13 year old math prodigy, radiant with the prospect of all there is to know, passionate with grief over knowledge already squandered, all the possibilities of life (both intellectual and emotional) still before her. It says a great deal, I think, about Stoppard that this should be so, because in another sense ARCADIA is a play that could really only be written in middle age, evoking the magical optimism of youth with the hard-won wisdom of maturity and a wry compassion for human fallibility. It is both vernal and autumnal, equal parts hope and rue, not quite a comedy, but not quite a tragedy either - very much like life. A poignant and exhilarating play."
By Bettie,
on the cusp of the orust riviera, Sweden
"Tom Stoppard - Arcadia - BBC Drama 1993 (2.33.24) 64 kbps
ARCADIA is Stoppard's acknowledged masterpiece, a scintillating play in which - as in IN THE NATIVE STATE - present day researchers seek to find the truth about people and events from a former time - in this case, about 200 years earlier.
It was broadcast by Radio 3 in the year of its first performance at the National theatre, 1993. The action displays both past and present, opening in 1808 before switching to the 1990s. The listener learns the truth of both eras, but, predictably, the modern researchers construct a false picture of the past, which gathers sufficient momentum to displace the true one. Most of the characters are exceptionally intelligent and erudite and their dialogue matches - indeed, defines - their intellectual stature.
David Benedictus' production has the same cast as that of the National's staging: Felicity Kendal, Bill Nighy and Samuel West as the moderns, and Rufus Sewell, Emma Fielding and Harriet Walter as the 19th century georgians. All are predictably excellent, especially Harriet Walter as the bird-brained, opinionated mother and Emma Fielding as her gifted, doomed daughter. blurb lines"
"rice pudding: "if you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.""
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