The Life-Giving Efficacy of Beauty and Desire in Stoppard's Drama

Abstract

Abstract: In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), Arcadia (1993), and Indian Ink (1995), the playwright Tom Stoppard poses existential questions about the inevitability of both cosmic and individual disintegration and death. However, as characters from Arcadia and Indian Ink engage in romantic encounters and acts of aesthetic creation driven by desire, they interrupt the cyclical inevitability of death embodied in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , and they oppose entropic disintegration by instigating encounters with beauty and desire that lead to reconciliation over time. This generative impulse of love and desire parallels Elaine Scarry's assertion in On Beauty and Being Just that encounters with beauty and desire are fundamentally life-giving.