[In the following essay, Smith directs attention to the compression and acceleration of dramatic time in several of Shakespeare's plays, discussing in particular the three different time schemes in Act IV, scene iii of Richard III.]

Wishing to scrape up a renewed acquaintance with Orlando, who fails to recognize her in her masculine attire, Rosalind asks him a question that still occasionally serves as an opening gambit when girl wants to meet boy. She asks him what time it is; and having thus introduced the subject of time, she keeps the conversational ball rolling by discussing the varying rates of speed at which time seems to pass: “Time travels in divers paces, with divers persons: Ile tel you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands stil withall.”¹

But time in Shakespeare's plays travels at more different speeds than can be described as a mere trio of paces, and sometimes at speeds too fast to be called gallops. This paper will inquire into a few representative examples of the many divers paces at which Shakespeare causes time to travel in his plays.

Some acceleration of time is, of course, an inevitable and desirable attribute of theatrical presentation, even in the most realistic of modern plays; it is a necessary consequence of the intensified emotional response to action on the stage. Dr. Alfred Hennequin, in his Art of Playwriting, has undertaken to set a norm for the foreshortening of dramatic time as contrasted with clock time:

Generally the supposed duration of events upon the stage is about five or six times as long as the actual period occupied by the representation. That is, at the end of a dialogue of five minutes, it is allowable to make one of the characters say, “Here we've been talking for a whole half-hour.”

(P. 150)

In inquiring into the ratio or ratios of dramatic time to actual time in Shakespeare's plays, it is necessary to make an assumption as to the rate of speed at which his plays progressed; and for the purpose of this discussion, I shall assume that his fellow actors spoke his verse at the rate of 20 lines, or about 170 words, to the minute. This is in close accord with the conjecture arrived at by Alfred Hart as a result of his researches into the length of time required for the presentation of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays.² It is, of course, an average merely: the rate would have varied with the actor and with the play, and even with different parts of the same play. Some actors may habitually have spoken as many as 23 or 24 lines to the minute, and others as few as 16 or 17. Some plays, as for instance The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, would have moved faster than Othello and The Tempest, and Hamlet would have delivered the impassioned speeches in his mother's closet more rapidly than his lonely soliloquies. The postulated average rate of 20 lines to the minute assumes that Shakespeare's fellows spoke his lines at a faster rate than modern actors speak the same lines.³ They were able to do so because they were highly trained in the art of speaking blank verse, they were using a vocabulary with which they and their audiences were familiar, they stood near their hearers, and their auditors were alert listeners.

On the basis of 20 lines to the minute, Shakespeare's condensation of time often far exceeds the six-to-one ratio contemplated by Dr. Hennequin. In Measure for Measure, for instance, the night before Claudio's scheduled execution (IV.ii) passes in 160 lines or eight minutes, from the “dead midnight” of line 67 to the “almost cleere dawne” of line 227. In Hamlet I.i, precisely the same number of lines intervenes between the stroke of twelve and the time when “the Morne in Russet mantle clad, / Walkes o're the dew of yon high Easterne Hill”; and if in both scenes we suppose the dawn to have broken at five o'clock, the ratio is 37 or 38 to one, not six to one. In Cymbeline II.ii, 49 lines, or just under two and a half minutes, cover the interval from “almost midnight” at line 2 until the clock strikes three at line 51, a ratio of approximately 75 to one. In King Lear, a day passes in the course of II.ii, from the “good dawning” of line 1 to the “goodnight” of line 180, and the ensuing night passes during the 21 lines of Edgar's soliloquy in II.iii. Approximately twenty-four hours are thus comprehended within the space of 201 lines or ten minutes, the ratio being about 144 to one.

In Othello II.i, three ships come into view, dock, and discharge their passengers, in the space of about 180 lines or nine minutes, and that in a raging storm. In Pericles I.iv, only 23 lines elapse between the entrance of a lord to report the sighting of ships “upon our neighbouring shore”, and the arrival of Pericles from one of them. In 2 Henry IV, III.ii, the offstage dinner of Shallow and his guests occupies 23 lines or just over one minute. In The Taming of the Shrew III.ii, Gremio needs only 20 lines to go to the church, attend the wedding of Katherine and Petruchio, and return to Baptista's house to describe the mad ceremony—fewer than half the lines that he later needs to tell the story. In 2 Henry IV, V.v, the coronation of King Henry V in Westminster Abbey takes only 35 lines, or less than two minutes, and that of Queen Anne, in Henry VIII, IV.i, takes no time at all.

In all the foregoing sequences, the action has fallen within the scope of a single unbroken scene,⁴ and only one clock has been timing it. In others, however, the action extends over two or more consecutive scenes, and the timing is done by two or more clocks running at different speeds. In I.iv and II.i of Richard II, for instance, Bolingbroke's journey to France, and his return to England with eight tall ships and an army of three thousand men, occupy no more time than it takes the King to pay a visit to the dying John of Gaunt; and in 1 Henry IV, I.ii to II.iv, Hotspur's two-week trip to the north coincides with a single day in the lives of the Gadshill conspirators. These discrepancies, and others like them, reveal themselves in the library, not in the theater; on the stage they pass unnoticed in the rush of dramatic events.

Richard III, in Scenes ii and iii of Act IV, presents an extreme example of differing speeds in the passing of time. The Folio prints the two scenes as one; together they compose an undivided Scena Secunda, in spite of a clearance of the stage at the point where today's scene division has been inserted. Probably they were acted as one continuous scene on Shakespeare's stage, without lapse of time or change of place; but since the scenes are of present interest as illustrating varying rates of speed rather than as illustrating foreshortened time, the question of continuity is not important.

Four separate actions are initiated in Scene ii and carried to completion in Scene iii: the killing of the Princes in the Tower, the murder of Queen Anne, the hugger-mugger marriage of Clarence's daughter to a commoner, and Buckingham's flight to Wales. The four actions are timed by three different clocks.

The slowest of the clocks times the murder of the Princes. It begins to tick off the seconds when Sir Richard Tyrrel, having received his instructions from the King, departs from the palace on his infamous errand at IV.ii.84; it stops when he returns at IV.iii.1. In the interim he has suborned Dighton and Forrest and has accompanied them to the Tower. His two accomplices have smothered the children in their sleep, Tyrrel has seen their young bodies, and the Tower chaplain has buried them; and now Tyrrel has returned to the palace to make his report to the King, as in the Quartos he had promised to do, before the King should go to sleep:

KING.
Shall we heare from thee Tirrel ere we sleep?
TIR.
Ye shall my lord.

These two lines are lacking in the Folio version, their omission probably being due to their echoing almost identical lines at III.i.188-189, rather than to their being thought of as discordant with the time scheme. In any event, the Folio makes it obvious, even without them, that a sense of urgency underlies the whole undertaking; indeed, the King seems not yet to have had his supper by the time of Tyrrel's return (cf. IV.iii.31). Perhaps we may suppose that Tyrrel was absent from the palace for four hours of real time. On the stage his absence occupies the space of 40 lines or two minutes, plus the time-lapse, if there was any, between the modern scenes ii and iii.

The murder of Queen Anne probably takes somewhat longer. At IV.ii.50, Richard has said:

Come hither Catesby, rumor it abroad,
That Anne my Wife is very grievous sicke,
I will take order for her keeping close.
. … I say againe, give out
That Anne, my Queene, is sicke, and like to dye.

The rumors of Anne's illness are, of course, designed to prepare the public ear for the subsequent news of her death. Days, not hours, would be needed for such rumors to spread abroad and win acceptance, and it therefore seems necessary to assume that some few days have elapsed by the time that Richard closes the incident at IV.iii.39 by saying that “Anne my wife hath bid this world good night.” If we arbitrarily set the elapsed time at four days, then the 106 lines needed for the murder of the Queen represent a period twenty-four times as long as the 40 lines needed for the murder of the Princes. On this basis, Catesby's clock has been running about nine times as fast as Tyrrel's clock.

At the moment of ordering Catesby to circulate rumors about the illness of the Queen, Richard also ordered him to

Inquire me out some meane poore Gentleman,
Whom I will marry straight to Clarence Daughter;

and 107 lines later, at IV.iii.37, he reports this incident also as being closed: “His daughter meanly have I matcht in marriage.” This affair precisely parallels Anne's murder in point of time, and supposedly it extended over the same four days.

But the flight of Buckingham has a time-table all its own. The Duke has alienated the King by his slowness to agree that the Princes must be murdered. Ignorant or careless of the King's wrath, he has returned to the palace to claim the gift, the earldom of Hereford, that Richard had promised him:

My Lord, I clayme the gift, my due by promise,
For which your Honor and your Faith is pawn'd,
Th'Earldome of Hertford, and the moveables,
Which you have promised I shall possesse.
.....What sayes your Highnesse to my just request?
.....May it please you to resolve me in my suit.

But the King is deaf to Buckingham's repeated pleas, and finally exits with a flippant “I am not in the vaine.” The Duke suddenly realizes that his own life is in jeopardy:

And is it thus? repayes he my deepe service
With such contempt? made I him King for this?
O let me think on Hastings, and be gone
To Brecnock, while my fearefull Head is on.

He departs at IV.ii.124. At IV.iii.43, only 43 lines later, Sir Richard Ratcliff interrupts the King's meditations to make this report:

Bad news my Lord, Mourton is fled to Richmond,
And Buckingham backt with the hardy Welshmen
Is in the field, and still his power increaseth.

Since leaving the palace in fear of his life, therefore, Buckingham has traveled from London to Wales, has recruited and mobilized an army of Welshmen, and news of his revolt has been carried back to London. Communications being what they then were, these things could not have been accomplished in a shorter time than two weeks at the least. And yet the stage time occupied by Buckingham's exploit is only 43 lines, just three lines more than the 40 occupied by the murder of the Princes, and less than half as long as that occupied by the murder of the Queen. The three events fall within the same two scenes, run parallel to each other, and in fact actually overlap each other, in spite of their divergent rates of speed. On the basis of the time intervals that I have arbitrarily assumed, Buckingham's clock has been running about eight and a half times as fast as Catesby's clock and about seventy-eight times as fast as Tyrrel's, at the very moments when the events have been running concurrently.

But these discrepancies attract little attention in the theater. This is partly because Shakespeare has been at pains to break the continuity of each of the four sequences: the conclusion of each is separated from its inception by an interval of at least forty lines. Thus the narrative of Tyrrel's errand to the Tower is interrupted by the King's mention of Dorset's flight to join the insurgent Earl of Richmond, by his warning to Lord Stanley that he will hold him accountable for the actions of his wife and his wife's son, by his recollection of an old prophecy that Richmond should be king, and by his brushing aside of Buckingham's reminders about the earldom of Hereford. Only after all these diversions does Shakespeare permit Tyrrel to return to the palace to make his report to the King. The accounts of Queen Anne's fatal illness and of the marriage of Clarence's daughter are interrupted not only by all these irrelevancies, but also by Richard's initial employment of Tyrrel and by Tyrrel's return to report his mission accomplished; and Buckingham's departure is separated from the news of his arrival in Wales by all these interruptions except the King's first instructions to Tyrrel, and by the conclusions of all the sequences except its own.

More importantly, the foreshortenings and discrepancies were made acceptable by the fact of being narrated in a theater, and of being heard by persons who, by the very act of going to the theater, had concurred in certain broad and imperative assumptions. They had agreed to a suspension of incredulity and to an acceptance of the impossible. They had agreed that Richard Burbage should be a king and that a boy should be his queen, that the playhouse stage should be both the Tower of London and Bosworth Field, and that the time should be more than a century past. In comparison with these basic concessions, acceptance of a drastic foreshortening of time was relatively easy.

Notes

1. As You Like It III.ii.326-329. The first quotation from Richard III (IV.ii. 83-84) is from the Quarto of 1597, and that from Pericles is from the Quarto of 1609. All other Shakespearian quotations are from the First Folio. Line numbers are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. George Lyman Kittredge, Boston, 1936.

2. Hart estimates the average rate of speed at 176 words per minute, which one actor might raise to 200 words and another reduce to 150 (“The Time Allotted for Representation of Elizabethan and Jacobean Plays”, RES, VIII (October 1932), 407). G. B. Harrison estimates the pace at 140 or more words to the minute (Shakespeare's Tragedies, p. 12). See also Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton University Press), I, 37n.

3. In response to my request, Mr. Glen Byam Shaw, when Director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1958, very graciously timed seven different actors in twelve passages of Romeo and Juliet under performance conditions, and found that they averaged 18.3 lines per minute.

4. The sequence in King Lear is not an exception, since the modern Scenes ii, iii, and iv of Act II constitute an unbroken Actus Secundus, Scena Secunda in the First Folio, and should constitute a single Act II, Scene ii in present-day texts. The splitting of the one scene into three is unwarranted, since Kent remains continuously on the stage and the place remains unchanged.