Elective Affinities
Some ideas in the play recall Goethe's novella "Elective Affinities": Stoppard's characters "Thomasina" and "Septimus" have parallels in Goethe's "Ottilie" and "Eduard", and the historical section of Stoppard's play is set in 1809, the year of Goethe's novella. Among other parallels, the older work takes the theory of affinity between chemical elements as a metaphor for ineluctable, inevitable "human chemistry" in the same way as Stoppard makes use of the force of determinism acting on his characters. A feature of both works is the preoccupation with remodelling country house landscapes; Goethe's young character "Ottilie" (the counterpart to Thomasina) dies as an indirect result of this.