Acting in Stoppard requires verbal dexterity, great emotional intelligence, and clarity of thought. The original production of Arcadia, in which the essay’s author played Valentine, marked a particularly productive combination of text, actors, and cultural and intellectual history that highlighted the genius of Stoppard’s writing for the theatre.

The explicit attention to Classicism and Romanticism in Arcadia and The Invention of Love highlights Stoppard’s interest in the dramatic potential of contrasting head and heart. However, beyond the simple opposition of aesthetic categories and temperaments, the Classical-Romantic dynamic generates the playwright’s deepest understanding of history, epistemology, and creativity. Indeed, it cuts to the very nature of theatre as an art form and Stoppard’s approach to it.

As the newly invigorated and performative disciplines of poetry and rhetoric took hold in court cultural life, so too did the inseparable activities of poetic recitation and performance. Civic humanism was adapted to the new cultural ethos of the courts, which cultivated courtly splendor and entertainment as an expression of dynastic magnificenza. Court life accordingly reshaped poetic practice in important ways: through hybridizing interaction with polyphonic practice, the fostering of intensifying debates on the nature and status of Italian vernacular, the turn to more introspective poetic modes and forms modeled on Petrarch’s canzoniere, and the cultivation of more socialized forms of poetic expression such as the dialogue and theatrical presentations. This chapter focuses on three centers (Ferrara, Urbino, and Naples), which have been chosen for the vitality of their poetic performance practices and for the variety of their court cultures. Like humanism in general, cantare ad lyram took hold in each of these centers in a manner particular to each court’s distinctive character: residual feudalism and a strong university in Ferrara, the complex patronage structure of Naples (including the Spanish heritage of its Aragonese kings), and the Urbino court of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro as seen through the idealizing lens of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano.