Arcadia Characters

Hannah the Anti-Romantic...or Is She?While Bernard dominates the first scene in which we meet Hannah, she definitely shows that she's someone not to be messed with:HANNAH: Bernard. You did say Bern...

Thomasina speaks the very first line of the play, a line that tells us from the start that Arcadia may be set in Regency England, but it's no Jane Austen novel:THOMASINA: Septimus, what is carnal e...

When we first meet Bernard, he's on an undercover mission: to get the information he needs out of Hannah without her figuring out that he wrote a particularly mean review trashing her book. Even un...

From the very beginning of the play, we know that Septimus isn't your ordinary tutor.THOMASINA: Septimus, what is carnal embrace?SEPTIMUS: Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms arou...

Valentine is the voice of modern science in the play. As a mathematician, he explains to Hannah (and, by extension, to the audience) exactly what's going on with fractals and grouse and Thomasina's...

Lady Croom may disapprove of "women [...] got up like jockeys" (2.6), but she definitely wears the pants in the Coverly family. Watch as she commands the lesser mortals who surround her at Sidley P...

At the end of the play, an exchange between Bernard and Hannah sums up Ezra Chater's character pretty well:BERNARD: (Wildly) Ezra wasn't a botanist! He was a poet!HANNAH: He was not much of either,...

Oh, Byron. "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know," as Caroline Lamb (yes, Hannah's Caroline Lamb) famously called him. Byron was the Edward Cullen of his day: the brooding bad boy whom everyone found ir...

Chloë seems the opposite of Hannah – while Hannah values freedom over sex and is suspicious of emotions in general, Chloë is eying Bernard's from almost the minute he arrives at Sid...

Like Ezra Chater, Captain Brice seems to be present in the play mainly for the more intellectually nimble characters to run circles around him, to their own (and the audience's) amusement. At first...

Mrs. Chater is one of the play's invisible characters, never appearing on stage, but she haunts the corners of the action. She's like that phantom person who's Facebook friends with all your friend...

Gus is the youngest of the present-day Coverlys, and the most mysterious. His silence sets him apart from the other present-day characters, as does the fact that he seems to have a foot in both the...

As the gardener in charge of transforming Sidley Park from something mappable on an Etch-a-Sketch into Gothic Disneyland, Mr. Noakes is the main agent for what Hannah calls "the descent from thinki...

Jellaby is butler to the nineteenth-century Croom household, and most of what he does is deliver notes, look disapproving – and, with the rest of the servants, spread gossip about the upper-c...

Augustus is Thomasina's younger brother. He thinks he's all that because he's a student at Eton, England's top prep school, while Thomasina is stuck at home learning from a mere tutor. He doesn't r...