ng fired by the lady of the house, Lady Croom, for ruining Thomasins'a innocence by teaching her the meaning of such expressions and "carnal embrace."It is actually with this lesson that Stoppard opens the play. These two, Thomasina and Septimus, are the active people of this play. They are the true "doers."The main characters in the present day cast are all scientists and two of the three, Hannah and Bernard, are historians researching the occurrences at Sidley Park in 1809. The third scientist in the present day cast is Valentine, a graduate student at Oxford who is working on the grouse of populations, i.e., seeing how populations mathematically grow and change in nature. These people talk about doing everything. The audience is instantly able to see the mirror that Stoppard is holding up to modern society through the differences between the active characters of the past and the talkers of the present.Valentine spends his time either talking about figuring out his grouse and publishing, or being frustrated about the brilliance of Thomasina's work compared to his inability to see the patterns in his own. Hannah talks about writing another best selling book on the Sidley Hermit which she based on a drawing in the landscape book that Hannah doesn't know was drawn in by Thomasina as a joke. Bernard talks about proving that Lord Byron killed a fellow poet of the time, Ezra Chater, after panning his book. Not only do none of these characters actually succeed in doing what they originally planned to do, but they never really act on anything.The societal mirror of Arcadia is once again illustrated in the differences between the characters of Valentine and Thomasina. It is obvious from the start that Valentine is meant to be the modern counterpart to Thomasina. Both are mathematicians working on finding the pattern to natural chaos. The difference between them is that Thomasina sees the pattern at only 13 years old without the help of modern-...
