« Les Arcadies de Sir Philip Sidney et de Tom Stoppard »

Abstract

Although Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia only seems to share a title with Sidney’s Elizabethan pastoral romances, the two works prove to raise common questions. The present article does not aim at uncovering echoes of Sidney’s Arcadias in Stoppard’s play but explores the Arcadian place as a contradictory space built upon jarring geographical and literary assumptions. From Sidley Park to Kalander and Basilius’s houses, Arcadian country-houses convey both a poetic potential and a political reflexion on their foundations. Hinging upon recent criticisms voiced by cultural materialists, the frontiers and boundaries of both representations of the Arcadia are here questioned and paralleled.

Keywords

• Sir Philip Sidney
• The Old Arcadia
• The New Arcadia
• country-house poetry
• pastoral
• Raymond Williams