Romeo and Juliet (Vol. 76) | G. Thomas Tanselle (essay date autumn 1964)
G. Thomas Tanselle (essay date autumn 1964)
SOURCE: Tanselle, G. Thomas. “Time in Romeo and Juliet.” Shakespeare Quarterly 15, no. 4 (autumn 1964): 349-61.
[In the following essay, Tanselle focuses on Romeo and Juliet's references to time in relation to its themes of fate, youth versus age, and haste.]
It is conventional for editors and critics to point out that in Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare compressed into a matter of days the action that took nine months in Brooke's Romeus and Juliet. They also note that there are a great many time references in the play, and, on the basis of these refererences, they construct a calendar for the events of the plot. But, even though allusions to time are made with great precision in the play, critics are not yet agreed about such a seemingly elementary chronological point as the number of days the plot covers. P. A. Daniel, for example, declared in 1878 that the play...
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