SOURCE: Toliver, Harold E. “Shakespeare and the Abyss of Time.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64, no. 2 (April 1965): 234-54.

[In the following essay, Toliver follows Shakespeare's increasingly ambiguous and complex treatment of the theme of time from the sonnets and early comedies to the late romances. He calls particular attention to the dramatist's exploration of the effectiveness and limitations of different strategies of resisting time.]

“For the Christian of the Middle Ages,” Georges Poulet writes in Studies in Human Time (New York, 1959), “the sense of his existence did not precede a sense of his continuance” (p. 3). His life was a journey, ideally an itinerarium mentis in deum, both a discovery of and return to the fountainhead of time and being: a discovery because he lacked complete knowledge of himself and of God; a return because his first father Adam had been “there” and the second Adam enabled him to think of unending fulfillment as an inheritance restored. Richard Hooker is in the main tradition when he writes that men grow by degrees through sensible, intellectual, and ultimately spiritual knowledge (Ecclesiastical Polity, I, 6, 2). Milton reflects the same tradition when he has Raphael define time as eternity “applied to motion” to measure “all things durable” (Paradise Lost, V, 580). In medieval poetry time is thus not ordinarily “dramatic,” a dimension of momentary experience (there are exceptions, of course); rather, it tends to be more or less orderly, a providential continuum. Though events unfold in time, they are generally conceived sub specie aeternitatis, so that nothing is meaningless or ever quite lost.

For the most part, time is much more complex and immediate than this in Shakespeare, especially in the mature tragedies but also in the sonnets and early plays. It is a vital dimension of things: events tend to rush onward, toward certain characters, like landscape toward a speeding train, fragmenting in the present and receding in the past toward non-being. In the main tragedies, it figures in the willful creation of self as opposed to the possibility of self-definition within an orderly cosmos available to the medieval “pilgrim.” Macbeth asserts his own career against the due processes of time, as he does against various forms of traditional order—most noticeably the kingship, with its implications of fixed class, social continuity, and divine analogy and prerogative. Intending to force the future predicted by the witches, he undermines the stability of his “name” by usurping what in his ambitious, unsettling dreams he imagines to be not public but “his” offices, to be remade as his imagination suggests.

Macbeth undermines the language as well as the honors that he takes from the public stock, catching words up in the whirl of his imagination until they become ineffectual in articulating even his own private world. Montaigne explained the linguistic probems in such disruptions of time in this way:

Now the lines of my painting do not go astray, though they change and vary. The world is but an eternal seesaw. All things therein are incessantly moving. … Constancy itself is nothing but a … languid motion. I cannot fix my object; it goes muddled and reeling by a natural drunkenness. I take it just as it is at the instant I consider it. I do not paint its being. I paint its passage: not a passage from one age to another … but from day to day, from minute to minute. I must accommodate my history to the hour.¹

Time thus conceived as continuous lapsing has implications for the dramatist concerned with the “plot” of the self in the social order as well as for the structure of the essay attempting to label a “muddled and reeling” object: what is the hero to identify with, what public name can he assume? The bonds that unite words and meaning are based on the same general order as the bonds that unite king and subject, lover and beloved, Montaigne's attempt to label the object “just as it is at the instant” notwithstanding. There can be no new names for each moment an object passes through and no social communion without communicable substance. In lamenting the apparent overthrow of a noble mind obsessed with floating shapes in clouds and “words, words, words,” Ophelia puts the matter in terms of the disjunction between an ideal form for the prince and the altered character he now illustrates:

That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me,
T' have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

(III.I.165-69)

The “mould of form” is broken; Denmark decays from the “poison” in its old king's ear, as the new king hastens through his rites with “most wicked speed.”

I should like to explore the influence of that new mobility of nature upon the form and substance of Shakespeare's art by examining the time theme, first in the sonnets, which erect verbal monuments, bonds of words, against time, and then in its expanded variations in the plays. For the sonnets are shaped as plotted resistance to time; the histories are conceived in terms of the adjustments to time implicit in public institutions and heroic action; the problem plays and tragedies, especially Troilus and Cressida and Macbeth, explore the heroes' intensely subjective time as a disintegration both of inner nature and of the bonds that enable the individual to identify with a lasting order; and, finally, the “mythic” comedies attempt to suspend or control time through a kind of a-historical ritual based primarily on the secular power of the artist-magician, who helps create a new society.

I

In the sonnets and early plays, Shakespeare tends to conceive of time primarily as a personified destroyer of what should be absolute bonds—love and order beyond change. Change, like Spencer's mutability, is a “perversion” of “meet order ranged”: we have sucked “Death, instead of life … from our nurse,” as Spenser writes in the mutability cantos (VII, vi, 6). But things, like words, are not finally subject to time: they are “not changed from their first state; / But by their change their being do dilate” (VII, vii, 58); they are “firmly stayed / Upon the pillours of eternity” (VII, vii, 2). Though Shakespeare's sonnets depend less explicitly on Platonist doctrine, they celebrate a similar faith in sameness within apparent change. Any of several tactics will defeat or at least resist time. The sonnet itself outlasts time by fixing its subject in enduring language; true love does not admit its impediments or “bend with the remover to remove”;² renewal through procreation forestalls it. Even perpetuity through memory, though more complicated, is effective in its way. While “remembrance of things past” recalls old sorrows for “precious friends hid in death's dateless night,” it also restores all losses. Though love, which sharpens memory, also sharpens the sense of time's passage, the artist in celebrating that love can at least keep the record living to the “ending doom.”

In a few sonnets such as “That time of year thou mayest in me behold” and “Like as the waves,” however, Shakespeare is less sanguine about controlling the ravages of time. In “Like as the waves” (Sonnet 60) the implication of the imagery is that the struggle to sustain one's identity is too great for mortal strength:

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.

As the surf is pushed to its crowning, it collapses and then recombines, under the surface, with the oceanic element. Confronted with this image, the idea that art, at least, is permanent is only partially consoling. The creative and destructive element, the imagery suggests, is not timelessness but a kind of uniform non-being, a formless, undifferentiated substance against which the artist struggles in trying to erect a lasting monument to his friend. Though love may be a star to every wandering bark on this sea, the implication is that there is no harbor. Likewise, in “Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” lust, which substitutes quick possession for the marriage of true minds, is “Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust.” It is

Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.

The basis of Shakespeare's concern with time in the early plays is in part this ambiguity of the bonds of love and its transmutation to lust. For if love outlasts time and validates the poet's Platonist language, lust precipitates the lover headlong into the abyss.

In Romeo and Juliet, it is difficult to tell the difference. On one hand, Romeo's love is an absolute passion that appears to triumph over both time and the grave, but on the other hand, considered in moral and realistic terms, is merely the product of adolescent haste. Romeo's final speech indicates that as far as he is concerned, a true marriage of minds need not fear even the fine, private grave. Though they have been in a sense time's fools, they will bear up, even to the edge of doom, achieving the bridal union that life denies when death frees them from time. In Romeo's version of love and the extrication they desire from the entanglements of their society and the fate of the stars, all's well that ends badly:

                                                                                Shall I believe
That unsubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
For fear of that, I still will stay with thee,
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again. Here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh.

(V.iii.102-12)

Not only is death the triumph of love; love is also, in a sense, the highest achievement of the personified death, who is a “paramour” as well as a “lean abhorred monster.” But on this point Romeo's language brings us up short. It is difficult to say whether he means what he says or speaks with a kind of grim irony. Is his triumph “real” or merely verbal whistling in the dark? Does he find or only pretend to find the star-fated ending a beginning in which he may shake at last the “yoke of inauspicious stars”? Whether or not his verbal transformation of the grave to a bridal chamber is something more than a manner of speaking or a standard topos, however, the fact that he can put it this way at all is a gain over his previous love-language, which has not had even this range of mood. Whichever way we take it, it is an impressive scene that he plays, at least from the standpoint of proving that to him a grave is not a grave when called by another name. His death is “untimely” in defying time as well as in coming too soon.

Character and plot are shaped to make this confrontation of love and death the climax of Romeo's brief journey. Because of the factions that divide one “name” from another, normal social bonds offer him no guidance. The original order represented in the two families (the state and church being out of sight for the most part), as in other early plays, is irrational and repressive and hence drives the lovers outside the normal means of marrying. Until tested by that confrontation, Romeo's view that sorrow cannot “countervail th' exchange of joy / That one short minute” of love affords, cannot escape Friar Lawrence's realistic deflation of love and his concessions to time:

These violent delights have violent ends,
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume. …
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

(II.vi.9-15)

The final marriage of Eros and Thanatos in the grave reveals that Friar Lawrence's interpretation is only half correct because it ignores the ennobling capacity of passion and the sacrifice of all time for one transcending moment.

In the early comedies, the problem is not so much to discover a way to escape the bonds of society as to define personal goals in terms of an enduring order. To retreat from that order in any form of willed transcendence is to fall into eccentricity. Potential lovers must overcome their various idiosyncrasies—protean instability in Two Gentlemen, for instance—which makes them “comic.” In Love's Labor's Lost, Biron (that “envious sneaping frost / That bites the first-born infants of the spring”) finds Ferdinand's first proposal to defeat time too unrealistic to bear scrutiny:

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live regist'red upon our brazen tombs
And then grace us in the disgrace of death;
When, spite of cormorant, devouring Time,
Th' endeavour of this present breath may buy
That honour which shall bate his scythe's keen edge
And make us heirs of all eternity.

(I.i.1-7)

He recognizes that the exchange of three years' fasting and study for “eternity” would indeed be a good bargain. But unfortunately, Ferdinand's program assumes both that the ascetic scholars can easily find truth “hid and barr'd” beneath the fleeting surface of things and that time cannot touch essential reality once they have discovered it. Biron believes that “necessity” will force them to qualify that optimism “Three thousand times within this three years' space.” Paradoxically, love—that is, heterosexual love, committed to the world of procreation and action—time, and necessity all become allies in re-educating the scholars and purging them of the “comic”:

Sweet lords, sweet lovers, O, let us embrace!
          As true we are as flesh and blood can be.
The sea will ebb and flow, heaven show his face,
          Young blood doth not obey an old decree.
We cannot cross the cause why we were born.

