Arcadia: Act 1, Scenes 2–4

During the course of the play the table collects this and that, and where an object from one scene would be an anachronism in another (say a coffee mug) it is simply deemed to have become invisible.

After a few moments, HANNAH takes the sketch book to the windows, comparing the view with what has been drawn, and then she replaces the sketch book on the reading stand. She wears nothing frivolous.

He carries a capacious leather bag which serves as a briefcase.

CHLOË: I bet she’s in the hermitage, can’t see from here with the marquee...

CHLOË: A dance for the district, our annual dressing up and general drunkenness. The wrinklies won’t have it in the house, there was a teapot we once had to bag back from Christie’s in the nick of time, so anything that can be destroyed, stolen or vomited on has been tactfully removed; tactlessly, I should say –

Bernard looks round vaguely then checks over his shoulder for the missing Peacock, then recovers himself and turns on the Nightingale bonhomie.

BERNARD: A theory of mine. Ha-hah, not ha-ha. If you were strolling down the garden and all of a sudden the ground gave way at your feet, you’re not going to go ‘ha-ha’, you’re going to jump back and go ‘ha-hah!’, or more probably, ‘Bloody ’ell!’...though personally I think old Murray was up the pole on that one – in France, you know, ‘ha-ha’ is used to denote a strikingly ugly woman, a much more likely bet for something that keeps the cows off the lawn.

This is not going well for BERNARD but he seems blithely unaware.

BERNARD: The book! – the book is a revelation!

BERNARD: No. All the more credit to you. To rehabilitate a forgotten writer, I suppose you could say that’s the main reason for an English don.

BERNARD: Good God, no, let the brats sort it out for themselves. Anyway, many congratulations. I expect someone will be bringing out Caroline Lamb’s oeuvre now?

BERNARD: No, no – a monograph perhaps for the Journal of English Studies.

HANNAH: Well! This is a new experience for me. A grovelling academic.

HANNAH: Oh, but it is. All the academics who reviewed my book patronized it.

HANNAH: Landscape gardener. He’d do these books for his clients, as a sort of prospectus. (She demonstrates.) Before and after, you see. This is how it all looked until, say, 1810 – smooth, undulating, serpentine – open water, clumps of trees, classical boat-house –

HANNAH: Landscape gardener. He’d do these books for his clients, as a sort of prospectus. (She demonstrates.) Before and after, you see. This is how it all looked until, say, 1810 – smooth, undulating, serpentine – open water, clumps of trees, classical boat-house –

HANNAH:...There’s an account of my hermit in a letter by your illustrious namesake.

HANNAH: I found it in an essay on hermits and anchorites published in the Cornhill Magazine in the 1860s… (She fishes for the magazine itself among the books on the table, and finds it.) ...1862...Peacock calls him (She quotes from memory.) ‘Not one of your village simpletons to frighten the ladies, but a savant among idiots, a sage of lunacy.’

BERNARD: An oxy-moron, so to speak.

HANNAH: Oh, he was very busy. When he died, the cottage was stacked solid with paper. Hundreds of pages. Thousands. Peacock says he was suspected of genius. It turned out, of course, he was off his head. He’d covered every sheet with cabalistic proofs that the world was coming to an end.

HANNAH:...There’s an engraving of Sidley Park in 1730 that makes you want to weep. Paradise in the age of reason. By 1760 everything had gone – the topiary, pools and terraces, fountains, an avenue of limes – the whole sublime geometry was ploughed under by Capability Brown.

HANNAH: I don’t like sentimentality.

BERNARD:...Meanwhile, overlooked box of early nineteenth-century books languish in country house cellar until house sold to make way for the Channel Tunnel rail-link.

THOMASINA: A gibe is not a rebuttal.

THOMASINA:...You are churlish with me because mama is paying attention to your friend.

THOMASINA: What a faint-heart! We must work outward from the middle of the maze. We will start with something simple. (She picks up the apple leaf.) I will plot this leaf and deduce its equation.

SEPTIMUS:...The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne...burned on the water...

Septimus looks outside the door, slightly contrite about THOMASINA, and sees that CHATER is skulking out of view.

Septimus looks outside the door, slightly contrite about THOMASINA, and sees that CHATER is skulking out of view.

BRICE: There is still the injury to his conjugal property, Mrs Chater’s –

CHATER: English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, your ladyship, is a doggerel aimed at Lord Byron’s seniors and betters. If he intends to include me, he intends to insult me.

LADY CROOM:...Mr Hodge, you must speak to your friend and put him out of his affectation of pretending to quit us. I will not have it. He says he is determined on the Malta packet sailing out of Falmouth! His head is full of Lisbon and Lesbos, and his portmanteau of pistols, and I have told him it is not to be thought of.

LADY CROOM:...Mr Hodge, you must speak to your friend and put him out of his affectation of pretending to quit us. I will not have it. He says he is determined on the Malta packet sailing out of Falmouth! His head is full of Lisbon and Lesbos, and his portmanteau of pistols, and I have told him it is not to be thought of.

SEPTIMUS: Oh, damn your soul, Chater! Ovid would have stayed a lawyer and Virgil a farmer if they had known the bathos to which love would descend in your sportive satyrs and noodle nymphs!

SEPTIMUS: (Wearily) Oh, very well I can fit you in at five minutes after five. And then it’s off to the Malta packet out of Falmouth. You two will be dead, my penurious schoolfriend will remain to tutor Lady Thomasina, and I trust everybody including Lady Croom will be satisfied!

BRICE: He is all bluster and bladder.

VALENTINE: (Now with the lesson book again) It’s an iterated algorithm.

VALENTINE:...Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them.

VALENTINE:...Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them.

‘O harbinger of Sleep, who missed the press
And hoped his drone might thus escape redress!
The wretched Chater, bard of Eros’ Couch,
For his narcotic let my pencil vouch!’

‘O harbinger of Sleep, who missed the press
And hoped his drone might thus escape redress!
The wretched Chater, bard of Eros’ Couch,
For his narcotic let my pencil vouch!’

‘O harbinger of Sleep, who missed the press
And hoped his drone might thus escape redress!
The wretched Chater, bard of Eros’ Couch,
For his narcotic let my pencil vouch!’

BERNARD: By which I mean a visceral belief in yourself.

BERNARD: No...we’re talking about Lord Byron the chartered accountant.

HANNAH steps over to him and gives him a demure kiss on the cheek.