The Garden
Even though we never directly see the garden of Sidley Park, its symbolic presence is felt throughout the play. Hannah, especially, has Opinions about what the history of the garden means:BERNARD:...
The Couch of Eros
Ezra Chater's opus is by all accounts worse than the poetry we wrote in middle school and wish we could erase from the Internet's long memory. The exact content of his book matters less than 1) its...
The Sidley Park Hermit
Hannah introduces the hermit as "a perfect symbol" (1.2) for all that's wrong with Romanticism: "A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a sett...
Classicism vs. Romanticism
Classic, Romantic...it's all just old stuff, right? Well, not for the inhabitants of Sidley Park in 1809. The switchover from 1700s to 1800s saw a knock-down battle between two ways of thinking abo...
Entropy and The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Entropy is physics-speak for mess: it's a measure of how much disorder is in a system. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the entropy of the universe is always increasing. Let's let Valenti...