[In the essay below, Robinson maintains that Shakespeare shows all the characters, but most especially Prospero, struggling against the urgent pressure of time to carry out their schemes within the brief duration of the present moment.]

In discussions of The Tempest, Shakespeare's use of the “unity of time” is usually dutifully referred to and then too often dismissed as unimportant or incidental. I propose to show, however, that the time of The Tempest is very much of the nature of The Tempest. Derek Traversi has pointed out that a time theme is prominent in Shakespeare's last plays: referring to Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, he explains that the passage of time accentuates the problems of maturity and in that way is involved in “the theme of ‘nature’ and its relation to the full civilized state.”¹ But unlike the time of the other late romances, the dramatic time of The Tempest is carefully limited, and precisely defined, as everyone readily notices. By using classical principles of structure and limited time, Shakespeare has given the time theme a special focus and significance in The Tempest. Time is involved in the classical design of the play and in the total context of its conflict, poetry, and themes. In short, time is a central element of the form and meaning of the play.

Recent studies by Bernard Knox and Frank Kermode have explored the classical design of The Tempest in several ways. Knox argues in part that “the fantasy and originality of the setting must be balanced and disciplined by a rigid adherence to tradition in character and plot” and so demonstrates the similarity between The Tempest and the art of classical comedy, particularly in the patterns of character and plot related to the conditions and theme of freedom and slavery.² Kermode refers the structure of the play to the pattern worked out by Donatus and the Renaissance editors of Terence: the first two acts unfold the background and precipitate the various intrigues (protasis); “in the third act the turbulence is intensified” (epitasis); and the fourth act continues the epitasis as it prepares for the catastrophe of Act V.³ This pattern, of course, can be applied in a general way to numerous Renaissance plays, but Kermode sees the pattern in The Tempest to be of a particularly “intensive form,” something of a return for Shakespeare to the “formal structure” of his early comedies. Kermode believes that Shakespeare chose this intensive form for The Tempest because the theme demanded an adult Caliban. The action must begin after the attempt to educate Caliban has failed. Only then can Caliban serve as a criterion for contrasts involving the various themes of love and lust, nature and nurture, the natural and the noble: “He is a measure of the incredible superiority of the world of Art, but also a measure of its corruption.”⁴

The analyses by Knox and Kermode are important contributions to an appreciation of the classical design of The Tempest. However, there is a feature of Roman comedy that should yet be emphasized as a principle relevant to an understanding of the form of The Tempest. This is a crucial relation between structure and time.⁵ The structure of The Tempest involves a movement that defines a present crisis as it has evolved from the past and reaches resolution only when all are aware of the relation of the past and the present.

The specific feature of classical structure that involves this time pattern can be appreciated by reference to the commentators on Terence. Donatus, fourth-century commentator on Terence who was ubiquitously printed and imitated in the Renaissance, made this remark about the structure of Terence's Andria:

We ought to recognize in the examination of the story the poetic skill, how beginning with the last events of the story, he [Terence] returns to the beginning of the fable or origin of the story and brings forth to the spectators an agent who is there for that purpose, whereby the fable is ended. Not only did the tragic and comic writers follow such an order and circle of poetic art or skill, but so also did Homer and Virgil hold to it.⁶

This principle of the circular structure of Terence was also defined by the sixteenth-century commentator Adrianus Barlandus, who was in turn citing Rodolphus Agricola. The comment specifically concerns Andria, Act V, scene iv, where Crito reveals the true identity of Glycerium and so resolves the main problem of the play. To do this, Crito had to relate a history of events that occurred some years prior to the time of the play's action. This is the Barlandus passage:

Rodolphus Agricola in Book II, heading 7, Inventionis Dialecticae, writing of the difference of poetic arrangement from history: It is, he said, the same in comedy or tragedy. If we regard the external form of matters, which are brought forth in action, and which are expressed by the imitation of the persons, the order seems natural: but indeed in considering the whole compass of the story, we see that writers very often begin with events near the end of the story and, as occasion arises, explain by the characters' remarks the events that happened earlier; in this way they sometimes join the first events of the story to the last, as in Terence's Andria the marriage of Pamphilus and Glycerium is accomplished when the shipwreck of Phania is revealed. One who sees these things easily recognizes this order to exist by the art of the author rather than by the natural order of events.⁷

In Terence the one day (two days in one play) of dramatic action becomes, as Donatus and the Renaissance commentators realized, the day wherein a whole history is revealed and resolved, an “order and circle” of life brought to happy consummation.

