The birth of chaos.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Briefly Noted - 'Arcadia' - Brief article

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Tom Stoppard's 1993 play Arcadia, revived on Broadway in March, engages the intellect more than most contemporary drama. Sex, fractals, poetry, the heat death of the universe, and the joy and frustration of academic life frame a contest between reason and emotion.

In 1809 tutor-seducer Septimus Hodge, a schoolmate of Lord Byron, instructs 13-year-old mathematical genius Thomasina Coverly in the library of an elegant English estate. Two centuries later, competing literary scholars, feminist Hannah Jarvis and egocentric Bernard Nightingale, convene in the same library to debate the evidence that Byron might have...