SOURCE: Quinones, Ricardo J. “Views of Time in Shakespeare.” Journal of the History of Ideas 26, no. 3 (July-September 1965): 327-52.

[In the following essay, Quinones identifies three principal concepts of time in Shakespeare's works: augmentative time, whose potentially destructive power may be averted; contracted time, whose corrosive effects are inevitably tragic; and extended time, which works in league with nature to bring about auspicious resolutions.]

With Paul Elmer More one can say that “no single motive or theme recurs more persistently through the whole course of Shakespeare's works than [the] consciousness of the servile depredations of time.”¹ Yet, despite this recognition and more recent ones, there has been wanting a comprehensive and thorough examination of Shakespeare's dramatic uses of Time.² Even More's phrase “servile depredations” does little to suggest the wide range of Time's functions. This study is a summary exposition of my attempts to see the variety and general order of Time's importance in Shakespeare's poems and plays.³

For this work I might have borrowed Georges Poulet's title, “Studies in Human Time.” Time is, almost, as you like it. Rosalind reminds Orlando, “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.” We can think of Juliet waiting for the Nurse's return when Rosalind explains with whom time passes slowly:

Marry, he trots hard with a young maid between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemniz'd. If the interim be but a se'nnight, Time's pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven year.⁴

(III.ii.331-335)

But despite the play's title and Rosalind's lecture on Time's diversity according to human subjectivity, Time is still a principle of reality that goes undeviatingly on its way (a truth the lovers Romeo and Juliet bitterly experience when they watch the spread of day that means Romeo's departure). In the sonnets, in the histories, comedies, tragedies, and the last plays, drama is made from the attempts of characters to deny, control, escape or understand the real, relentless, and unrecalling activities of Time.

Three basic conceptions of Time emerge: augmentative time, contracted time, and extended time. The first concept provides a basic framework by which we can judge actions and character in the earlier sonnets and the English history plays. It is a morale whose importance does not end with the political plays; the violation of the code of augmentative time is crucial in such tragedies as Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. In the tragedies of love, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, and—to stretch the rubric slightly—Hamlet, contracted time helps us to understand the experiences of the doomed lovers: it shows the strength of their fatal choices. Extended time is the dominant perspective of Shakespeare's final romances; it is the vision of his last age and, to a great degree, represents a harmonization of the conflicting tensions of the two other categories of Time.

Augmentative time is the great principle underlying and connecting the earlier sonnets and Shakespeare's English history plays. This “code,” as I would have it understood, implies a pattern of behavior, more generally, a loose constellation of facts, attitudes, and requisite actions. The major fact of augmentative time is that Time is an agent of a reality that leads the organism ceaselessly, inevitably, to destruction and perhaps oblivion. But if this essential reality is recognized in time, means of staving off ruin are available. Infatuation, however, can fill the mind and blind the individual to this destructive temporal reality. In his ignorance, he neglects proffered means of resistance, and meets disaster. This pattern of a destructive reality, and delusion with disaster, or recognition with appropriate action, finds its prototypic expression in the earlier sonnets.

Here continuity through children is the means by which man can brave Time. It is natural that children should be important in any discussion of Time: through the link of generation man derives from the past and communicates with the future. But in augmentative time they are also crucial in indicating attitude and correct or incorrect assessments of the reality confronting man (as we shall see, the question of children looms large in the fates of Henry IV, Henry VI, and Richard II). In the sonnets the young man's unwillingness and failure to further his line stems from a fundamental delusion about the nature of his being in time. He does not seem to be sufficiently aware of the transience of his personal being (presumably his fault is self-liking). But Time, a principle of reality, can only be deferred for a while, never completely denied. In the end it catches up with the deluded, and presents them with the bitter lesson of personal waste.

It is to shake the young man from his delusion, and spare him the bitter fate of such a belated recognition, that Shakespeare in the sonnets holds up a mirror to reality. The fading mansion of the flesh is a visible reminder of the need to provide, and Shakespeare has a precocious awareness of the perishability of the body. By the lines and wrinkles of our flesh time is measured (Sonnet 2):

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gaz'd on now,
Will be a tatter'd weed of small worth held.
Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

Shakespeare is deeply sensitive to so being called to account. This “calling to account” is a prototypic situation which, constant to augmentative time, will recur with dramatic power in the fates of Richard II and Henry VI. As Sonnet 4 asks, “when Nature calls thee to be gone, / What acceptable audit canst thou leave?” A son would make an effective balance (Sonnet 2):

How much more praise deserv'd thy beauty's use
If thou couldst answer, “This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,”
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
          This were to be new made when thou art old
          And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.

We come even closer to the particular issues of the history plays in Sonnets 10 and 13, where the waste of individual beauty is metaphorically associated with the ruin of a house. In Sonnet 13 the young man is asked,

Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honour might uphold
Against the stormy gusts of winter's day
And barren rage of death's eternal cold?

Honorable husbandry prevents decay and oblivion from sweeping over a flourishing estate. In the context of the sonnets, one is a good husband by providing for continuity through children. In the more social and dramatic context of the histories, one must also defend one's house against the wintry season and the oblivion that an emulous opposition would heap upon it.

There is yet another subordinate concept which is essential to an understanding of augmentative time and provides a thematic link between the sonnets and history plays. Shakespeare is very consistent in his description of the way Time works its destruction. I give this destructive process the name of “emulative time.” Two quotations, one from the sonnets and the other from Ulysses' “Time” speech in Troilus and Cressida (III.iii.145-190), demonstrate the similar function of Time's destructive process in the sonnets and the plays.

In Sonnet 60, Time works closely with a tyrannical and arbitrary Nature to turn youthful promise into the disfavor and decline of old age:

Like as the waves make toward 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.

Transferred to the social world this same principle of emulation is rife. Thus it is in the society of man, Ulysses tells the sulking Achilles; past laurels are forgotten, the present eye praises the present object, to have done is to be quite out of fashion:

                                                            Keep then the path,
For emulation hath a thousand sons
That one by one pursue. If you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an ent'red tide they all rush by
And leave you hindmost. …

The similarity of thought and expression is striking. Emulation's sons are like the waves of the sea. If one relaxes his control, he is swept by. In the sonnets one can make provision against this emulative natural reality through children; in the social world of the histories a ruler must provide by keeping ahead of his rivalrous opposition. The strong ruler is he who clearly perceives the issues of augmentative time, both the hazards of vanity and willfulness, and the possibilities of success that attend a serious and diligent control of experience. The politics of virtuous control is the orbit of Bolingbroke; his son comes to accept the same duty. Henry VI and Richard II, however, fail to understand the challenges to their rule. Remarkable is the number of major turning points at which the code of augmentative time, as I have isolated it, indicates the rise of the successful ruler and the fall of the deposed.

