SOURCE: Westerweel, Bart. “The Dialogic Imagination: The European Discovery of Time and Shakespeare's Mature Comedies.” In Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice, edited by Jean R. Brink and William F. Gentrup, pp. 54-74. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Westerweel employs Mikhail Bakhtin's theoretical model of the chronotope (literally “time-space”) to analyze temporal and spatial concepts in Twelfth Night and, to a lesser degree, in As You Like It. Westerweel identifies a variety of time-space relationships in these two comedies that help define mood and genre, but his primary emphasis is on the distinctive chronotopes of each of the characters in these plays.]

The aspect of time in Shakespeare's work has received much critical attention. Book-length studies of several kinds have been devoted to the subject in recent years: to its philosophical ramifications (Turner), to its comparative context (Quinones), to its function in the structure of the plays (Kastan).¹ The number of articles and occasional references to the topic is legion. To say that time destroys in the sonnets is as much a critical commonplace as it is to remark that time heals in the late romances.

Most criticism tends to emphasize a development in Shakespeare's attitude towards time that seems to result in some kind of harmony. ‘By the end of Shakespeare's dramatic career he seems to have come to terms with time. The destroyer, devourer and tyrant of the Sonnets has become a more mysterious but less malignant force’ (Turner, p. 173). ‘The romances see time from a vantage point that enables pattern and purpose to emerge from the succession of “nows” that an individual must experience’ (Kastan, p. 29).

In view of these critical tendencies it is small wonder that the function of time in Shakespeare's mature comedies has suffered relative neglect. With regard to these plays the frequently quoted opinion of Helen Gardner seems to have set the pace for most later critics: ‘Tragedy is presided over by time, which urges the hero onwards to fulfil his destiny. In Shakespeare's comedies time goes by fits and starts. It is not so much a movement onwards as a space in which to work things out: a midsummer night, a space too short for us to feel time's movement, or the unmeasured time of As You Like It or Twelfth Night’.² Most critics writing since Gardner voiced these ideas have approached the function of time in these plays in terms of wholesale solutions to a general problem. Thus Halio sees the forest of Arden as representative of timelessness, whereas for Wilson it represents subjectiveness versus the objective time of the court. Lyons analyses Feste's song ‘O mistress mine’ in Twelfth Night, emphasizing the tension between human love and mortality.³

In this article I intend to approach the ways in which time functions in two of Shakespeare's mature comedies, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, not so much in terms of Shakespeare's development as a playwright, nor to achieve any single interpretation, but as a variegated phenomenon that functions at many levels, revealing attitudes that are characteristic both of Shakespeare's dramatic presentation and of Renaissance ideas.

My analysis takes its starting-point from an aspect of Helen Gardner's words, the consequences of which have been insufficiently taken into account in subsequent studies. Gardner equates the way time operates in the comedies with ‘a space in which to work things out’ as illustrated by the measured ‘space’ of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the ‘unmeasured time’ of As You Like It and Twelfth Night. I have two comments in response to Gardner's analysis: first, there is a subtle shift, halfway through the quoted passage, away from time as a historical category within which characters can be said to move and to which they are answerable in their socio-political behaviour. In this type of metaphor time can indeed be said to ‘preside’, and it is not surprising to find that it functions like this in the tragedies rather than in the comedies, if only because it is one of the distinctive features of the genre. However, when Gardner describes time in the comedies as a ‘space in which to work things out’, this refers not to time ‘presiding’ over characters but to time as it ‘resides’ in the mental landscape of individual characters rather than in the framework of a social group or nation. When time is approached in this way the generic distinction between comedy and tragedy is no longer helpful, because this kind of time, a psychological category, operates in both, notwithstanding differences of degree.⁴

My second comment has to do with the equation itself. Time is space, says Helen Gardner, and this is, of course, one of the ways in which we shape our awareness of the passing of time. But the equation is a metaphor for an ontological problem, as Spengler made clear: ‘Space “is”, but “Time” on the contrary is a discovery, which is only made by thinking’.⁵ The concepts of ‘space’ and ‘time’ are an inseparable pair, the relation between which has not only intrigued philosophers but inspired poets as well:

Had we but World enough, and Time,
This coyness Lady were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long Loves Day.