So it is in The Tempest.⁸ The crisis of the three hours presented in the play's action is actually the crisis of a lifetime. The audience is made fully aware of this basis of the play's form early in the play. In the second scene we learn that “The hour's now come, / The very minute bids thee ope thine ear” (I.ii.36-37).⁹ It is the hour and minute, we learn, in which a whole time in this world is to be revealed, understood, and brought to resolution. It is time for Miranda to be educated to a total perspective regarding the world and what she is heir to, the virtue of her mother, the royal position of her father, his neglect of responsibility, the evil the world has done him (his brother's usurpation), and the good (the charity of Gonzalo and deliverance to the magic island). Prospero's exposition unfolds the life of one generation to another and the course of years passes by in minutes. And this is precisely the point about the play's dramatic time. The three hours of the play's time are an embodiment of the transient course of the world and the intense demands on life that the swift force of time effects. “The hour's now come,” and there is much to know and much to do.

When Ariel enters a little later in this second scene of Act I, there is more exposition of the past incorporated into the crisis of the present. This exposition reveals the history of an elemental spirit, the history of nature personified as fantasy. We learn of Ariel's past enslavement as well as his desire for immediate freedom. The delicate Ariel who has endured in a cloven pine the tyranny of a witch for a dozen years, wandered the salt deep, the North wind, and the veins of the earth for Prospero, who has run the course of nature so far as we know since time began, now commits his freedom and future to the business of a few hours. The full course of Ariel's time escapes no doubt even the prescience of Prospero, but it is clear that whatever it is, it is crucially embodied in the climactic time that the play presents. This time involves the history of an elemental spirit as well as the history of men.

The moment of the play, then, is presented as a moment of the swift passage of time wherein rides the transient and mutable course of mortal lives and the mysterious course of elemental nature. In so far as the time of The Tempest embodies the history of Naples and Milan, it is real. In so far as it is the time of Prospero's providential aegis attended by Ariel, it is magical. The powers of the latter will be used to control the former so that the time and spirit of fantasy will become one with the time and substance of reality. This process is already in motion before the second scene ends. Responding to Prospero's commands for quick action, Ariel quickly brings Ferdinand to Miranda and so precipitates the love intrigue. Prospero began the scene by unfolding one lifetime to Miranda and by the end of the scene he is well on his way in shaping another—that of Miranda's and Ferdinand's.

The complications in the center of the play are in large part determined by the temporal crisis established in the exposition of the play. Bertrand Evans argues that there is no real conflict in the play. He grants that there are moments of simulated conflict, but in the main the dramatic center and interest lie in other features: “the exploitation of discrepancies in awareness” in the characters, and the “god's satisfaction” that the audience shares with the omniscient and all-powerful Prospero.¹⁰ There is no denying the importance of point of view in the play, but to suggest that it replaces conflict can lead to a serious misreading of the play's movement and structure. The most pressing antagonist of Prospero is time itself. However godlike, Prospero is finite. He is limited by time and must be ever alert and in motion with his plans so that he can accomplish his purposes before his time runs out.

This temporal conflict is made clear in the second scene. Prospero's zenith depends upon “A most auspicious star, whose influence / If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes / Will ever after droop” (I.ii.182-84). When Ariel enters, Prospero is eager to know the time of day:

PRO.
What is the time o' the day?
ARIEL.
Past the midseason.
PRO.
At least two glasses. The time 'twixt six and now
Must by us both be spent most preciously.

(I.ii.239-41)

Prospero must reckon the time as exactly as he can, and four hours is the most he can count on. Ariel shares Prospero's eagerness to act quickly, because Ariel wants to win his freedom as soon as possible (I.ii.246-49, 298-300).