(IV.iii.214-18)

Love is indeed a star to their wandering barks and hence redeems the lovers who had sought refuge from time. Though false to their original oaths, they are “false for ever to be true” (V.ii.783). One bond is valid, the other not. Their very falsehood “purifies itself and turns to grace.” Their destiny, “the cause” why they were born, is revealed to them in the midst of time's ebb and flow. Love is both physical and enduring, continually renewing the degenerate, coursing blood as asceticism never could; it offers an eternity “applied to motion” provided only that they submit without reservation to it. As the lovers accept the articles of love, however, they lose something of their individuality: all's alike that ends well. Love not only renews vigor, doubles power, and removes fifty years from the withered hermit (IV.iii.242), it also disciplines the imagination and constricts its range. Biron must “throw away” or “choke” his “gibing spirit,” a “wormwood” in his fruitful brain. Love's preservative cools the “heat of blood” with “frosts and fasts, hard lodging and thin weeds”; what survives is beyond decay—and dramatic action.

In a similar manner, in As You Like It, Orlando and Rosalind must discover how to reconcile the real world and romance, love as a timeless bond and its incarnation and commitment to the experience of time. The variations of the time and love theme are much more complicated than in Love's Labour's Lost, however, because the pairs of lovers all seek different levels and different ways of adjusting to time. That human nature is worse off without love is clear in the character of Jacques, who finds man's potential too severely circumscribed by time. He thinks in terms of old age and death and hence finds a deflating pessimism, rather than love, the best medicine for cleansing the “foul body of the infected world.” Decay, in fact, becomes his truth, his only real link with humanity. He foresees only joylessness in maturity, ending in “mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” The vitality of lovers arouses his contempt; the philosophical “motley fool” wins his approval:

'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine;
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot. …

(II.vii.24-27)

Since no one can escape the logic of the “seven ages,” the ripening and rotting from hour to hour, time simplifies responsibilities and makes subtleties of manner unnecessary. Because all bonds are corrupted in time, Jacques sees no reason to establish them with anyone. The strategies for meeting the threat of time which Rosalind discovers are thus entirely lost to him.

It is Rosalind who is most aware of the problem time poses for lovers. On the one hand, she mocks the sensual haste of pseudo-Petrarchan lovers (III.ii.320). The dilemmas lovers create for themselves they can resolve without despair and without rushing to the grave: “Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (IV.i.107). But on the other hand, when Orlando is out of sight she must, like a lovesick sonneteer herself, “find a shadow and sigh till he come” (IV.i.222). Lovers will always be tried by Time, “the old justice that examines all such offenders.” Still, when lovers join, Hymen, rather than time, writes the epilogue: “Then is there mirth in heaven / When earthly things made even / Atone together” (V.iv.114-16). The as-you-like-it ending makes irrelevant the future Jacques imagines and unnecessary the kind of ambivalent consummation Romeo achieves. The end is a ceremony suggesting a kind of final atonement. The marriage sacrament, like the “feast” Orlando and the old Adam join, reflects a higher bond. Lovers' mirth extends to heaven; love “atones” for “earthly things” by making them “even”—that is, well-matched in marriage, paid for exactly as in a proper atonement, and flowing at a regulated rate. Love consummated in marriage is a temporal version of a divine comedy that makes durable all “even” things.

II

In the history play the effects of time continually belie this analogy between divine and human “mirth,” as kings belie their vicegerency and divine prerogative. Consequently, it is not surprising to find Shakespeare moving toward the main tragedies and problem plays in an increasingly subtle and complicated exploration of the time theme and its variations. In the early histories, Shakespeare conceives of time primarily as an obstacle to glory that necessitates continual heroic action. Brave deeds replace constancy and love as the means of redemption, while division and self-seeking arm time against continuity both in Respublica and in its heroes. As Gloucester warns the potential factions in 2 Henry VI, shameful acts blot names “from books of memory,” deface monuments, raze “the characters of … renown,” and undo all “as all had never been!” (I.i.100-103). Even a Henry V or Talbot cannot permanently defeat time, not because it inevitably “rots and rots” the foundations of being but because the heroic virtues that might raise men above the times are too rare. The greed of one age obliterates the heroism and wisdom of another. Henry VI in his pastoral lament over the passing of the old order sees this clearly but has no power to alter it:

O God! methinks it were a happy life
To be no better than a homely swain;
To sit upon a hill, as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run,
How many makes the hour full complete,
How many hours brings about the day,
How many days will finish up the year,
How many years a mortal man may live. …
So minutes, hours, days, months, and years,
Pass'd over to the end they were created,
Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.
Ah, what a life were this! how sweet! how lovely!

(3 Henry VI, II.v.21-41)

As the repetition and the slackness of syntax reveal, monotony and a kind of death-in-life mar the vision. Though orderly, Henry's pastoral time has no real content; and filling time with action unfortunately destroys orderly progression. Thus Henry's dream is shattered, first by a young soldier, dragging behind him the dead body of his father, who laments “O heavy times, begetting such events!” and next by a father bearing his son and weeping “O, pity, God, this miserable age!” Henry's passive retreat has encouraged future generations to murder the past and the present generation to murder the future.

Nor will history, of course, allow one to perpetuate life in art, as the sonnet does. If politics has an art, it is the art of strategic retreat before time and corruptible human nature. An “artist” like Richard II, who attempts to write and act his own tragedy, is powerless before flesh-and-blood events. Taking the kingdom as an extension of his own consciousness, Richard succeeds only in giving it his own egoistic dream-sickness. (“Now comes the sick hour that his surfeit made,” Gaunt observes.) And even if he were to succeed in converting the kingdom to his “scene,” it would only perish with him, like the mirror he dashes to the ground (IV.i.288). Since he cannot succeed, he ends the only actor in his play. His final invention of a kingdom and his final concept of time are thus extravagant, ineffectual, and personal:

For now hath Time made me his numb'ring clock.
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. …
… So sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours; but my time
Runs posting on in Bolingbroke's proud joy,
While I stand fooling here, his Jack o' th' clock.

(V.v.50-60)

He can neither hasten his fall or retard it; he is Bolingbroke's “Jack o' th' clock” popping out when the hour strikes. But even this view of his disarrangement is somewhat willful. He stops his imagination from working when the vision grows too unpleasantly accurate.³

Richard's attempt to control the flux of events by imposing an order upon them that they resist is typical of more worthy idealists to follow. In later plays, especially those of Shakespeare's middle period, the implications of the displacement of continuous order are explored in terms of the hero's inner life as well as in terms of social institutions. Troilus and Cressida and Macbeth are perhaps the clearest examples.

As the most “subjective” of Shakespeare's heroes except perhaps for Macbeth, Troilus experiences the most far-reaching disintegration of “normal” progression. Expectation and impatience whirl him around as he attempts to idealize them. Rather than seeking gradual fulfillment in time, he cannot endure time at all. His itinerarium is not in deum but in Cressidam: “O, be thou my Charon,” he admonishes Pandarus, his guide, “And give me swift transportance to those fields / Where I may wallow in the lily-beds,” lily-beds proposed, of course, “for the deserver!” (III.ii.11-14). Given the rush of time, he must make up in intensity for lack of duration and consequently must abandon the obvious value of things for values he imposes on them. He must imagine Cressida worthy of the kind of pursuit a Platonist makes of “truth's simplicity.” Reversing the Thomistic formula. Troilus asserts essentially that nihil in sensu quod non prius in intellectu; but confronted with things in sensu he finds the self overwhelmed by them:

Th' imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense; what will it be,
When that the wat'ry palates taste indeed
Love's thrice repured nectar? Death, I fear me,
Swooning destruction, or some joy too fine,
Too subtle, potent, tun'd too sharp in sweetness
For capacity of my ruder powers.
I fear it much; and I do fear besides
That I shall lose distinction in my joys,
As doth a battle, when they charge on heaps
The enemy flying.

(III.ii.20-30)

Far from giving experience orderly sequence and enduring form, the imagination teases and “enchants” the senses to swooning; sensory reality rushes onward like “heaps” of enemies Troilus scarcely has time to savor in the killing. “This is the monstrosity in love, lady,” he observes, “that the will is infinite and the execution confin'd, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit” (III.ii.87). He will indeed “lose distinction,” distinction among joys and distinction as “warrior.” Though he clearly realizes this in one corner of his mind, he does not see the implications of boundlessness in human relations or reconcile it with his advice on the Trojan war. His attempt to decree value in the fleeting pageantry of time runs up against the shattering reality of Helen, Cressida, and the senseless war.

In his subjectivism, he totally severs imagination from reality, as he again realizes, but only imperfectly:

O that I thought it could be in a woman—
As, if it can, I will presume in you—
To feed for aye her lamp and flames of love,
To keep her constancy in plight and youth,
Outliving beauties outward, with a mind
That doth renew swifter than blood decays!
Or that persuasion could but thus convince me
That my integrity and truth to you
Might be affronted with the match and weight
Of such a winnow'd purity in love!
How were I then uplifted! But alas!
I am as true as truth's simplicity,
And simpler than the infancy of truth.

(III.ii.165-77)

Troilus' “will presume” and the subjunctive mood reveal something of the gap between wish and fact. That the mind might race with blood and win is possible only if the beloved remains true. Fixed in love for Cressida, Troilus' “simplicity” must be destroyed with her inconstancy. As Cressida unintentionally predicts in an ironic inversion of a common sonnet theme, time will perpetuate not truth and “winnow'd purity” but infamy:

If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,
When time is old and hath forgot itself,
When waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy
And blind oblivion swallow'd cities up,
And mighty states characterless are grated
To dusty nothing, yet let memory,
From false to false, among false maids in love
Upbraid my falsehood!

(III.ii.191-98)

In this context of dissolving and warring elements, Shakespeare finds a new dimension in the traditional bond between Mars and Venus. The marriage reveals the deepest flaws in each: the warrior “loves” war and the lover makes love a sensual struggle. Each pursuit becomes the chief metaphor of the other in the double plot. In the interaction of the two, the wound that love gives is fatal, like those Achilles gives Hector, whom he surveys, as he tells Hector, “As I would buy thee, view thee limb by limb” and whom he has a “woman's longing” for, “an appetite” to see unarmed. The battering ram at Troy's gate, the wound of the sword, and love's “dying” are parallel aspects of rapid change—both of “truth's simplicity” and of the universal order Ulysses describes so opportunely to Achilles. Cressida is thus quite correct in seeing her love as the “centre of the earth” (IV.ii.110), drawing all things to it. It represents a fluid nature without order which leaves the “warrior” at the mercy of his own imaginative “expectation.” The gap between finite and infinite is no longer bridged by Ulysses' “degrees” of being, sustained by divine creativity, mutual dependence and “l' amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.” It remains an unbridgeable gulf; time is motion unanchored, just as value is severed from truth's simplicity. Hence human relations cannot be based on static social and cosmic hierarchies. The hero's character is defined in terms of the dramatic flux that surrounds him and is eventually destroyed in the shifting mirrors of language and action held up around him. By manipulating the mirrors, a rhetorician like Ulysses creates a new world out of the “noble” values to which the hero is accustomed. Not total chaos but a new concept of private “order” is the result. Troilus, like Othello in the midst of Iago's fleeting mirrors and sleights of hand and word, after reinterpreting the “facts,” replaces justice with personal vengeance.

Ulysses is shrewd enough to realize that such instability can be useful as well as disheartening. The value of such “meet order” as he finds it expedient to describe to Achilles is simply that it increases the efficiency of the war machine (which unfortunately has only Helen for its goal). Self-love, he tells Achilles, derives from the reflection of admiring faces, growing continually fewer around him:

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion,
A great siz'd monster of ingratitudes.
Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done. …
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating Time.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

(III.iii.145-50, 171-75)

The “kinship” is a kinship of corruptibility, of course, rather than of earthly things made “even.” The small touch of nature that Achilles has is just enough to envelop him in the fluctuating uncertainty that governs all action (though his ego is nearly sublime enough to make him untouchable). Continuous war and continuous quests for love are the only recourses against “calumniating Time”: giddy expectation and frustration keep the “war” going.

Troilus, like Richard II, has one other strategy to try against time: he attempts to reach tragic stature by staging his defeat against the background of time's inevitable victory, by universalizing his suffering and thus elevating the sufferer. Unfortunately, language fails him at crucial moments; what is meant to be ceremonial never achieves dignity, which is typical of the action of the play as a whole. Time interrupts the ceremonies and rituals that aim at elevating war and love. In fact, we might describe the “form” (or non-form) of the play as dyshedonic and dyslogistic rather than as tragic, comic, or even “problematic.” As each thing meets in “mere oppugnancy,” reason and imagination lose coherence; power becomes will, and will an “appetite, an universal wolf” (I.iii.120). One “instance” of inconstancy so dissolves the “bonds of heaven” that faith breaks into “fragments, scraps, bits and greasy relics,” fractions “five-finger-tied.” Consequently, savagery characterizes Troilus' final code of war, replacing his original idealism and his abortive attempts to ritualize both lust and bloodshed. Rather than the stately march and the final noble words for the hero that ordinarily end Shakespearean tragedy, and rather than the marriage-blessing that normally ends comedy, the play concludes in a disrupted march and a curse. Troilus becomes a “wicked conscience” from the past that “mouldeth goblins swift as frenzy's thoughts” to haunt the present, while Pandarus promises not an atonement but disease transmitted from “lover” to “lover.”

I have dwelt on Troilus and Cressida partly because its severance of form and reality is the climax in Shakespeare of time's chaotic force, and partly because it is pivotal and prepares us to see more clearly the nature of Macbeth's pathological time, which is equally destructive of limits. The difference is that Macbeth's disintegration is contained and defined in terms of the very order it momentarily threatens: order and disorder co-exist as dialectical opposites. Moreover, the approach to chaos opens up new realms of imaginative experience; it suggests, if only fleetingly, the creative powers released by the breaking of limits that will characterize later plays.

The first of these notions, that foul is defined by fair, disorder by order, is not precisely what Macbeth and the weird sisters mean by their equation of opposites, which is closer to Troilus' belief that “aught is as 'tis valued.” Macbeth's very language acknowledges a proper “state” and function: “not” is a negative of “is.” But his substitution of foul for fair is, for him personally, a smothering of sequential order and hierarchy in private, “horrible imaginings”:

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.

(I.iii.139-42)

In trying to overleap time, Macbeth does indeed lose function in “surmise”; only the future and the fantastical imagination, things that are not, exist for him. He assumes one of the functions of Godhead, the rending of nature and, through the cracks, the revelation of the “fantastical” (“And base things of the world … hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are,” I Cor. 1:28). Objective time and reality are annihilated when imagination is freed of normal restrictions.

For Macbeth's imagination works by leaping over things rather than by reordering them. At first he continues to acknowledge the “outside” world of measured duration and proper promotion: “Come what may, / Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.” He clings momentarily to two contradictory postures, one demanding patience and resignation to time's regular passage, the other the destruction of the present. (If “the assassination / Could trammel up the consequence,” of course, he would be able to avoid a segment of time and consequential events altogether.) He soon chooses the second course, however, and as he does so, compassion and pity travel “upon the sightless couriers of the air” and arouse human nature against him.

Lady Macbeth also tries to escape nature and to break the chain of cause and effect, only to reaffirm their validity as external guides. “To catch the nearest way” she would use “fate” and “metaphysical aid” and bring the “future in the instant.” The nearest way leads through the dark where imagination shuts out the real world until “nor time nor place … adhere.” Together, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth mock time with “fairest show” while the “eye” is mocked in return by illusory visions from “heat-oppressed” brains. Taking the nearest way suffocates rather than frees them. Excessive ambition, an aspect of “expectation,” by its nature paradoxically stifles the self while giving free reign to egoism; it destroys the present in reaching ahead for the future and smothers reason as “dark night strangles the travelling lamp.” The violence of the “creative” will leaves the will helpless against the ghosts of the imagination. Sleep, “sore labour's bath / Balm of hurt minds,” can no longer restore the mind, whose rhythm of action and contemplation is upset.

Macbeth discovers too late, then, that only regular laws of nature can guide one through time; without them life becomes a walking nightmare guided by witches. Fragments of reality—adder's fork, lizard's leg, gall of goat, and so forth—are thrown into the seething cauldron, a symbol of the tormented imagination, whose decorum is the chant and whose effect is to “charm” and curse. The fragmented reality fed into the witch's brew undergoes a metamorphosis and dream distortion not at all like Ariel's transformation of bone to coral, of course, but equally enchanting:

HEC.
O, well done! I commend your pains;
And every one shall share i' th' gains.
And now about the cauldron sing,
Like elves and fairies in a ring,
Enchanting all that you put in.

(IV.i.39-43)

These, then, are Macbeth's muses, whom he summons to bless his imagination:

I conjure you by that which you profess,
Howe'er you come to know it, answer me!
Though you untie the winds and let them fight
Against the churches; though the yesty waves
Confound and swallow navigation up;
Though the bladed corn be lodg'd and trees blown down;
Though castles topple on their warders' heads;
Though palaces and pyramids do slope
Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure
Of nature's [germens] tumble all together,
Even till destruction sicken; answer me
To what I ask you.

(IV.i.50-61)

His rhetoric imitates the witches' chant and its fragmentation of reality. Monuments that stand against time begin to topple, laws of nature collapse, and movement through “yesty waves” is confounded, until even destruction sickens and grows monotonous.

The psychological effects of the unnatural imagination are revealed long before this, as Macbeth both urges himself forward and withholds himself from the violence in which the sequence of acts involves him. The intrusion of the outer world in the porter scene, for instance, pushes him further into the interior darkness:

To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself. [Knocking]
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst!

(II.ii.73-74)

Willful self-creation works only one way. One cannot recapture and remake the past; one can only retreat before the present “fact” and plot for the future. As Lady Macbeth perceives, they can escape the “knocking” only by further withdrawal, drowning out the insistent pounding of the exterior world by a kind of hypnotic chant: “To bed, to bed! there's knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. … To bed, to bed, to bed!” (V.i.72). Only by seeking total oblivion can they counter the “thick-coming fancies,” “pluck from the memory” the “rooted sorrow,” and “raze out the written troubles of the brain” (V.iii.38-42). Hence Macbeth tries to make night protective and merciful as well as destructive of “bonds”:

                                        Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale!

(III.ii.46-50)

Time will not allow even the safety of oblivion, however. It anticipates “dread exploits”: the “flighty purpose never is o'er took / Unless the deed go with it” (IV.i.144-46) In attempting to close the gap between present and future, the “nearest way” becomes more and more a mindless reflex action drawing Macbeth out of his protective secrecy into the searching light of the nature he tries to smother. The first things of heart become the first of hand (IV.i.147-48). Ross sees clearly that in these times all who share in Macbeth's world “but float upon a wild and violent sea / Each way” (IV.ii.21-22). Further, since the future contains death more certainly than anything else that the witches predict, even the immediate present loses its capacity to be and becomes a death-in-life. “Tomorrow” does indeed “creep” inevitably poisoned before its arrival by the monotonous tomorrows that follow (V.v.17).

Since Macbeth's disintegration involves the very forms of thought and action, it entails also the breakdown of language. It is in this breakdown, however, that Shakespeare apparently discovered creative possibilities in unstructured change that had been lacking in Troilus and Cressida. These possibilities govern subsequent plays in which time without measure leads to new illumination as well as to chaos, just as the simultaneous presence of future and past in the present can lead either to a kind of confused nothingness or to a transcendent timelessness. “Overleaping” the categories of time is not in itself destructive. And even the language of Macbeth, though Macbeth himself discovers only the abyss of time, is illuminating and rich beyond that of other Shakespearean tragic heroes. Perhaps the central paradox of the play is that the most depraved of Shakespeare's tragic heroes should have become also the most “poetic.” His experience prepares for that of Cleopatra and eventually that of Prospero, with his “charms” and dissolving pageants. For moral insight he substitutes an extremely sensitive though intensely narrow imagery. His fragmentary, associative language escapes the limits of ordinary rhetoric and logic; he creates his own “supernatural” with its demons and prophetic visions. In a sense, he is a Calvinist of the imagination who destroys the proper sequence of time in order to pursue an Absolute, though it turns out to be an absolute depravity. Despite the mixture of weariness and uncontrolled sound and fury in his language, he is impressively awesome as well as immoral.

Because Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are the sole creators of their inferno, however, restoration of social continuity and a sense of measured time is not difficult once society disposes of them. With Macbeth dead, Macduff hails the new king, who “by the grace of Grace” will perform in “measure, time, and place” what is just and needful: as the nightmare ends, “time” is set “free” by being bound again to the law.

III

Unlike Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra are not unambiguous enemies of social order. Their passion, like that of Romeo and Juliet, can be taken as either destructive or transcendent, the lovers as either victims of, or victors over, time, which in Cleopatra's version is powerless to prevent their final gratification. Antony's kiss will be “heaven” in death. On the other hand, the equation of love and war in Troilus and Cressida retains some of its implications also. Antony is caught in a morass of political maneuvering and, more dangerously, in the giddiness of his Egyptian revel. His total commitment to Cleopatra may win him the immortal love she imagines or simply a grave beside her (as Caesar's version has it) and a degrading role in Roman comedy:

                                                  The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' th' posture of a whore.

(V.ii.216-21)

In either case, Cleopatra obviously goes beyond Cressida in offering something to replace the boundaries she shatters. What she destroys she re-creates in divine, proleptic talk. It would be plausible to consider Antony and Cleopatra among Shakespeare's last comedies simply on her word that such talk and the life-in-death that it creates enable lovers to achieve a timeless world beyond Caesar. Like the “magicians” of the last plays, she discovers timelessness within time, “eternity” in “lips and eyes,” and thus, without breaking the limits of nature with quite Macbeth's violence, creates a self-contained, self-evaluated world.

Realists and cynics in the play, however, believe that her “creativity” does very little for Antony, who is destroyed with or without her blessing. The play leaves the alternatives open: her language may indeed transubstantiate lead to gold or it may be, as Bernard Shaw believed, merely a magician's conjuring of images to draw one's attention from the vulgar comedy. Caesar's view is that Antony loses himself in time and fills “vacancy with voluptuousness” (I.iv.26). Pompey considers Antony a libertine with fuming brain “in a field of feasts.” Enobarbus, however, despite his momentary defection, confirms Cleopatra's extratemporal dimension: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety.” If variety is equivalent to inconstancy in others, “vilest things” so become themselves in Cleopatra “that holy priests / Bless her when she is riggish” (II.ii.240-45). Quite the opposite of Cressida's desperate passion, Cleopatra's love stirs immortal longings because it is voracious; rather than leading downward to the lily-beds of Elysium presided over by Pandarus, it leads toward a higher consummation in which “earthly things” are purged altogether, not simply “made even.” Though Antony at times acknowledges the “strong necessity of time” that commands his services in Ceasar's cause, Cleopatra seeks ultimate liberation and fulfillment in death and believes (or says) that Antony himself has risen above time, above autumn reaping and winter darkness: his delights “Were dolphin-like: they show'd his back above / The element they liv'd in” (V.ii.88-90). As for herself, she expects to become incorruptible fire and air, leaving the other elements to “baser life” and to the roman parody.

The quality of time in Antony and Cleopatra is thus as ambiguous as it is in Romeo and Juliet but with considerably more involved implications. In the ambiguity of Cleopatra's “purification,” Antony and Cleopatra lies somewhere between the main tragedies and later comedies in which the “baser elements” are purged with less complexity and dubiety. For in the last comedies not only is an old order dissolved in a “tempest” of some sort but a new order is formed; what has been lost is found and what seems dead comes back to life, miraculously, like Hermione's emergence from the artist's monument. Time is subjected to the rhythmic controls of an always changing but orderly nature, a nature that remains finite but somehow points beyond itself. Imagination alters nature as it alters language, sometimes for the worse, as in the deranged suspicions of Leontes, but ultimately, in the hands of the magician-artist, to the benefit of social continuity and well-being. Moreover, nature thus complemented and fulfilled through art restores health to the individual psyche. The “green world” harbors and educates exiles from court: over that art which “adds to Nature, is an art / That Nature makes” (Winters Tale, IV.iv.90-92).⁴

This pattern holds true in a general way for all of the “pastoral” comedies. In Pericles the nightmare world of incest and hatred converts the “journey” into an unstructured chase. “Born in a tempest,” Marina laments, “this world to me is like a lasting storm / Whirring me from my friends” (IV.i.19-21). But escaping the brothel to which the tempest leads her, Marina learns to sing “like one immortal” and dance “as goddess-like to her admired lays.” Rhythmic motion replaces flight and “whirring” as the dominant pattern. In this movement from tempest to an extra-human harmony, the form of Pericles and the other late plays is thus exactly counter to that of Trolius and Cressida, which moves from “giddy expectation” to frustration and anger. Out of the “tempest”—the wanderings of Pericles, the jealousy of Leontes, and the invented storm of Prospero—a controlled movement gradually takes shape, a movement issuing not only from man's better nature but also from the oracles, which are obscure and prophetic but not, of course, misleading, as Macbeth's oracles are. With the restoration of what has been lost, guilt is purged and the older generation—Pericles, Leontes, and Prospero—learns to share the new life of the younger group, or, more accurately in Prospero's case, the younger group shares in the magician's wisdom and his past. No longer a “great-siz'd monster of ingratitude,” time uncovers all mistakes: “I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror / Of good and bad that makes and unfolds error,” Time says in The Winters Tale (IV.i.1-2). If “ancient'st order” passes and customs are established and overwhelmed, Time itself endures as a mode of continuity. It is the agent of progressive discovery and penitence rather than an intolerable barrier to “giddy expectation.”

In a sense, then, the perspective of the last plays, the highest level at which we engage them as wholes, is somewhere above the flux of events; and participation in this perspective gives both older and younger generations their sense of continuity. They attain distance by reflecting upon past time and controlling the future. Prospero's time is thus not dramatic but mythic. Shakespeare makes the father and teacher also a conjurer, even though an aging one. Prospero uses the tempest to bring others to mastery of themselves, to recapture and judge the past. To Miranda before he educates her, the past is “far off / And rather like a dream than an assurance” (I.ii.44-45). The “dark backward and abysm of time” means no more to her than to Perdita: both must begin life anew. But Miranda, unlike Perdita, must take on something of the burden of the past to control the future; and so Prospero is a historian as well as a magician, but a historian whose visions are partly conjured and can be dissolved, like the effects of time in Ariel's song:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
          Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
          Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
                                                                                Ding-dong.
Heark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.

The song has power to “allay” its listener's fury by showing meaningful transformation within apparent decay. Out of man's corruptible parts the sea creates something permanent and rich, while ritual sea-nymphs toll the hours.

Ferdinand is correct in finding this “no mortal business”: Prospero's magic and Ariel's poetry are clearly something more than human. But the transformation they affect is limited also. They can conjure visions but cannot give permanence to “the great globe itself,” which will dissolve and “Leave not a rack behind.” Their function is to remove the corruptible elements from what is for as long as it lasts, and to celebrate the great dissolution in the manner of the pastoral elegy, that is, with a sense of timeless identity with nature and a concept of sea-change in death more rich and strange than life itself. The skillful magician thus gives pleasant dreams even to a Caliban, the lowest order of nature. More important, he restores “nature” to those who have unnaturally distorted it:

                                        The charm dissolves apace,
And as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason. …
… Their understanding
Begins to swell, and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shore
That now lies foul and muddy

(V.i.64-68, 79-82)

In contrast to “Like as the waves,” the “sea” itself is now the source of knowledge as well as a place of tempest and death. It transforms the dead and metaphorically floods the illuminated mind. The chief difference between this kind of rebirth and cyclical perpetuity, and the sonnet theme of triumph over time through love and art, is, I think, that art no longer requires a language and a permanent marriage of true minds beyond transient, seasonal life; it imitates that life, which both decays and renews itself, and simultaneously points to a life-principle beyond it, vaguely conceived, perhaps, but immanent in the comic action itself, like the sea of understanding that fills the reasonable shore. It differs from the medieval concept of continuance in its reliance upon the human artist, whose vision, though it dissolves into nothingness, reorders the experience of the audience and enlarges its understanding. The transformative song of the “Ariel” imagination “comes and goes”; it may leave even the artist (whose “charms” are at last “o'erthrown”) in despair:

                                                                                Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be reliev'd by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.

(Epilogue)

But the very indulgence of the audience is a sign that it has participated in the magician's “sacrament,” that his words have communicated across the void. Purging the “lower elements” and “ignorant fumes that mantle” clear reason makes possible not only the continuity of Miranda's new world but also a kind of marriage of true minds, the playwright's and the audience's, through the miracle play itself, a marriage that will last long after the artist himself, whose “every third thought” is on the grave.

Notes

1. “Of Repentance,” Essays, tr. Charles Cotton, ed. W. C. Hazlitt (New York, 1949). Cf. Sigurd Burckhardt, “The King's Language: Shakespeare's Drama as Social Discovery,” Antioch Review. XXI (1961), 369-87.

2. Several of my observations concerning the marriage of true minds and the linguistic problem it involves are indebted to Sigurd Burckhardt's article “The Poet as Fool and Priest,” ELH, XXIII (1956), 291 ff.

3. For a more extensive commentary on time in the history plays see my “Falstaff, the Prince, and the History Play,” forthcoming in Shakespeare Quarterly.

4. See Northrop Frye, “Recognition in The Winters' Tale,” in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia, Mo., 1962), pp. 235-46.