a letter..  The letter that Septimus is reading we have already heard - read by Bernard in scene 2:  'Sidley Park, April 11th 1809.  Sir - I call you a liar, a lecher, a slanderer in the press and a thief of my honour...[p31]

The difficulty for Bernard is that the letters do not make clear who the addressee is. We know that - but we don't yet know why Chater's tone has changed since his inscription in the book: 'To my friend Septimus Hodge...etc.

It is perhaps worth noting at this point - this point is as good as any other, I guess - how peculiar Arcadia is in that all the major characters for much of the time are trying to work things out - whether it be Thomasina and assorted mathematical/physics problems and also the nature of sexual relations, or Bernard and Hannah and the events of the past, or Valentine and his mathematical problems.  (What about Septimus - at least before he becomes a hermit?  He has to work out a solution to the related problems of his future and his social status.)  But what is also distinctive of Arcadia is that the audience is in the same position.  Rarely in the play do statements coincide with full understanding.  This opens the way to two essntially dramatic effects - comedy, when the audience is one step ahead of a particular character, and surprise, when the audience has not anticipated the 'real' meaning or event.

..the same apple from all appearances..Of course in terms of 'real' objects, stage props, it is the same apple.  Again, Stoppard is playing with the difference between 'real' time and 'stage' time.  In 'real' time - history - only the past can bequeath objects to the present - never, obviously, the other way round.  But in 'stage' time that does not apply:  Septimus can pick up the 'love offering' given by Gus to Hannah as it is still there on stage.  But note that the object will have been stripped of its meaning - just as the tortoise will be renamed (Plautus to Lightning).  The apple will be used in this scene by Thomasina as an example of the geometry  which actually exists in Nature and which is not covered by Euclid's geometry of 'arcs and angles'.

..places it between the leaves of 'The Couch of Venus'. How the letter gets into the book - to be discovered by Bernard, and misintepreted.

Who is the poet? At what point does the audience (or at least some members of it) work out what it is that Thomasina is 'translating' - that is, attempting to put back into English a Latin version of Enobarbus's great description of Cleopatra from Shakespeare's 'Antony and Cleopatra'?  (If you don't know this speech, click here)

Your translation is quite like Chater...  Within the play, Septimus is obviously teasing Thomasina - a bright girl, who finds intellectual tasks easy, but who is made uncomfortable by relative failure (What is the minus for?).  He has set her an impossible task.  But the nature of that impossibility is worth thinking about.  It has to do with the inherent problems of transmission - the Chinese whispers problem.  We might like to think that the translation of a translation should arrive back at the original (like two minus signs are equivalent to a positive).  But language is too variable, too vulnerable to individual choice and interpretation for this to be so - the second 'translation' moves further away from the original.  But if this is so, doesn't it relate to any transmission, any 'carrying over' - like that between past and the present?  Bernard and Hannah are trying to recreate the past in its 'original' truth - how it was.  Is there any wonder that they get some things wrong?  And where does this leave Septimus's great speech from this same scene - on how 'nothing can be lost' from the past permanently?  Thomasina's 'translation' sounds like a poem by Chater - that is the poetry of the original has been lost.  But that was its whole point!

 The subject of the Shakespeare speech also seems important; it is one of the great poems on desire/what is desireble.  Thomasina can make little of it - because of her age; Chater, whose poem is also about desire - 'The Couch of Venus'- can only make the subject boring - because, by nature, he has no understanding of it, being too wrapped up in himself.

..your friend Byron..Bernard doesn't get everything wrong.  Although his recreations of the past are informed by wishful thinking and ambition, he is right about a connection between Septimus and Byron, and, what's more, as this scene makes clear for the first time, Byron's presence at Sidley Park.