Read Online Arcadia by Tom Stoppard - Free Book Online

preoccupied.)
    Hannah: What I don’t understand is ... why nobody did this
feedback thing before—it’s not like relativity, you don’t have to be Einstein.
    Valentine: You couldn’t see to look before. The electronic
calculator was what the telescope was for Galileo.
    Hannah: Calculator?
    Valentine: There wasn’t enough time before. There weren’t enough pencilsl (He flourishes Thomasina’s lesson book.) This took her I don’t
know how many days and she hasn’t scratched the paintwork. Now she’d only have
to press a button, the same button over and over. Iteration. A few minutes. And
what I’ve done in a couple of months, with only a pencil the
calculations would take me the rest of my life to do again—thousands of pages—tens
of thousands! And so boring!
    Hannah: Do you mean—?
    (She stops because GUS is plucking Valentine’s sleeve.)
    Do you mean—? Valentine: All right, Gus, I’m coming. Hannah:
Do you mean that was the only problem? Enough time?
    And paper? And the boredom? Valentine: We’re going to get
out the dressing-up box. Hannah: (Driven to raising her voice) Vail Is
that what you’re saying? Valentine: (Surprised by her. Mildly) No, I’m
saying you’d have to have a reason for doing it.
    (Gus runs out of the room, upset.)
    (Apologetically) He hates people shouting. Hannah: I’m
sorry.
    (Valentine starts to follow Gus.)
    But anything else? Valentine: Well, the other thing is, you’d
have to be insane.
    (Valentine leaves.
    Hannah stays, thoughtful. After a moment, she turns to the
table and picks up the Cornhill Magazine. She looks into it briefly,
then closes it, and leaves the room, taking the magazine with her.
    The empty room.
    The light changes to early morning. From a long way off,
there is a pistol shot. A moment later there is the cry of dozens of crows disturbed
from the unseen trees.)

Act Two
Scene Five
    Bernard is pacing around, reading aloud from a handful of
typed sheets, Valentine, Chloe and Gus are his audience, Gus sits
somewhat apart, perhaps less attentive, Valentine has his tortoise and
is eating a sandwich from which he extracts shreds of lettuce to offer the
tortoise.
    Bernard: ‘Did it happen? Could it happen? Undoubtedly it
could. Only three years earlier the Irish poet Tom Moore appeared on the field
of combat to avenge a review by Jeffrey of the Edinburgh. These affairs
were seldom fatal and sometimes farcical but, potentially, the duellist stood
in respect to the law no differently from a murderer. As for the murderee, a
minor poet like Ezra Chater could go to his death in a Derbyshire glade as
unmissed and unremembered as his contemporary and namesake, the minor botanist
who died in the forests of the West Indies, lost to history like the monkey
that bit him. On April 16th 1809, a few days after he left Sidley Park, Byron
wrote to his solicitor John Hanson: ‘If the consequences of my leaving England
were ten times as ruinous as you describe, I have no alternative; there are
circumstances which render it absolutely indispensable, and quit the country I
must immediately.’ To which, the editor’s note in the Collected Letters reads
as follows: ‘What Byron’s urgent reasons for leaving England were at this time
has never been revealed.’ The letter was written from the family seat, Newstead
Abbey, Nottinghamshire. A long day’s ride to the north-west lay Sidley Park,
the estate of the Coverlys—a far grander family, raised by Charles II to the
Earldom of Croom ...’
    (Hannah enters briskly, a piece of paper in her hand.)
    Hannah: Bernard ...! Val ...
    Bernard: Do you mind?
    (Hannah puts her piece of paper down in front of Valentine.)
    Chloe: (Angrily) Hannah .
    Hannah: What?
    CHLOE: She’s so rude!
    Hannah: (Taken aback) What? Am I?
    Valentine: Bernard’s reading us his lecture.
    Hannah: Yes, I know. (Then recollecting herself.) Yes—yes—that was rude. I’m sorry, Bernard.
    Valentine: (With the piece of paper) What is this?
    Hannah: (To Bernard)