The nature of political rule and the principle of emulative time soon involve the leader in a crucial decision of self-preservation. He cannot elude confrontation with an ambitious opposition. The opening scene of 3 Henry VI is a symbolic situation, in which the two claimants to the throne (Henry VI and the Duke of York) dispute their rights, revealing clearly the either/or necessities of augmentative time. Henry himself poses the issue: “And shall I stand, and thou sit in my throne?” The throne is a single object which can be possessed by only one person. But Henry VI, like Richard II, does not possess the qualities required for success in augmentative time. What these qualities are can be seen in a brief look at the virtues of Bolingbroke and his son.

The shadow of Richard II hangs over Hal's waywardness in 1 Henry IV. But Prince Hal is spared Richard's bitter awakening and prepared for his destined conflict with Hotspur by the interview with his father. In Act Three, the pivotal confrontation of the play occurs when the wise father staggers his son's self-possession by appealing to his family loyalty and personal pride. Henry IV charges the Prince with being heir rather to the character and fortunes of Richard II than to those of his own father. Henry IV speaks from a deep seriousness that is conscious of the hazards of augmentative time. If, when Richard was king, Bolingbroke had behaved as Hal is doing now, he would have been left in “reputeless banishment, / A fellow of no mark nor likelihood.” Against Time one must make one's mark. Instinctive in the forthright Shakespearean heroes is a reluctance to succumb to namelessness.⁵ Bolingbroke had a clear sense of his name, “Harry of Hereford, Lancaster and Derby / Am I. …” Richard however can only curse the time,

That I have worn so many winters out
And know not now what name to call myself.

(IV.i.258-259)

More important in the meeting, however, is the King's appeal to his son's pride, by showing how ill his exploits compare with Hotspur's achievements. His suggestion that Hal would probably desert his father's cause and fight at Hotspur's side adds insult to the comparison. The success of this emulous coeval is the occasion that informs against Hal, and spurs his dull revenge. “Do not think so,” he assures his father,

                                                                                                    You shall not find it so,
And God forgive them that so much have sway'd
Your majesty's good thoughts away from me!
I will redeem all this on Percy's head
And, in the closing of some glorious day,
Be bold to tell you that I am your son. …

(III.ii.129-134)

The structure of the play is built around the destined confrontation of Hal and Hotspur. And nowhere is this quality of crucial choice in emulative time more apparent than when Hal and Hotspur meet head-on in the play's climax:

I am the Prince of Wales; and think not, Percy,
To share with me in glory any more.
Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere,
Nor can one England brook a double reign
Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales.
HOTSPUR.
Nor shall it, Harry; for the hour is come
To end the one of us. …

(V.iv.63-69)

In 1 Henry IV, the interview with his father prepared Hal to accept this challenge of emulative time; in 2 Henry IV it is another interview with his father that prepares the future Henry V to defend his realm with full conviction. Under the impress of the great figure of his dying father—that serious, stern, yet selfless man—the rights of family line become tantamount to full legal sanction:

You won it, wore it, kept it, gave it me;
Then plain and right must my possession be;
Which I with more than with a common pain
'Gainst all the world will rightfully maintain.

(IV.v.221-224)

Family line—its ties and its guides to conduct—is central to augmentative time. It explains successful action and its absence is crucial in failure. When we consider the centrality of the father-son theme in the Henry IV plays, probably the most important fact in Henry VI's life is that his father died when Henry was only nine months old. Henry VI is largely without his father's courageous qualities. We remember another vow of Prince Hal, when he tries on the crown over what he mistakenly believes is his father's dead body:

… put the world's whole strength
Into one giant arm, it shall not force
This lineal honour from me. This from thee
Will I to mine leave, as 'tis left to me.(6)

(IV.v.44-47)

Henry VI, however, in the crucial confrontation with the House of York is not stirred by any sense of “lineal honour.” Hal's commitment is plain and right, but Henry's is hedged with doubt. “My title's weak,” he mutters in an aside, when the Yorkist disputants answer him that Bolingbroke seized the crown by rebellion. Henry's sense of legitimacy totters over the uncertain historical foundation of his claims.

Henry's scruple over historical right (in the face of the menacing and rebellious House of York, in revolt against a ruler whose family has possessed the crown for three generations, this is only a scruple) does not exhaust his violations of augmentative time. His defection from “lineal honour” implies other elements of the pattern. He reaches the nadir of humiliation when he agrees to disinherit his son. Blocked by the Yorkist show of force, Henry himself suggests the terms of surrender: he will name York heir apparent if in turn they will allow him to rule peacefully for the remainder of his natural life. Certainly Henry's action quartered, hath ever three parts coward. Not only has he denied his ancestral legacy, but he selfishly deprives his son, where with more courageous hearts, self-sacrifice would have been the rule. The degree to which the code of augmentative time is accepted by the participants in the drama is seen by their horrified reaction to Henry's proposal. His party splinters, and the strong-willed men who buttressed his cause abandon him:

Farewell, faint-hearted and degenerate king,
In whose cold blood no spark of honour bides.

(I.i.183-184)

Henry's act of invalidating his son's succession is symbolically related to Richard's childlessness. Both suffer marital estrangement. In Henry's case, however, it is Margaret who rushes in after hearing of the disinheritance and publicly divorces herself from Henry's bed (although privately Suffolk had already worked such a separation). Evidently Richard's queen does not share his bed, but here Richard's flatterers led him astray. Richard and his queen are negated through their childless marriage. Yet considering Richard's childlessness, his failures at honorable husbandry, and his failure to govern his land, it is remarkable how many times figures of childbirth or begetting enter into the speech of king and queen, in what significant places, and with what insistent reference to negation.

Insufficient attention has been paid to Richard's queen. She is his spokeswoman and sets the pattern for his address.⁷ It is through her that we get the royal party's first reaction to the news of Bolingbroke's return from banishment. Before the news arrives, she is filled with fearful premonitions. Some sorrow, ripe in fortune's womb, is coming toward her. To Bushy's rational explanation of this sorrow, the queen replies that her sorrow is not usual conceit:

                                                                                Conceit is still deriv'd
From some forefather grief. Mine is not so,
For nothing hath begot my something grief,
Or something hath the nothing that I grieve.
'Tis in reversion that I do possess;
But what it is that is not yet known what,
I cannot name. 'Tis nameless woe, I wot.

(II.ii.35-40)

Green enters bringing news of the landing of Bolingbroke's forces and the chain of events that will eventually unseat the king. The queen's reply contains the third meaningful reference to childbearing in this short scene:

So, Green, thou art the midwife to my woe,
And Bolingbroke my sorrow's dismal heir.
Now hath my soul brought forth her prodigy;
And I, a gasping new-deliver'd mother,
Have woe to woe, sorrow to sorrow join'd.

