In his article “‘Oh, Phooey to Death!’: Boethian Consolation in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia,” some guy postulates another possibility—“events repeatedly happen out of ‘order,’ until the two historical periods seem to merge into simultaneity at the end of the play.” (Alwes 392-3) Under Alwes’ model, time is presented as a collapsed, boundary-less entity. The “repeated overlapping of the two time periods” gives the audience a “godlike perspective” because it “allows [them] to experience historical time as an unchanging tableau…[t]o stand outside of time, to see the flux of human history as an eternal instant.” (393)
Alwes’ attempt to incorporate other props, however, is far less successful. In particular, he examines the use of the apple that Brater makes note of as a demonstration for his proposed model of