Time and Memory in Arcadia and Top Girls: A Comparative Study

Introduction: Two Plays, Two Approaches to Time

Both Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and Caryl Churchill's Top Girls stress the persistence of the past in the present. Both plays feature well-known nonfictional historical or mythical characters as part of the action that takes place on stage, alongside a cast of fictional and contemporary characters. However, in Arcadia the events of the past and present unfold as parallel narratives, set in the same house, but the two sets of characters do not interact as emotionally aware human beings. Rather, they connect through shared spaces, objects, and works of reference — such as the mathematical quandaries posed by Fermat's Last Theorem. In contrast, while Top Girls evolves in a more straightforward, linear, and chronological fashion, its characters from the past interact directly with individuals from the present, in the same place, and teach those characters about the role of women in history.

Parallel Narratives in Arcadia

In Stoppard's play, characters from different time frames never directly speak to one another, although there are some shadowy references to different sets of characters sensing or hearing traces of one another's presence. But these shades are not the core of the narrative of Arcadia. Rather, the audience gains a sense of dramatic propulsion as events from the historical past and the contemporary present evolve simultaneously in a complementary fashion. The primary focus and interest of the main characters is always in the world immediately around them. The academic Bernard Nightingale may be interested in Byron, but not because he has a personal relationship with the poet — his motivation is to deliver a compelling lecture on Byron's life.

The narrative begins to take shape as the rapid succession of the opening scenes signals to the viewer that the tutor Septimus and his charge Thomasina inhabit the same house as the two academics studying the English Romantic era. The time period differs, but the place is the same, and the lives of both groups belong to a similar social milieu. Their concerns are immediate yet comparable in nature: both sets of characters are drawn to mathematics, literature, and their own self-advancement. Although not directly aware of one another's presence, the characters of Arcadia touch each other's lives through the same books and the same theories, suggesting a commonality rather than a contrast in human intellectual and emotional life across time. People engage in literary disputes, question their role in society and the universe, and live, love, and die across the ages in recognizably similar ways.

Direct Historical Engagement in Top Girls

Rather than Stoppard's covert suggestions about the historical importance of the house and its characters' relationships with the past, the characters in Caryl Churchill's Top Girls engage directly and openly with women from history. These figures are immediately recognizable as famous, successful women drawn from various periods spanning roughly 1,200 years of human history. In their interactions with the contemporary characters of the play, women such as Pope Joan and Lady Nijo teach the modern family featured in the drama about the far-reaching implications their lives hold for women today. The education is not covert, as in Arcadia, but overtly didactic and feminist in nature.

Narrative Force and Dramatic Technique in Arcadia

Although it moves as two parallel rather than one linear narrative, Stoppard's tale of past and present still carries considerable narrative force. One of the most compelling ways in which Stoppard deploys time to drive the plot forward occurs when the academic Bernard advances the theory that Lord Byron was a murderer. The viewer first recognizes this claim as unlikely by observing events in the past timeline; later, the contemporary academic Hannah Jarvis confirms it is false by discovering evidence in the house after Bernard has departed to deliver his erroneous lecture. Even while the past and present interact only tangentially, certain emotional as well as plot parallels emerge: Septimus flatters his employer despite having written a damning review of Mr. Chater's first poem, just as Bernard flirts with Hannah even though he dismissed her book on the Romantic figure Caroline Lamb. Meanwhile, the mathematical questions posed by Thomasina continue to destabilize the viewer's intellectual certainty about what belongs to the past and what to the present.

Conclusion: Speculation vs. Ideology

The reason Churchill employs more conventional narrative techniques than Stoppard may be that her play is more openly ideological — she wishes to make clear that women have always striven for political and social dominance, but have had to make tremendous sacrifices to achieve it. Stoppard's play, by contrast, is academic and speculative in its agenda, much like his characters themselves. His play speaks to the abstract uncertainties humans hold about the nature of memory and time, rather than striving to advance a particular ideology. Nevertheless, by gently suggesting the futility of understanding human history through literary language alone, or through science and mathematics alone, the playwright less stridently makes the case that both realms of human experience must be engaged together — the "time" of words and the time of physics — to produce a truly complete, educated, and feeling person.