(61-65)

Now, like Richard, she will give in to despair.

The king, imprisoned at Pomfret, is a father in his thoughts. In his mind he tries to reproduce a world, yet he cannot, because the world is multitude, and he is all alone:

                                                                                Yet I'll hammer it out.
My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father; and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts. …

(V.v.5-8)

But this maze of ambitious fancy and disappointed pride leads nowhere, and Richard, hemmed in by the solid reality of prison walls, is straight nothing. Both Richard and the queen deal in absences of qualities, the queen with a nameless woe, both with ineffectual curses, and the king with a whole repertory of fanciful beings, the product of his inability to face the fact of deposition. But the fancy cannot cheat him as she used to do. His desire cannot deal away the strong prison walls, stark, unyielding reminders of the reality he neglected. Richard wasted Time, and now Time wastes him. Time, like Nature, is notoriously frank, and gives only to the free, those who can make the most of her gifts. To the careless and the unprepared, she is a tyrant, calling back what she once gave so liberally. Richard's sighs and groans and tears now tell the time which rings him out and Bolingbroke in. Willful vanity is replaced by a serious and virtuous control of experience, qualities well fitted to political rule in augmentative time.

Neither is Henry VI spared the recognition of his folly. His enemies are merciless in calling him to account. He lives to see his land ruined, himself dispossessed of his throne, and his son a victim of the forces whose rebellion he failed to quell. Henry acquiesced in his son's disinheritance and thus consented in some measure to his death. Queen Margaret's prediction comes true: Henry's life is at the mercy of the murderous Richard of Gloucester. But the code of augmentative time tells us that Henry had already engaged his own life when he agreed to deprive his son of his normal birth due. That fundamental, symbolic scene forebodes Henry's pending nothingness. The future Richard III taunts Henry in telling him that his son was killed for presumption. Henry's reply is the crucial admission of the play:

Hadst thou been killed when first thou didst presume,
Thou hadst not lived to kill a son of mine.

(V.vi.35-36)

Hal was saved from leaving so unacceptable an account through the intervention of his father and the strong claims that family ties could make on him. But Henry, like Richard, was unable to respond to these guides to action, and lost his kingdom, his son, and himself.

Although augmentative time is well suited to the political world of hard realities, its importance is not exhausted with the history plays. It is visible in the tragedies as a broken ideal. In the histories, the father-son relationship provided some insulation and protection against the emulative strife of Time, nature, and man. Still, there were tensions in this ideal. Bolingbroke could turn (mistakenly) on Hal with the bitterest acrimony, “See, sons, what things you are!” We must not forget that emulation hath a thousand sons. In King Lear, two daughters are proof that family is not necessarily a refuge. The rationalistic Edmund, invoking a cruel, emulative Nature, informs against his father: “The younger rises when the old doth fall.”

An instance of the breakup that the tragedies Hamlet and Macbeth portray is the violation of augmentative time. The son does not succeed the father; and sleeping kings are murdered by their kin. And in Hamlet's case the mother married the interloper who had stolen off with the son's right to succession. Things are psychologically more complicated; the prince's enemies are not outside his country's borders, but in his very household. One emblematic scene from Macbeth will show how the disruption of augmentative time is important for these tragedies. Banquo and Fleance are returning from a late ride (III.iii). The stars are darkened; it is about to rain as they approach the castle, where presumably banqueting and rest await them. They are the father and son bond of augmentative time, making their way through a dark universe and, symbolically, Fleance carries a light. This much they have in common with the sonnets, or with the English history plays. But in Macbeth the atmosphere is heavy with evil. The banquet table is haunted, and sleep has been violated. And the crucial addition is the presence of the lurking assassins. There is more underfoot than the inevitable ageing processes in nature, or emulation in society. Hotspur, after all, met Hal nobly in battle. But in Macbeth, the opposition is silent, and treacherous. And the clearest example of this is the death by ambush of Banquo, the prime representative of augmentative time. Nevertheless, augmentative time will triumph in Banquo's line, mocking the childless tyrant.

Although Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra are purer and more complete models of the type, Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet also share importantly in aspects of contracted time. The problems of Time and Love are common to all four plays. In the first two, Time is a principle of a constrictive or moribund reality that denies the lovers continuance of their love and casts them all the more fiercely into the arms of death. In the latter two, Time is a corrosive that feeds on human will and purpose and fidelity. Love itself falls apart through the woman's vulnerability to the changes of time. And in the case of young Hamlet, love is prevented almost at its first stirrings. This is a crucial distinction if we are to understand the different ways in which time is contracted in these plays. Extension in time for various reasons is impossible. Thrown upon their own resources, these young fatally-minded heroes come upon an area where beginnings and ends merge, love and death, the womb and the tomb, dust to dust. In their brief, flaming lives the termini of existence converge.

Whereas augmentative time is generally a moral concept, contracted (and extended) time is a psychological one, and more related to temperament. In augmentative time the dominant human faculty is practical reason and prudence, but the moving forces in contracted time are will, desire, and passion. Whereas in augmentative time the main focus seems to be on the successes of the strong and the weaknesses of the deposed, in contracted time we respond more to the limitations of the successful and the strengths of the doomed. Tragedy is the necessary stage of contracted time. The temperament of the characters and the nature of their experience in love seem to incline them toward fatal consequences. The intensity with which they commit themselves to love weakens their ability to maneuver in the face of their circumstances. On one hand, their passion clouds their reason (one indication of this is the mistaken suicides of both Romeo and Antony). But on the other hand, their experience in love is so overpowering that the normal activities of life seem banal in comparison. The force of the emotion to which they open themselves seems to lead them necessarily to death. Love is a killer and death a lover in Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. “The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, / Which hurts and is desir'd.” The lovers themselves seem fatally inclined, too willing to leap into the arms of death. Love is a noble weakness, as Caesar himself admits when he stands in awe of the dead Cleopatra's “strong toils of grace.” And Hamlet, too, when his Fate cries out to him, can hold his life as not worth a “pin's fee.” And after Cressida's betrayal, Troilus seems to call for death, shouting down its very throat.

In his unrewarding love for Rosaline, Romeo early reveals his neglect of normal activities. His father, like all fathers committed to the expectancies of augmentative time, is troubled by his son's reversal of things proper to day and night:

… all so soon as the all-cheering sun
Should in the farthest East begin to draw
The shady curtains from Aurora's bed,
Away from light steals home my heavy son
And private in his chamber pens himself,
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,
And makes himself an artificial night.

The father also introduces a note of foreboding that prevails in all the tragedies of love:

Black and portentous must this humour prove
Unless good counsel may the cause remove.