In this famous carpe diem poem, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, Marvell tries to persuade his beloved to go to bed with him. Her reluctance would not bother the speaker in the poem if he had infinity and eternity at his disposal. But he hasn't:

          But at my back I alwaies hear
Times winged Charriot hurrying near:
And yonder all before us lye
Desarts of vast Eternity.(6)

The abstraction of the passing of time is expressed in forceful spatial metaphors: ‘which way / To walk, and pass our long Loves Day’ and ‘Desarts of vast Eternity’. In our own century T. S. Eliot explored the contradictory and paradoxical nature of human time in all its complexity in Four Quartets. These are, for instance, the first lines of ‘Burnt Norton’:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

And in the description, or evocation rather, of the essence of Little Gidding, time and space merge in one image: ‘Here, the intersection of the timeless moment / Is England and nowhere. Never and always’.⁷ Without resorting to our experience of time, without ‘placing’ it within a series of events, its definition would seem to remain beyond our grasp. As Augustine muses,

What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled. All the same I can confidently say that I know that if nothing passed, there would be no past time; if nothing were going to happen, there would be no future time; and if nothing were, there would be no present time.

(Confessions, 11.14)⁸

He touches here on an important philosophical problem: is it meaningful to say, as we commonly do, that time passes or would it be more correct to say that we move in time? Wittgenstein thought it nonsense to talk about time passing, since the only reality that we experience is the passing of events.

But we are here dealing not with philosophy in a pure form, but with artistic expression of ideas in language. In poetry, if I am allowed a generalization, time and space usually merge in forceful images such as Marvell's or Eliot's, or, for that matter, such as we find in abundance in Shakespeare's sonnets, where one finds either love or art at the ‘intersection of the timeless moment’. But the genre in which the spatial element of time is explored to its fullest extent is the novel. One need only recall the works of some of the great experimenters with the novel form, Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, and, more recently, of novelists as different as Mann, Kundera and Powell, to realize the extent to which the overlapping domains of time and space have dominated the history of Western literature.⁹

The most profound analysis of the time-space element in literature that I have come across is a lengthy essay by Mikhail Bakhtin, originally written while he was in exile in Kazakhstan in the 1930s and published in English in 1981, with a new conclusion written in 1973. The essay is called Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics.¹⁰ In the essay Bakhtin coins the word chronotope, which he borrows from mathematics and physics, and defines its meaning for literary discourse as follows: ‘We will give the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (p. 84). In the glossary added to the English translation of Bakhtin's essays the editors underline the special value of the term for literary analysis: ‘The distinctiveness of this concept as opposed to most other uses of time and space in literary analysis lies in the fact that neither category is privileged; they are utterly interdependent. The chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring’ (p. 426).

The core of Bakhtin's essay is an impressive analysis of Rabelais' major work, but the structure is historical, starting with the ‘adventure-time’ (p. 87) of the Greek romance, the main characteristic of which is that ‘all of the action … all the events and adventures that fill it, constitute time-sequences that are neither historical, quotidian, biographical, nor even biological and maturational’ (p. 91). This adventure-time is dominated by chance entirely. Its space is abstract. The adventure chronotope is characterized by ‘a technical, abstract connection between space and time, by the reversibility of moments in a temporal sequence, and by their interchangeability in space’ (p. 99). All other types of novels discussed subsequently in Bakhtin's essay are characterized by varying admixtures of adventure-time with other types of time (everyday time, biographical time, historical time, etc.) and corresponding spatial categories, culminating in the analysis of the Rabelaisian chronotope, which is characterized by a ‘passion for spatial and temporal distances and expanses’ (p. 168), a feature Rabelais' writing shares with Shakespeare's and Cervantes'. Bakhtin also uses the word chronotope to characterize individual motifs within the plots of novels, motifs such as ‘meeting/parting, loss/acquisition, search/discovery, recognition’ (p. 97) and more localized motifs like ‘the chronotope of the road’ (p. 98) or ‘the chronotope of the threshold’ (p. 248). Essential is the matrix-like character of the interrelation in which a particular value of time intersects with a particular spatial value. As Bakhtin indicates, the theory of the chronotope also provides an excellent tool for the analysis of character, since it allows us to recognize that at a certain point of development the individual life sequence gains predominance as the ancient matrices in which impersonal time and indeterminate space played a major role recede to the background.

Although Bakhtin focuses on the novel, other genres are not excluded from analysis along the lines outlined in his essay, and he refers to them in passing. There are three elements in Bakhtin's argument that are particularly relevant for our concerns in the present investigation: a) the idyllic chronotope (pp. 224-42) and, more particularly, the love idyll, whose basic form is the pastoral; b) the dialogic character of the chronotope; and c) the role of laughter.

