These sections of Arcadia contain many of the same elements that stuck me reading the first two acts. The dialogue is of particular interest to me. It’s both humorous and fast paced as I believe many pointed out in class on Tuesday. I like the way the dialogue feels light despite the fact that there is a lot of rather heavy intellectual context and many of the references made within the play are a little involved. The way in which the characters interact reminds me very much of the way in which Vivian addressed the audience within the play Wit.

Also much like Wit there is a tension between intellectuality and emotion within this play. The characters of Thomasina and Hannah are most like Vivian in the fact that they both apparently reject emotion in favor of intellectual pursuits.  On page 42 Thomasina declares that she hates Cleopatra because “everything is turned to love with her.” Her method of creating a “feedback method” as a means of generating natural forms via mathematics seems to be another way of forgoing emotion, irrationality or unpredictability. Or maybe it is a way of bringing the two together.

I’m quite interested to see the way in which this play reconciles these two facets (emotion and reason). It does not reveal its ending in the way Wit did, which makes me anxious to see the resolution.