(I.i.141-149)

The voice of the father is the voice of good counsel, urging appropriate actions in time, those which would further the development of the experienced man. But Romeo is his “own affections' counsellor,” unlike Hal, who profits from the wise communications of his father.⁸

In his secret and requited love affair with Juliet, Romeo does have a counsellor from an older generation, Friar Laurence. The Friar, about to marry the young couple, has some fears about the future:

So smile the heavens upon this holy act
That after-hours with sorrow chide us not!

(II.vi.1-2)

But single-minded love works on a qualitative time-scale. Only moments with the object of desire are important. Future considerations seem paltry in comparison with the present pleasure, and Romeo replies:

Amen, amen! But come what sorrow can,
It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short minute gives me in her sight.
Do thou but close our hands with holy words,
Then love-devouring death do what he dare—
It is enough I may but call her mine.

(3-8)

This passionate (and perhaps desperate) confidence does not reassure the Friar; he offers a moral lesson which reveals how love and death are brought together:

These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume. …
Therefore love moderately: long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

(9-15)

Romeo and Juliet are the great model of lovers caught in external limitation. The long-distant past still exerts its influence and arouses the passions of the present. Their loves are meshed in an ancient grudge. Time is a principle of this larger reality, and its steady movement, unaffected by human desire, is dramatically used to suggest the limitations that the impassioned wills of the lovers so ardently seek to elude. The anxiously expectant Juliet frequently faces the passage of time. In one soliloquy (II.v.1-17) she waits for the Nurse to bring back news of the marriage plans. Normal time is too slow for her desire: “Love's heralds should be thoughts, / Which ten times faster glide than the sun's beams. …” Love tries to achieve and then maintain its moment, but in so doing it runs up against the larger time that it would deny. If the creatures who contract time are passionate, intense, and aspiring, the creatures who represent this larger perspective should be moderate, patient, and enduring. Actually, these qualities are those belonging to the vision of extended time, whose proper sphere is the romances of Shakespeare's later age. The tragedies, too, have their representatives of extended time, but they do not possess the richness of Shakespeare's final vision: rather they are obtuse, sententious, humorous, and opportunistic. They give larger perspective to the events of the present, and in their uninspired way—in Romeo and Juliet, at least—would convert passionate intensity to social convenience. It is hard for the Nurse, for example, to take too seriously the passions of the young girl whose bumps and knocks she ministered to. She is in no hurry to come to the point. The garrulous Nurse will tell and tell over again the events of the past. Like the older Capulets at the ball, she estimates the present by the deaths, births, and earthquakes of long ago.

In another soliloquy (III.ii), Juliet, unaware of the disastrous deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, appeals to the sun to move more quickly that night may come and her marriage be consummated. Again, the normal passage of things is too slow. She wishes that the mythical hot-blood, Phaeton, prototype of the passionate consumed in their own flames, were in control of Time. Then the sun's chariot would move quickly, making way immediately for “love-performing night” when her young husband would “leap to these arms untalked of and unseen.” Night is rich in its dark intimacy and secret love. Although the time is night, Romeo would be like the day: he would lie “upon the wings of night / Whiter than new snow on a raven's back.” Lovers would make their own time.

Romeo eventually does come, but under far from happy circumstances. As Juliet had earlier desired time to move more swiftly, now she wants to hold it back. But Time moves steadily on its way. Juliet refuses to believe their night of love has ended, and would have the song of the lark be that of the nightingale. But Romeo is more realistic, and knows he must be leaving or face death. It is a remarkable dramatic scene when the huddled, isolated lovers, whose time is night, watch the inevitable spread of day throughout their lives, day that means banishment and separation:

JULIET.
O now be gone! More light and light it grows.
ROMEO.
More light and light—more dark and dark our woes!

(III.v.35-36)

Values are reversed. The time of love—night—and the time of normal activity are in tragic conflict. Lovers must seek in aspiring intensity the growth of their love denied them in extension. In the last act, death and love, the womb and the tomb, complete the tragic contraction of the play. Beginnings and ends are fatally brought together. The choric prologue dictated the end of the play: everything is predetermined from the fatal loins of these feuding households.

Although it is true that a more reasonable love would have made a closer rapprochement between the contracted time of love and the extended time of normal activity, in the play itself, as expressed by the prince, the death of the lovers is regarded as an accusation and penalty against their feuding families. In language that suggests both the inversion and contraction of the play, the prince charges Capulet and Montague:

See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love!

(V.iii.292-293)

Aspiring emotion, which would somehow rise above worldly limitations, and practical reason must merge if love is to be accommodated to extension in time. But in Antony and Cleopatra the gap between the two faculties is wider than in the earlier play. They are as far separated as the two leaders who so exclusively embody each. Caesar is too eminently the prudential politician, the rational man. To him Hotspur's phrase, “vile politician,” clings more clearly than to Bolingbroke. And Antony is too desperately committed to his passion, with scarcely the slightest sense of self-preservation. The tragedy is that there should be irreconciliable conflict between their separate virtues.

Antony's and Cleopatra's attitudes toward Time are especially revealing. The present time is the object of their attention. They scorn more prudential considerations, looking before and after. Antony is a child of the time, but Caesar possesses the time (to make a quotation apt by removing it from context). To him Antony's waste of time is childish:

                                                                                          But to confound such time
That drums him from his sport and speaks as loud
As his own state and ours—'tis to be chid
As we rate boys who, being mature in knowledge,
Pawn their experience to their present pleasure
And so rebel to judgment.(9)

(I.iv.28-33)

But in Antony's case this devotion to the present is not meaningless. There had been a prior disenchantment with the fruits of Empire that tossed Antony into the lap of love. Theodore Spencer, in his Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, recognizes this:

Antony and Cleopatra, unlike the chief characters of the other great tragedies, are never disillusioned, for they had no illusions to start with. Antony knows what he is doing when he chooses Egypt instead of Rome.¹⁰

Early in the play Antony takes his stand in Egypt (although he is destined to vacillate):

Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch
Of the rang'd empire fall! Here is my space,
Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man. …

(I.i.33-36)

Empire smacks of the mortality of the earth; it doesn't permit enough freedom for the aspiring spirit. The long time of political rule is tedious without the illumination of the spirit, without love, daring, generosity. All of these things and more the lovers offer each other. All of these things are absent from Caesar's reasoned world. Cleopatra asks for mandragora when she learns of Antony's departure, “That I might sleep out this great gap of time / My Antony is away.” When Antony learns the false news of Cleopatra's death, he vows his own death. Length of time without her would be tedious, and all effort would be mere plod and self-defeating labor:

                                                                                          So it must be, for now
All length is torture. Since the torch is out,
Lie down, and stray no further. Now all labour
Mars what it does; yea, very force entangles
Itself with strength. Seal then, and all is done.