Before we return to Shakespeare's plays and see how the analysis of the time aspect is furthered by making use of Bakhtin's model, a general point should be made. The three main advantages of a Bakhtinian approach over the above-mentioned studies of time in Shakespeare are its comprehensiveness, hermeneutic openness and historical dimension. The model is comprehensive in the sense that it invites the integration of structural elements of setting, plot and character with linguistic elements of rhythm, sound and metaphor into the discussion of the time element. It is hermeneutically open in that it does not favour one interpretation above another, does not prefer the chronotope of one character above that of another and does not subsume the various chronotopes under the heading of one dominant chronotope. The model is non-patriarchal and does full justice to the essentially heteroglot nature of language. The historical dimension, finally, appears in the primacy given to context rather than text.

But let us return now to the comedies themselves. When we consider the spatial aspect of both plays in terms of location, the action of As You Like It takes place mainly in the idyllic chronotope of Arden, with the town chronotope as a backdrop, whereas Twelfth Night is situated in town, with the name of the country, Illyria, as a background with pastoral connotations (it occurs as a pastoral place name, for instance, in Ovid and Virgil).¹¹ On the surface these connotations do not, perhaps, seem to play a major role in the latter play but, as we shall see shortly, it is a more significant chronotope than has been recognized.

If one's approach is generic, the differences between the plays are also more prominent than the resemblances. There is nothing in As You Like It to parallel the names of characters like Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek or Malvolio that figure in the subplot of Twelfth Night. These remind one of the type of comedy that tended to supersede the romantic comedy in popularity towards the end of the century: the satiric comedy of humours, propagated by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's coeval and rival playwright. In the comedy of humours human vice is satirically exposed and the audience is invited to share the laughter on stage at the final public downfall of the humour characters. In the romantic comedy, on the other hand, the pleasure of the audience focuses on the disguises, mistaken identities and misguided demonstrations of love that invariably end in the satisfaction of harmony restored by a number of marriages.

It is a commonplace to argue that the satiric elements in Twelfth Night were incorporated as an attempt on Shakespeare's part to emulate a rival and highly popular kind of comedy. Shakespeare must have been one of the first to notice the growing popularity of the satiric comedy, since his own company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, had performed the first of Jonson's comedies of humours, Every Man in His Humour, in 1598, and with great success. As You Like It is, then, the last comedy of the purely romantic kind that Shakespeare wrote, while Twelfth Night is a mix of satiric and romantic comedy, an experiment he did not repeat.

If one does not concentrate on the differences generated by either location of genre—and of course the two are interconnected—but on the idyllic chronotope itself, the outcome is quite different. Twelfth Night, too, contains a number of significant references to the ideal of the pastoral world, the first in Act Two. Viola has put on her Cesario disguise and is firmly installed in Orsino's court. The latter begins the scene in the way we are used to from him:

Give me some music. Now good morrow, friends.
Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song,
That old and antic song we heard last night;
Methought it did relieve my passion much, …

(2.4.1-4)

Feste the clown, who had sung the song the night before, is fetched and the Duke commands him to sing it once more:

O, fellow, come, the song we had last night.
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain;
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
Do use to chant it: it is silly sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love,
Like the old age.

(2.4.42-8)¹²

It is clear that the love chronotope of the Duke is a chronotope of the past, the ‘golden age’ when the world was simple and innocent. Even though the Duke and the Clown have the same habitat, their chronotopes vary widely. Feste's chronotope is firmly anchored in the present, while the Duke's is folkloric in origin, defined by a unity of place in which temporal boundaries are blurred. It is a static chronotope of the past as viewed from the present.¹³ Since the Duke's love chronotope is of the past, the future (with Olivia) he daydreams about is drawn into that chronotope and will never come true, because its matrix does not match that of an individual, biographical life lived in the here and now.¹⁴

The clash between the two chronotopes—Orsino's and Feste's—becomes manifest when Feste's song, quite contrary to expectations, turns out to be an extremely melancholic mourning song in which the unhappy lover laments his unreciprocated love and wishes to die and be buried:

Come away, come away death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid.
Fie away, fie away breath,
I am slain by a fair cruel maid:
          My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
                    O prepare it.
.....Not a flower, not a flower sweet,
On my black coffin let there be strewn:
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown. …

(2.4.51-6; 59-62)

Judged by the standard of Feste's chronotope, the Duke's yearning for the pastoral world is tantamount to escapism. This kind of juxtaposition between incompatible chronotopes is not uncommon in Shakespeare's work. In 3 Henry VI, for instance, the king soliloquizes about the idyllic life of the shephered on top of a hill in Yorkshire, while the battle of civil war is raging around him:

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 make the hour full complete;
How many hours bring about the day;
How many days will finish up the year;
How many years a mortal man may live.
When this is known, then to divide the times:
So many hours must I tend my flock;
So many hours must I take my rest;
So many hours must I contemplate;
So many hours must I sport myself;
So many days my ewes have been with young;
So many weeks ere the poor fools will ean;
So many years ere I shall shear the fleece:
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!

(2.5.20-40)

In the idyllic chronotope time and space intersect in the matrix of the shepherd's life. Its natural rhythm is measured by the most natural of time-measuring devices, the sundial. The life envisaged by Henry stands in strong relief against the unnatural event of the rebellion.

As in the pastoral vision of Henry VI, in Twelfth Night, too, time and space merge in the idealized image of the golden age, which is far removed from the requirements of Orsino's daily life. Towards the end of the play the Duke's speech about marriage indicates that his chronotope seems to have undergone a change:

When that is known, and golden time convents,
A solemn combination shall be made
Of our dear souls. Meantime, sweet sister,
We will not part from hence. Cesario, come;
For so you shall be while you are a man;
But when in other habits you are seen,
Orsino's mistress, and his fancy's queen.

(5.1.381-7)

Having said this, Orsino leaves the stage along with everyone else, except for Feste, who ends the play with yet another song, about life, time, the weather and the world. ‘Golden time’ is a phrase full of symbolic significance. Its most direct referent is the occasion of the announced weddings, which is the crowning event of any romantic comedy. In this case the word ‘convents’ means ‘is convenient, suits’. In an allegorical interpretation ‘golden time’ can be seen as a crowned victor over the entanglements of the plot. ‘Convents’ would then mean ‘causes to come’ or ‘summons’ (NED, s.v. ‘convent’, 3 and 5). Finally, the phrase can be seen as a confirmation of the ‘golden age’ chronotope, suggesting the restoration of innocence and harmony in the marriage ceremony. The Duke's chronotope has changed, from an idyllic chronotope of the past to a biographical chronotope of the present. Fancy and reality merge in the last of the quoted lines: ‘Orsino's mistress’ (biographical time) and ‘his fancy's queen’ (idyllic time) have now become part of the same matrix.

In the chronotope of Twelfth Night music occupies a special place. Music is rhythm, measure, time, and each of the characters in the play reacts differently to it according to his or her own chronotope. The different significance music has for the Duke and for Feste the Clown is a case in point. The Duke is not essentially different from the modern devotee of digital delights, to whose taste the compact disc player caters by providing multiple possibilities to avoid listening to the music in the sequence intended by the composer as laid down in the musical score. What Orsino lacks in consistency and staying power in listening to music is amply made up for in the power of the language in which his melancholic ennui is expressed:

If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more;
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute! So full of shapes is fancy,
That it alone is high fantastical.

(1.1.1-15)

Overstimulation of the senses without any substantial emotion to support it will leave one in a state comparable to that of the sensual lover in the ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, with a ‘heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead and a parching tongue’. However, Shakespeare's message in Twelfth Night is not that ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter’, as the speaker in Keats's poem claims. In the play the imagination is not so much presented as an alternative for material reality but as a faculty that builds on that reality. This perspective is embedded, for instance, in the music of Feste, the wise fool, who, unlike the Duke, prefers singing to easy listening:

What is love? 'Tis not hereafter,
Present mirth hath present laughter.
          What's to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty:
          Youth's a stuff will not endure.

(2.3.48-53)¹⁵

Feste speaks of the actuality of love in the present, the Duke of a future state in images that derive solely from heated ‘fancy’. ‘Fancy’ may provide many beautiful images, but it is not a faculty that mediates effectively between reality and dream. Whereas Orsino listens to music while waiting for the fulfilment of love, Feste uses the measure of music to indicate that the proper time for love is the here and now. Music also plays a distinctive role in the subplot. Malvolio complains about the noisy, nightly revels of Sir Toby and his cronies: ‘Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?’ Sir Toby responds aptly: ‘We did keep time, sir, in our catches’ (2.3.92-4). Obviously the measure of the drinking songs is incompatible with the life rhythm of the Puritan steward. Malvolio is called a ‘time-pleaser’ (2.3.147) by the revellers, an opportunist with an eye on the main chance.

Apparently, there is a clearly marked difference between chronotopes of the night and of the day. A similar distinction is made between Prince Henry and Falstaff in 1 Henry IV. When Falstaff asks Henry, ‘Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?’ (1.2.1), the Prince responds:

… What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.

Falstaff readily admits that Hal is right:

Indeed, you come near me now, Hal, for we that take purses go by the moon and the seven stars, and not ‘by Phoebus, he, that wand'ring knight so fair’. …

(6-15)

In the language of the play Falstaff is the night's knight, while Hal is the sun-prince.¹⁶ The chronotope of the moon is used for nightly rendezvous, for revelling and robbery, the chronotope of the sun for weddings, ceremonies and majesty.

There is a third chronotope in Twelfth Night, the chronotope of the clock. Clock-time belongs to Malvolio, for instance, whose imagination runs wild at the thought of being the master of the house: ‘… I frown the while, and perchance wind up my watch, or play with my [Touching his chain]—some rich jewel’ … (2.5.59-61). For a Puritan like Malvolio the acme of hedonism is to use his watch—the outward sign par excellence of devotion to duty—for a toy, an embellishment instead of the measure of his existence. The chronotope of the clock does not fit in with the moon-time of the revellers nor with the sun-time of those that are about to get married. The clock as an emblem of moderation appears again later in the play in Olivia's bitterly ironic reaction to Viola/Cesario's rejection of her overtures:

                                                                                                    Clock strikes.
The clocks upbraids me with the waste of time.
Be not afraid, good youth, I will not have you,
And yet when wit and youth is come to harvest,
Your wife is like to reap a proper man,
There lies your way, due west.
VIOLA.
Then westward ho!

(3.1.131-6)

Clock-time and love-play are an ill-matched couple. The striking of the clock awakens Olivia's consciousness to the painful fact that she is about to break the solemn oath she had sworn to mourn her dead brother for seven years. Actually Olivia's chronotope resembles Orsino's. Both chronotopes are of the past; Orsino's is an idyllic chronotope, Olivia's a chronotope of death. Both characters are confronted with the limited efficacy of their chronotopes in the face of life lived in the present, which requires a love chronotope of meeting or of the threshold (compare Bakhtin, pp. 248f).

The clock became one of the attributes of the personified cardinal virtue of Temperantia from the early Renaissance onwards, based on the new type of mechanical clock developed after the verge escapement had been invented in the fourteenth century. The escapement (Hemmung in German) of the mechanism ensures the regulation of the force exerted on the gear wheel by the weights or pendulum by the retarding action of a pair of metal leaves that alternately catch in successive notches of the wheel. Long before the clock became an attribute of Temperantia, the infringement of time on the natural rhythm of life had become a literary topos, as is exemplified by the following excerpt from a poem by the Roman poet Plautus (d. 184 b.c.):

The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sun-dial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions. When I was a boy,
My belly was my sun-dial; one more sure,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when 'twas proper time
To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat.
But now-a-days, why even when I have,
I can't fall-to, unless the sun give leave.
The greater part of its inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, creep along the streets!(17)

Finally, there is the notion of providential time in Twelfth Night, as expressed by Viola and already commented on earlier. While the Clown's chronotope incorporates the intuitive feeling for the value of time as (present) experience, Viola's chronotope encompasses the idea of time as a personified abstraction in control of the fate of man: ‘What else may hap, to time I will commit …’ (1.2.60), and: ‘O time, thou must untangle this, not I’ (2.2.39). For Viola time is not a series of disconnected moments as it is for Touchstone nor is it a focal point for unfulfilled desires as it is for Orsino. Her words evince an awareness that time is an entity with its own laws, the effects of which require stoic acceptance since they are beyond human control.

