Compromised Epistemologies: The Ethics of Historiographic Metatheatre in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties and Arcadia

Tom Stoppard uses historiographic metatheatre to question the efficacy of historical narratives: plays such as Travesties directly address the constructed texture of history. However, partially because the 1809 scenes in Arcadia are naturalistic, critics generally accept Arcadia as presenting a “real” history. But taking anything in Stoppard’s plays at face value is a crucial mistake. Instead, we should read Arcadia as participating in a self-consciously destabilizing cultural project building a historiography of error – like Travesties, but through a less obviously constructed historiographic metatheatre – a reading that prompts us to reconsider standard narratives of Stoppard’s development as a playwright of epistemological uncertainty. Part of Stoppard’s joyous humour in Arcadia goes beyond satirizing Bernard and extends to the critical misreadings through which we, as critics, reproduce Bernard’s unreliable thesis and, like him, risk convincing ourselves that we are right. Taking Arcadia at face value undermines the ethical imperative to uncertainty and multiplicity inherent in historiographic metatheatre, an ethic that runs through both Travesties and Arcadia.