(IV.xiv.45-49)

Antony's involvement in a world of political ambitions, the either/or world of emulative time, and his neglect of the proprieties of rule in that world, mean his end. In Antony's decline, his temporal orientation shifts from the present to the past, when he had been the “greatest prince o' th' world.” As the end approaches, the split between effective control in this world and the lovers' vision widens. Antony finally looks outside of Time entirely, to a place “where souls do couch on flowers.”

If Antony loses in the game of politics, his great aspirations are affirmed in Cleopatra's ultimate fidelity. Cleopatra joins him in this projection of the spirit beyond the end of life. Her speeches (V.ii) reach philosophical heights. Her losses (and Antony's) in the mortal world of Empire induce her to take greater benefit from the life of the spirit:

My desolation does begin to make
A better life. 'Tis paltry to be Caesar.
Not being Fortune, he's but Fortune's knave,
A minister of her will. And it is great
To do that thing that ends all other deeds,
Which shackles accidents and bolts up change,
Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung,
The beggar's nurse and Caesar's.

(V.ii.1-8)

The last lines remind us of the graveyard scene in Hamlet. Cleopatra's insight into the base origins and physical limitations placed on low and great alike is akin to Hamlet's discovery that the dust of Alexander may be found stopping a bunghole. Caesar's triumph is his loss. He triumphs, through prudential control, in the world of Time, but his practical reason is still subject—or slave—to the necessities of Fortune, Time, and Mortality, to physical limitation. He is still under the sway of the accidents and changes of life. The lovers' defeat in the world of Time calls them to the better life of the spirit. Cleopatra has immortal longings. She looks for a perpetuation of her love outside of time, “Husband, I come.” The title suggests the anticipation of extended love, missed in this life. She even has a sympathetic enjoyment of the place Antony envisioned, where souls do couch on flowers, “As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle. …” Cleopatra is fire and air; her mortal elements she leaves to base life. The division is complete between the spiritual and the physical. Why should she stay—in this wild world?

Ulysses gives eloquent and forceful expression to the destructive powers of Time, that devour not only physical graces, but moral as well:

Let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was!
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating Time.

(III.iii.169-174)

But Shakespeare in his greatest sonnets, and in his more intransigent heroes and lovers, sees in a man a capacity to withstand the changes of Time.¹¹ “The present eye praises the present object,” in Ulysses' view. But Troilus resists the tyranny of the present. Never did young man fancy with so eternal and fixed a soul:

We turn not back the silks upon the merchant
When we have soil'd them, nor the remainder viands
We do not throw in unrespective sieve
Because we are now full.

(II.ii.69-72)

Hamlet too conceives of a human dignity able to rise above the present object. “What is a man,” he asks,

If his chief good and market of his time,
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus'd. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion. …

(IV.iv.33-40)

Prodded by the example of Fortinbras' military daring and by his own failure to avenge his father's death, Hamlet wonders whether it is simple forgetfulness, submission to the passage of Time, that has prevented his action. To forget the dead is bestial; remembrance is a distinguishing human characteristic that resists the forward sweep of Time. As Paul Reyher has written, “Shakespeare a le culte de la mémoire des morts.”¹²

We recall that the purity of Juliet's intention was shocked at the Nurse's suggestion that she marry Paris and forget the banished, and hence harmless, Romeo (III.v.237-242). But some six years later in Shakespearean drama the woman does not come off so well when fidelity is at the stake. It breaks Hamlet's heart that his mother has not borne longer with the memory of his father:

Frailty, thy name is woman!—
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father's body
Like Niobe, all tears—why she, even she
(O god! a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourn'd longer) married with my uncle. …
Within a month,
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

(I.ii.146-157)

Cressida herself echoes Ulysses when she laments the weakness of her sex:

Ah, poor our sex! this fault in us I find,
The error of our eyes directs our mind.
What error leads must err. O, then conclude
Minds sway'd by eyes are full of turpitude.

(V.ii.109-112)

The problem of the plays here coincides with that of the greatest final sonnets addressed to the young man: can love endure the vicissitudes of Time and physical decay? The love of Hamlet's father for Gertrude

                                                                                                    was of that dignity
That it went hand in hand even with the vow
I made her in marriage. …

(I.v.48-50)

And Hamlet's sense of man's godlike reason has its equivalent in Troilus' belief in the mind's renewing love (although even here, in the antechamber of love, he hedges this belief with doubts about woman's constancy):

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!

(III.ii.165-170)

Shakespeare's noblest heroes conceive of a human spirit that does not yield to Nature's inevitable decay and the satiety of bodily limitation, but rather seeks its own furtherance.¹³ In contracted time there is generally such a tension between man-in-love and his external circumstances. But Troilus sees this dichotomy as intrinsic in man's very nature, man, that subtle knot, that compound of body and soul, “born under one law, to another bound.”¹⁴ In the physical act of love itself this spirit is dissatisfied. Although Troilus sees no monster in love's pageant, he is aware of this

monstruosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite and the execution confin'd, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit.

(III.ii.87-90)

In contracted time, the infinite will and the boundless desire are constrained. The lovers seek in depth the experience denied them in length. But Hamlet and Troilus introduce faculties which, if allowed, would give horizontal scope to the vertically aspiring passionate will. In their dedication to the resources of man's renewing mind these thoughtfully sensitive heroes anticipate resolutions found in the extended time of the last plays.

Yet this sense of intransigence is all the closer to extended time since it is tempered by a realistic assessment of Time's power. Man is changeful and Time's sway is awesome. Troilus warns Cressida, that

something may be done that we will not;
And sometimes we are devils to ourselves
When we will tempt the frailty of our powers,
Presuming on their changeful potency.

(IV.iv.93-96)

But despite Troilus' idealism and his calm realism, he is still committed to contracted time. Fatally minded, he anticipates tragedy in Cressida's departure: the call of Aeneas sounds like the attendant genius summoning a man to death. “Some say the genius so / Cries ‘Come!’ to him that instantly must die.” (IV.iv.52-53) The negation of his love in Cressida's infidelity drives him to desperation, cancelling all other value: “Fate, hear me what I say! / I reck not though thou end my life to-day!” (V.vi.25-26)

Hamlet too has a great passion. But it marks the difference between this play and the others we have studied that contraction is not due to love. The time is out of joint. There is no possibility of love in a world when Hamlet's king is killed, his mother whored, and the assassin and seducer usurps the succession that Hamlet could normally have expected to be his. The flowers that Gertrude had thought to deck Ophelia's wedding-bed she must strew on her grave. Hamlet's great occupation is revenge. It makes other activities pall and disappear:

                                                            Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter.

(I.v.97-104)

But under the impression of his own delays in executing this dread and all-usurping command, Hamlet is able, like Troilus, to appreciate the force of Time and “baser matters” with greater realism. He has the dying king in the play-within-the-play warn his determined queen (in language that clearly refers to Hamlet's own predicament):

Purpose is but the slave to memory,
Of violent birth, but poor validity;
Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks to the tree,
But falls unshaken when they mellow be.

(III.ii.198-201)

And after the intervention of the ghost in Act Three halts Hamlet's hysterical onslaught on his mother's sexual weakness, Hamlet is able to urge her reformation with calm reasonableness (III.iv.160-170). “Assume a virtue, if you have it not,” he tells his mother. Custom, product of long time, is monster in dulling purpose and habituating the rational awareness to evil practice. But Hamlet sensibly recognizes that custom can also strengthen one's hold on good actions.

                                                                                Refrain to-night,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence; the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature,
And either [master] the devil, or throw him out
With wondrous potency.

Hamlet's growth in understanding and control is seen in the realistic use he would make of the powers of Time.

Hamlet's old order has been destroyed. On the ruins of the old he must build a new order, based on his old idealism reintegrated with his new-won sense of natural limitation. This final order that Hamlet achieves falls between the neat categories of contracted and extended time. Unlike Troilus or Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet does reach a new order of things. But plainly unlike Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet sees a pattern within human history. And yet, unlike the final romances, this pattern is one of mortality, not of fruitfulness. It does not look toward continuity, but rather toward death. Extended time in Hamlet is told by repetition. Both Gertrude and Claudius try to shake the young, mourning prince from his “obstinate condolement” with the argument that Nature's common theme is death of fathers: “… you must know your father lost a father, / That father lost, lost his …” (I.ii.89-90). How different at its very origin is the impulse of Hamlet from the histories and the sonnets, where the common theme is provision for children, father passing legacy on to father on to son. Hamlet is the end of marriage, “I say we will have no more marriages.” And Hamlet, the prince, dies without an heir.

In the graveyard scene Hamlet comes to accept conclusions similar to those offered as consolation by the king and queen. But here the context of his elders' philosophical resignation is all-decisive. Their conventional wisdom is really covering for moral passivity in the queen and murder in the king. But Hamlet knows not seems; in his case the vision into limitation will be earned. The pattern of repetition within extended time is important in the graveyard scene. Time extends from Adam to Doomsday, but the pattern within this duration is fixed. The essential stages of life between the termini of birth and death are reduced to the termini themselves; hence the paradox that time of such vast duration is actually single in its pattern: earth returns to earth. The gravedigger's refrain is apt; it summarizes this theme:

O, a pit of clay for to be made
          For such a guest is meet.

(V.i.104-105)

The transparent cunning of the politician, the foppery of the courtier, and the superficial glossing of the lady all are vanity against this background of beginnings and ends. Hamlet's theme is “To what base uses we may return;”

O that the earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall t'expel the winter's flaw.

(238-239)

There is another profound contraction of beginnings and ends in this scene. The sexton took up his employment thirty years ago, the day old Hamlet defeated Fortinbras, and the day young Hamlet was born. The cycle of events is swinging round to completion. Before the day is over, Hamlet will be dead and the succession will fall on young Fortinbras. Within the suggestion of extended time, a pattern is imposed which joins inevitably beginning and end. The serpent takes his tail in his mouth; the wheel is come full circle. The sense of inevitability, of necessity, which pervades the tragedy is built on this contraction of extended time to essential termini, coupling in a necessary way birth and death. Yet with all this dust and death, the pattern is not wholly reductive. We are thrilled at the significant contraction and the basic discovery that prepare Hamlet for his final steps. We are moved deeply by the calm realism of this young hero who passes so nobly through the graveyard of life and tries to restore a world destroyed.

Time is extended in Shakespeare's last romances. For the tragic lover, long time is tedious without the object of his desires. In the last plays, however, length of time, instead of representing the humdrum existence of the Capulets, the mortality of Empire, or the corrosion of fidelity, becomes fruitful and healing. Nature and Time conspire; old wrongs are forgotten, or, if not forgotten, at least forgiven. The lustre of the present, for better or worse, is worn over by the passage of time and the course of circumstance. The elder Hamlet's cry was “Remember me!” But in The Tempest, Alonso is urged:

Let us not burden our remembrance with
A heaviness that's gone.

(V.i.199-200)

Although it is almost sacrilegious to so use it, King Lear is an excellent bridge between the tragedies of love and the final romances. Unlike Antony, King Lear's will is educated to an understanding and acceptance of his own physical limitations and creatural nature.

When the rain came to wet me once and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found 'em, there I smelt 'em out. Go to, they are not men o' their words! They told me I was everything. 'Tis a lie—I am not ague-proof.

(IV.vi.102-107)

In Cordelia's camp, the storm is over in Lear's mind. Sleep and music have restored him in part:

You must bear with me. Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old and foolish.

(IV.vii.84-85)

Forget and forgive. We are on the eve of the message of the great romances of Shakespeare's final period. If in the problem comedies there are dark stretches that have tragic potential, in the tragedies there are resolutions which, if allowed, would result in the happier conclusions of the last plays.

Cordelia and Lear are not the first who with best meaning have incurred the worst. Cordelia bears free and patient thoughts. And so would Lear. He entertains the possibility of an extended time where he can watch with his daughter the ins and outs of court life and the rise and fall of princes:

No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out—
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th' moon.

(V.iii.8-18)

Lear would be off the wheel of time and change. As in The Tempest, the Happy Island is a retreat for father and daughter. But despite this search for a peaceful harbor, the vision is still directed toward the rich patterns within the temporal reality. In addition to showing us the vision of extended time, Lear's speech also lends us the phrase that best summarizes its qualities. It is surely the vision of “God's spies” whose perspective brings together reason and emotion, placates rage and bestows the grace of mystery on human affairs. But, as in Hamlet, the spheres of achieved personal peace and of temporal success are still distinct; Edmund does not send in time; everything does not turn out well in the end.

In the final romances fortunate resolutions, denied Lear and Hamlet, again attend on individual decency. Though the seas threaten, they are merciful, is the thought of both Pericles and Ferdinand. In this respect, the great speech of Time before the fourth act of The Winter's Tale does not adequately reflect the movement of the last plays. In the sonnets, Time cheers and checks; in the romances, it checks and then cheers. But in the speech of Time there is no indication of either a benevolent or an inimical order of things. Time tries all, both good and bad. But in its expression of Time's power, the speech is in accord with the impression of the last plays. These plays deal with elemental things, and Time is one of the great elements. The four final romances all have enlarged temporal exposures, doubtless reflecting the ageing Shakespeare's personal awareness of what sheer length of time can do. Twelve, fourteen, sixteen, twenty years—these are durations that enable men to look at their passions and wrongs, suffered or committed, with new understanding and feeling. In his speech, Time is an absolute master. His hour being self-born, he has no delimiting parentage, no antecedents, no spouse. Time is present at the origin and at the end of even the most ancient social order or custom. His nature is unchanging; he is always in the present. He is the great “I am.” Time witnesses the inception and historical growth of even the most seemingly permanent institutions and societies. And he sees their foreclosure. Even the classical unity of Time, therefore, must bow before the precedence of this long view.

As in the augmentative time of the histories, children are again essential. Their youthful presence warms colder bloods in the earlier code; they provide continuity; and on the high seas of politics they provide guidelines and motivation for action. In the last plays, they represent the regenerative potential of Time and Nature that reconciles and reunites. Their presence is crucial; when their innocence has been lost men stray until they find it again. But, despite their great importance, the vision of the last plays, and of extended time, is that of the middle-aged. It is their misfortunes and their reunions that we follow. It is through their eyes that we look at the young. In their children they see themselves when young. The family resemblance of the children suggests repetition within generation; and it is the perception of this pattern that is one of the pleasures of extended time. Essential lines of human nature stand revealed.

The return of what was lost is one of the major movements of The Winter's Tale. It is in this connection that the basic story of the play comes into contact with the myths that hover around the actions and give mysterious enlargement and suggestiveness to what takes place. Through the mythic resonances the basic life lines of man and woman emerge. The myth of the Christian Fall helps explain the loss of boyhood innocence shared by Polixenes and Leontes. Polixenes tells Hermione that the two boys

… were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' th' sun
And bleat the one at th' other. What we chang'd
Was innocence for innocence; we know not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd
That any did. Had we pursu'd that life,
And our weak spirits ne'er been higher rear'd
With stronger blood, we should have answer'd heaven
Boldly, “Not guilty,” the imposition clear'd
Hereditary ours.

(I.ii.67-75)

Hermione jokingly takes this to imply that they have fallen since, and Polixenes agrees, graciously complimenting her and his own queen as the respective sources of temptation. Although this explanation of the fall is offered with grace and humor, it does correspond to the real changes that have come upon the former friends in their male maturity. The loss of innocence is coincidental with the age of sexual maturity and the ego-possessiveness in man's relations with woman. Also jeopardized by this fall is the paradise of male friendship. In this period of jealous turmoil, the former friend removes himself and the woman suffers patiently: like Alcestis, Hermione must go underground, as it were, and endure death, until, with the growth of the daughter and her husband's middle-age, Leontes can look on his wife with the understanding and unselfish affection that suffering in long time has produced. In his daughter he can see his wife when young; and in his wife he sees what his daughter must endure. This vision is basically that of extended time: the perception of patterns of resemblance produces a growth of the understanding that works toward reunion.

If the essential stages of male growth are suggested, so are those of womanhood, from Perdita's innocent natural grace to her mother's return as a middle-aged woman. Here, too, the reader is moved by an irresistible urge to respond to the mythic suggestivity of the piece. Proserpina is there in Perdita's lovely apostrophe, “O Proserpina, for the flowers now that, frighted, thou let'st fall / From Dis's wagon!” And like the mythical prototype, her absence is coincidental with the hard weather of estrangement. But, although Perdita is absent she is never underground. In Florizel's description of her (IV. iv. 136-146), she is natural grace in all its completeness and self-sufficiency. She is the world before the Fall. The play is a spring tale in the reflourishing of possibility after a long period of blight. But the wisdom of the play is not that of simple spring; Perdita does not possess the chastened wisdom of destroyed happiness; this is the experience of the older members who see two times, what they once were, and what they have become. They repossess the innocent virtue of spring in their winter of ruined expectations.

It is Hermione who goes underground, lost to the spectator as well as to her family. Like Alcestis, she endures death. Hers is the maternal sacrifice that the woman must undergo when she enters into marriage. There is a special bond between mother and daughter in the last scene of the play. Perdita kneels before her mother in reverence for the sacrifice Hermione made when Perdita came into life. And here her simple utterance seems to have greater reverberations, just as the actions of the play have airy extension:

                                                                                          Lady,
Dear queen, that ended when I but began,
Give me that hand of yours to kiss.

(V.iii.44-46)

The bringing together of beginnings and ends is important in The Winter's Tale. But here, unlike the contraction of the tragic lovers, the collocation is not of essential facts of experience, as love and death, but rather of essential stages in the life process; the emphasis is not on termination, but the discovery of continuity and pattern. The stage of Hermione's innocence ended symbolically with the birth of Perdita. Perdita now takes Hermione's place in the human chain of repeated birth. It is this discovery and this acceptance of the essential stages of human life that gives profundity to the joys of the final reconciliation.

In The Tempest, Prospero's studious nature, given as it is to the larger perspectives of extended time, involves him in the danger of becoming, like melancholy Jaques of As You Like It, a mere spectator at the human drama. The vision of extended time can become so large that the importance of present achievement is reduced in the contrast. But however much one may delight in rising above the dust to observe what is past and passing and to come, one is never outside of nature, and hence never outside of the requirements of moral action in the present. What ties Prospero to right motion in the present and helps him to overcome despair and the temptations of revenge is his daughter, her charity and affections.

Through the “vanity of his art” Prospero seeks to lend a permanence and continuance to the passing things of this world. Like the tragic lovers, he would transcend temporal limitations. In the masque that he creates for the newly-pledged lovers, Miranda and Ferdinand, love is granted extension in a majestic vision of bounty and grace. Heaven and Earth unite to enrich this Prayer for a Daughter. Even Nature, in this idealized picture, seeks to avoid the wintry season of decline. The songs of Juno and Ceres bring the abiding spirit into the earth:

JUNO.
Honour, riches, marriage blessing,
Long continuance, and increasing,
Hourly joys be still upon you
Juno sings her blessings on you.
CERES.
Earth's increase, foison plenty,
Barns and garners never empty,
Vines and clust'ring bunches growing,
Plants with goodly burthen bowing;
Spring come to you at the farthest
In the very end of harvest. …

(IV.i.106-115)

But Prospero has forgotten Caliban and his plot. Caliban is that uneducable piece of earth in us that has little to do with the vision of our mind. He is that in us that participates in natural decay, “as with age his body uglier grows / So his mind cankers.” The return of Caliban reminds Prospero of that muddy vesture of decay that his spirit sought to avoid, and produces a “strange, hollow and confused noise,” that sweeps Prospero into a total despair. He conceives then of a universal time that dwarfs all of man's efforts and reduces the spirit's desires to vanity. His vision of bounty was a baseless fabric, his theatre an insubstantial pageant. They hold for little in the perspective of a temporal reality that will dissolve not only man's more solid cultural and spiritual accomplishments, but this great globe itself, and leave not a rack behind. To think too curiously about long time has its dangers. Significance and action in the present are lost:

                                                                                          We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

(IV.i.148-150)

What it is that quiets this momentary vexation in Prospero's beating mind is not certain. His error seems to have been in projecting his personally achieved sense of harmony onto the universe. From this he rebounds to total skepticism. From this despair no theoretical resolution restores him; rather it is sheer practical involvement: he has several plots to complete and a daughter to marry.

Early in the play Prospero tries to explain to his daughter who he really has been, to explain that in the past he was better than mere Prospero, the keeper of a cave. But it is in the nature of Miranda, all pity and love, not to want to know more about the past, to be content with the present: “more to know / Did never meddle with my thoughts,” is her answer. It was the presence of the infant Miranda that gave Prospero “an undergoing stomach to bear up / Against what should ensue” in the tempest of personal crisis. And now, years later, with his enemies caught in a similar storm, which Prospero's art has created, it is his daughter who educates his response. For, despite Prospero's reflective nature, he still retains a sense of having been injured in the past. As he admits later, he is struck to the quick by the wrongs he suffered. He must come to look at his enemies' distress through the eyes of his daughter, who cries: “O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!” It is when Ariel later describes the disorder and helplessness of his enemies, that Prospero too forgives them. Ariel tells Prospero:

                                        Your charm so strongly works 'em,
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender.
PROS.
Dost thou think so, spirit?
ARIEL.
Mine would, sir, were I human.
PROS.
And mine shall.
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,
Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part. The rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance.

(V.i.17-28)

Miranda's pity, like Perdita's regenerative potential, seems to have become part of Nature itself. The very air is inclined toward compassion, and so is Prospero's nobler reason. Although practical reason recognizes that he has been wronged and that revenge is justified, his “nobler” reason, his sense of kind, must subdue this fury. When put to the test, Prospero must discover his finer self—the real end of the Shakespearean journey in time.

Augmentative time, resting upon a virtuous control of experience, has a natural affinity with the political setting. This control, however, depends upon a recognition of man's limitations, his vulnerability as an organism in Time, and the necessities of action in an emulative struggle. But the value of the concept of augmentative time is that it reveals the larger personal issues which help dictate public decision. Prudence is more than prudence when it is a guard against willful vanity and the threat of nothingness. Augmentative time illuminates the issues that connect the histories with the sonnets and later works; it concentrates on the problems that help to make the histories intense personal as well as political drama.

The neglectful monarchs—those that lose out in augmentative time—have something in common with the tragic heroes and lovers. With King Lear, Richard II could cry out, “They told me I was everything.” Romeo, Troilus, Hamlet, to be sure, would not utter such a thought; nevertheless, they too are creatures not wholly content with man's temporal limitations. Their desires and their sense of human constancy are frustrated by external reality. And Time is the great agent of that reality. In Richard's attempt to deny the reality of Time we experience primarily a sense of waste. But in the bitter contraction of love and death the tragic lovers, Antony and Cleopatra, come upon an area of tragic strength that reveals the limitations of Caesar's success. And Hamlet, too, has made a discovery where the transparent cunning of the politician, successful as it may be in its sphere, is vastly overshadowed by the contracted experience of man's common fate.

The attitudes of Lear and Hamlet both look toward the vision of the last plays. “Temporal royalties” may be lost, but a “kindlier” vision is restored. Man is seen not as a political creature, nor solely as a social creature; the basic lineaments of his creatural humanity are discovered. The “boundless will” of man is satisfied within the significant limitations perceived in time. One could almost say that in the blending of love with reason, and the overview with present involvement, the last plays represent a reconciliation of the demands of the histories and the desires of the tragedies of love.

Notes

1. Shelburne Essays: Second Series (Boston, 1905), 28.

2. In his Redeeming Shakespeare's Words (Berkeley, 1962), 54, Paul Jorgensen wrote, “Viewed against the background of Shakespeare's other plays written within a few years of Henry IV, this emphasis on the concept of time appeared to be part of a long-range concern with the meaning and wise use of time. … The concept of time becomes increasingly meaningful throughout Shakespeare's plays.” A partial correction of this lack came to my attention after my own work was completed. I was happy to find some of my ideas confirmed independently in Inge Leimberg's discussion of the tragedies, Untersuchungen zu Shakespeares Zeitvorstellung als ein Beitrag zur Interpretation der Tragödien (Köln, 1961).

3. For a longer view of ideas and arguments presented here with little illustration, and for other aspects of Time that could not fit into the limits of this article, the interested reader can consult my unpubl. diss. (Harvard, 1963), “Views of Time in Shakespeare.” Reluctantly I here omit that fruitful field for temporal considerations, the comedies, and that interesting line of development, The Rape of Lucrece, Richard III, and Macbeth.

4. All quotations from Shakespeare's plays and sonnets are taken from George Lyman Kittredge's edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare (Boston, 1936).

5. In the sonnets Shakespeare appeals to whatever sense of revulsion the young man may have from namelessness and nothingness. To die without children would put an end to his name and his beauty (Sonnet 3):

   But if thou live rememb'red not to be,
   Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

   And in the eighth sonnet, the concord of various strings sounds discordant to the young man, because they ring the unpleasant truth (a variation of which Richard II will also hear): “Thou single will prove none.” To resist this nothingness is a strong impulse in the Shakespearean heroes who are successful in augmentative time.

6. For a more detailed defense of Bolingbroke and Hal's sense of legitimacy, see my “‘Lineal Honour’ and Augmentative Time in Shakespeare's Treatment of the Bolingbroke Line,” Topic (April 1964).

7. Coleridge's reference to Richard's “intellectual feminineness” is very appropriate. See Coleridge on Shakespeare, ed. Terrence Hawkes (New York, 1959), 226-227.

8. Here it is important to recall that the defeat of Hotspur, another tragic hero who contracted time, came about, in part, through the absence of his father.

9. Plutarch had similar judgments about Antony's inclination to present pleasure. He writes (in North's translation): “… yet, as though all this [Fulvia's wars, Caesar and the Parthians] had nothing touched him, Antony yielded himself to go with Cleopatra into Alexandria, where he spent and lost in childish sports, (as man might say) and idle pastimes, the most pretious thing a man can spende, as Antiphon sayth: and that is, time.” The New Arden Antony and Cleopatra carries the relevant parts of the North-Plutarch text, Appendix V, 258-285.

10. Spencer, 174.

11. Sonnets 116 and 124 are too well-known to quote here.

12. In Essai sur les idées dans l'oeuvre de Shakespeare, (Paris, 1947), 412.

13. Perdita, for instance, is a woman who shares the lofty conception of mind and love. With Hamlet, Antony, Troilus and the sonnets, she believes that “affliction may subdue the cheek / But not take in the mind.”

14. This much-quoted line was part of the final chorus added to Fulke Greville's Mustapha. It can perhaps most conveniently be had in Hebel and Hudson's Poetry of the English Renaissance (New York, 1929), 126.