It would be a gross simplification to suggest that Viola's chronotope is providential only. Her time-space also contains love time and practical time. The particular quality of her personality manifests itself in the wide range of time perspectives combined with a wider spatial reach than that of any other character in the play. In her the chronotopes of travelling and of the threshold—passing from one world of events to another—are epitomized. Viola is a traveller in the play in two senses. She (and her brother) have arrived in Illyria from a distant country. In this sense she is a traveller of the world. This in itself is in marked contrast with the feeling of confinement and immobility that is characteristic of virtually all other characters. Neither Orsino nor Olivia budge from their self-inflicted exile from the world. Similarly, in the subplot Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria and Malvolio stay put in the one place where they hope to thrive. The only escape from this confinement is provided by Feste's music—the only art form that is purely spatial, since it does not take up any room—but the movement in the real time of the characters is entirely Viola's doing. By commuting between the houses of Orsino and Olivia and by breaking through the self-created barriers of their worlds, Viola becomes the representative in the play of the chronotopes of the threshold and of meeting.

Although the aspect of time in As You Like It has elicited far more critical commentary than time in Twelfth Night, an analysis of time-space, based on the intrinsic connectedness between the two as outlined in Bakhtin's theory of the chronotope, has not been attempted for the play as far as I know. I shall restrict myself to a few observations, mainly of a comparative nature. As was suggested before, there is much more to connect than to keep apart As You Like It and Twelfth Night, if one does not concentrate on generic aspects of the plays. This is particularly true of the chronotopes of the two plays. Twelfth Night is a satiric town comedy with romantic overtones, As You Like It a pastoral with ironic effects. In As You Like It the idyllic chronotope is prominent and the chronotopes of the individual characters are measured against the pastoral ideal. The latter is introduced in the words of Charles the wrestler. When asked the whereabouts of Senior, the banished Duke, he says:

They say he is already in the Forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world.

(1.1.114-9)

Duke Senior expresses the conventional view of the pastoral as it is seen from the perspective of the court:

Now my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?

(2.1.1-4)

Orlando, arrived more freshly from the court than Duke Senior, regards nature with a more hostile eye. He calls it ‘an uncouth forest’ and expresses his surprise that the Duke and his retinue of civilized people ‘… in this desert inaccessible, / Under the shade of melancholy boughs, / Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time’ (2.7.110-12).

In As You Like It the cyclic aspect of natural time, which in Twelfth Night is explored in song only, finds an outlet not only in the chronotope of music but also in the rhythm of life in the forest and in the comments of the shepherds:

Under the greenwood tree,
          Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry note
          Unto the sweet bird's throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither,
          Here shall he see
          No enemy,
But winter and rough weather.

(2.5.1-7)¹⁸

In the final act two pages sing a song announcing the forthcoming marriages with appropriate references to love and the seasons and full of images of expectation and fertility:

It was a lover and his lass,
          With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino,
That o'er the green corn-field did pass,
          In spring-time, the only pretty ring-time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding,
Sweet lovers love the spring.
.....And therefore take the present time,
          With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino,
For love is crowned with the prime,
          In spring-time. …

(5.3.14-19, 32-5)

As in Twelfth Night, music provides the proper rhythm and measure for some characters, not for all: ‘… We kept time, we lost not our time’, says one of the pages. In Touchstone's chronotope singing has more negative connotations: ‘I count it but time lost to hear such a foolish song’ (5.3.41-2, 43-4). Touchstone's reaction is not surprising in view of his efforts, earlier in the play, to determine the correct hour with his sundial. Clock-time and natural time are juxtaposed time and again in the play, the most famous example being the dialogue between Rosalind and Orlando:

ROS.
I pray you, what is't o'clock?
ORL.
You should ask me what time o'day; there's no clock in the forest.

(3.2.294-6)

This is followed by Rosalind's speech about the relativity of time in the experience of life. Her catechism begins thus:

ROS.
Then there is no true lover in the forest, else sighing every minute and groaning every hour would detect the lazy foot of Time, as well as a clock.
ORL.
And why not the swift foot of Time? Had not that been as proper?
ROS.
By no means sir. Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I'll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, and who he stands still withal.

(3.2.297-305)

For some people time crawls, for others it flies, depending on their particular situation and the emotional state connected to that situation. Rosalind's philosophy of time is the counterpart of the famous monologue of Jaques about the Seven Ages of Man, earlier in the play:

                                                            All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then, the whining school-boy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. …

In this chronotope human life ends like this:

                                                            Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

(2.7.139-49; 163-6)

Time and space combine in a series of pictures presented both with cynicism and humour. When one views time, as Jaques does, as a succession of random events that are not related to each other in a meaningful way, there is not much sense in human aspirations either. Jaques' speech makes it easier to understand why Touchstone, who represents laughter in the play, speaks with such quasi-solemnity about his dial in his first encounter with Jaques in the forest.

‘Good morrow, fool’, quoth I. ‘No, sir’, quoth he,
‘Call me not fool, till heaven hath sent me fortune’.
And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And looking on it, with lack-lustre eye,
Says, very wisely, ‘It is ten o'clock.
Thus we may see’, quoth he, ‘how the world wags:
'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,
And thereby hangs a tale. …’

(2.7.18-28)¹⁹

Touchstone's speech forms a satirical version of Jaques' cynical philosophy and the obsession with the moment-by-moment annihilation of time expressed in it.

The basic difference between the two chronotopes is that in the one represented in Jaques' speech time is a succession of static scenes. Although each scene is vividly portrayed, the scenes are contingent, not causally connected; ‘the world’ is anywhere and time is viewed from the outside. Rosalind's chronotope, on the other hand, is dynamic: time ‘travels’ and the view of time is from within, from the inner experience of man.

In the space dimension of As You Like It the chronotope of the road plays an important role. Unlike Twelfth Night it does so in the movement from the court to the forest and back, but, similarly to Twelfth Night, it plays at least as important a part in the language of the characters, thus pointing the way to the chronotopes of their individual lives. ‘Travelling’ from one place to another, from city to country or from seashore to town house, is a distinctly different experience for Rosalind or Viola than it is for Jaques or the Duke Orsino. The two female protagonists adjust to their new situations with practicality and action, while Orsino does not move at all and for Jaques physical movement, instead of adding meaning to his life experience, just contributes to his scepticism and melancholy which he defines as

a melancholy of mine owne, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundrie contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

(4.1.15-19)

In Rosalind's chronotope space has a different connotation:

A traveller! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's. Then to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands.

(4.1.20-3)

The debate continues:

JAQUES.
Yes, I have gained my experience.
ROS.
And your experience makes you sad. I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad, and to travel for it too!

(4.1.24-7)

As Smith points out, the ‘travels to which Jaques refers the origin of his scepticism are equally likely to have been its consequence, for travel and exploration degenerate into habit. When the senses are dazzled by a ceaseless and rapid change of objects, the intellect has no time to discriminate between them, the will no occasion for choice, so that in the end a man becomes capable of neither’.²⁰

Travelling in As You Like It has a moral dimension as well. The old servant Adam follows Orlando to the forest and almost dies as a consequence of his selfless loyalty. Orlando expresses his gratitude in conventional images of the Golden Age:

O good old man, how well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world,
When service sweat for duty, not for meed.
Thou art not for the fashion of these times,
Where none will sweat but for promotion,
And having that, do choke their service up
Even with the having; it is not so with thee.

(2.3.56-62)

When Rosalind is banished from the court and Celia accompanies her cousin and friend, they decide to take Touchstone along with them:

ROS.
But cousin, what if we assay'd to steal
The clownish fool out of your father's court?
Would he not be a comfort to our travel?
CELIA.
He'll go along o'er the wide world with me. …

(1.3.125-8)

Loyalty is here expressed in spatial terms.

A final word about Touchstone. Like Feste, his fellow fool in Twelfth Night, Touchstone represents the chronotope of laughter, but with a notable difference. Touchstone's chronotope is dominated by language, whereas that of Feste is dominated by music. Feste adds to the chronotopes of the play and extends its discourse by the specific time-space of music, while Touchstone subverts the language of other characters, thus providing a satiric counterpoint to the dominant discourse.

In the title of my essay I use the phrase ‘dialogic imagination’. In Bakhtin's essay ‘dialogic’ has a specialized meaning. The editors and translators of his work define Bakhtin's use of the word in this way: ‘A word, discourse, language or culture undergoes “dialogization” when it becomes relativized, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same things. Undialogized language is authoritative or absolute’ (p. 427). The juxtapositions, contrasts and counterpoints in the discourse of As You Like It and Twelfth Night analysed in the light of Bakhtin's theory of the chronotope fully meet this definition of the dialogic. Virtually every inhabitant or visitor in Illyria and the Forest of Arden lives in a different world of time, which makes the fact that these mutually exclusive worlds somehow end in the harmonious state of marriage even more marvellous than it is.

The dialogic and heteroglot nature of Shakespearean discourse is one of its distinctive features. It is also one of the most frustrating aspects for the hermeneutic critic in search of interpretive closure. So much the better, for it forces him back to where he began, to the language itself.²¹

Notes

1. Frederick Turner, Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972); David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (London: Macmillan, 1982).

2. Helen Gardner, ‘As You Like It’, in More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett (London: Longmans, 1959), pp. 17-32.

3. Jay L. Halio, ‘“No Clock in the Forest”: Time in As You Like It’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 2 (1962): 197-207; Rawdon Wilson, ‘The Way to Arden: Attitudes Toward Time in As You Like It’, Shakespeare Quarterly 26 (1975): 16-24; Lyons, ‘Twelfth Night: The Illusion of Love's Triumph’, pp. 44-68.

4. Compare James Smith: ‘… the essential difference between comedy and tragedy may perhaps be this sort of difference: not one of kind, I mean, but of degree. … In comedy the materials for tragedy are procured, in some cases heaped up; but they are not, so to speak, attended to, certainly not closely examined’; see ‘As You Like It’, Scrutiny 9:1 (1940): 9-32. This quotation is from p. 17.

5. The Decline of the West, trans. C. F. Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1926), p. 122. Compare also the historically oriented account of time in Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).

6. In The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Helen Gardner, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 250-2.

7. Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), p. 189 (‘Burnt Norton’) and p. 215 (‘Little Gidding’).

8. Trans. and ed. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 264.

9. The title of Anthony Powell's cycle of novels, Dance to the Music of Time, is an especially expressive image of the close relation between time and space.

10. The essay is part of The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

11. The note in the Arden edition of Twelfth Night to the name Illyria (1.2.2) refers to Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses, 4.701. See Twelfth Night, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975), p. 8. Another relevant reference to the name Illyria in a pastoral context is to be found in Virgil's Eclogues, when the poet addresses the shepherds' Muse:

    Tu mihi, seu magni superas iam saxa Timavi,
    sive oram Illyrici legis aequoris, …

    (8.6-7)

    (But where are you for whom I sing? Skirting, by now, the mighty barrier of Timavus' rocks? Coasting the shores of the Illyrian Sea? …)

    Virgil: The Pastoral Poems, trans. E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), pp. 70-1.

12. All references to Twelfth Night and other plays by Shakespeare are to the Arden editions (London: Methuen), unless specified otherwise.

13. Compare Bakhtin: ‘The unity of the life of generations (in general, the life of men) in an idyll is in most instances primarily defined by the unity of place, by the age-old rooting of the life of generations to a single place, from which this life, in all its events, is inseparable. This unity of place in the life of generations weakens and renders less distinct all the temporal boundaries between individual lives and between various phases of one and the same life’ (p. 225).

14. Olivia's chronotope, like that of the Duke, is of the past; it is a chronotope of mourning that prevents her from loving in the present.

15. Compare Charles R. Lyons, ‘Twelfth Night: The Illusion of Love's Triumph and the Accommodation of Time’, in Shakespeare and the Ambiguity of Love's Triumph (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 44-68.

16. Compare Hal's famous soliloquy:

    I know you all, and will awhile uphold
    The unyok'd humour of your idleness.
    Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
    Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
    To smother up his beauty from the world,
    That, when he please again to be himself,
    Being wanted he may be more wonder'd at
    By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
    Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
    .....I'll so offend, to make offence a skill,
    Redeeming time when men think least I will.

    (1.2.190-8; 211-2)

17. Quoted in Boorstin, p. 28.

18. Time and impermanence are clearly part of the pastoral world of Arden. For this variant of the pastoral convention see Erwin Panofsky's seminal essay, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 340-67.

19. Touchstone's speech about the passing of time is reminiscent of Macbeth's reaction to the report of his wife's death: ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time; / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death’ (5.5.19-23). Macbeth at this stage is ‘caught in a continuous and meaningless present’; see Westerweel, ‘Macbeth, Time and Prudence’, Dutch Quarterly Review 16 (1986): 313-25.

20. Smith, ‘As You Like It’, pp. 13-14. Smith continues by pointing out that travelling for Jaques means ‘that he frequently changes, not his surroundings, but his interlocutor. He indulges the habit of gossip, which is that of a traveller immobilized’ (p. 14).

21. This article and the paper on which it is based were prepared in the course of a Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Wassenaar (1989-90).