The struggle against time is experienced by the several sets of characters. Antonio chides Sebastian that he lets his “fortune sleep” (II.i.216), and so urges him to draw his sword on the sleeping Alonso. The first attempt on Alonso's life having been foiled by Ariel, the conspirators are found in Act III, scene iii, forming new designs on Alonso's life. And they feel that they must hurry: “Let it be tonight” (l. 14); “I say tonight” (l. 18). Ferdinand feels too that he has little time to perform the labors enforced on him by Prospero:

                                                                      O most dear mistress,
The sun will set before I shall discharge
What I must strive to do.

(III.i.21-23)

And Caliban does his best to scurry Trinculo and Stephano to the murder of Prospero. The opportune time is when Prospero sleeps in the afternoon, claims Caliban, and “Within this half-hour will he be asleep” (III.ii.121). In Act V Caliban is still insisting, trying to counterattack the lure of the glittering apparel that has distracted Trinculo and Stephano from their purpose: “We shall lose our time,” warns Caliban (IV.i.248).

Against these attempts to effect purpose in short time are placed Prospero's attempts to control all and to effect his own purposes, again in short time. Ariel is quick to arouse Gonzalo to awake to the threat of Antonio and Sebastian:

While you here do snoring lie,
Open-eyed conspiracy
                    His time doth take.
If of life you keep a care,
Shake off slumber, and beware.
                    Awake, awake!

(II.i.300-305)

In Act III, scene i, Prospero enjoys the successful development of the Ferdinand-Miranda affair, but he reminds himself that he cannot tarry:

So glad of this as they I cannot be,
Who are surprised withal, but my rejoicing
At nothing can be more. I'll to my book,
For yet ere suppertime must I perform
Much business appertaining.

(III.i.92-96)

Again, in Act IV, scene i, Prospero, enjoying the masque celebrating the “contract of true love,” must rouse himself to the challenge of time:

I had forgot that foul conspiracy
Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
Against my life. The minute of their plot
Is almost come.

(IV.i.139-42)

We may wonder why the several characters are in such a hurry: why Prospero must set the world right before suppertime, why Ariel's freedom must be granted soon, why Ferdinand must win his love before the sun sets, why Antonio and Sebastian must act now or tonight, and Caliban within the half-hour. Some motivation for quick action is referred to sleeping and waking. Sebastian, Antonio, and Caliban are motivated to act by the opportunity afforded by the sleep of others, and Ariel in turn must keep Alonso and Gonzalo awake to avert the threat. Prospero must wake himself from reverie. Otherwise the only answer to the question of why all this hurry is that an auspicious star or Fortune says it must be so. Both reasons are suggestive by their very vagueness: the pulse of life is indeed measured by moments of sleeping and waking and limited finally by we know not what time-keeping star. And we must get done what we must get done.

Time comes full circle in the last act of the play. By the end of Act IV the contract of true love has been sealed, the various usurpers and would-be murderers have been pinched and subdued. Says Prospero to Ariel,

                                                                                                              At this hour
Lie at my mercy all mine enemies.
Shortly shall all my labors end, and thou
Shalt have the air at freedom.

(IV.i.263-66)

We are reminded several times in Act V that “this hour” of resolution is just three hours from the time of the storm at the beginning of the play (V.i.4, 136, 186, 223). But the three hours have embodied the course of years. In the trance of Act III, scene iii, and now again in Act V, Alonso and company have their whole histories reviewed and judged. The circular structure of the play is completed when the relation of past and present is explained to all the characters. Prospero reveals himself and completes the vision of a whole history of Naples and Milan transformed into a more promising future by the love of Ferdinand and Miranda. All do not share in the fullness of the transformation. Sebastian and Antonio have been properly harassed and subjected, but their caustic comments at the end about Caliban and his cohorts are hardly signals of a positive reformation. Stephano and Trinculo are more frightened than enlightened, and although Caliban may “seek for grace,” we are not convinced that he will become essentially anything more than what he is, “a thing of darkness.” The incompleteness of Prospero's reform is consistent with the play's emphasis on temporal crisis and temporal limitation. Prospero's magical power has been large: in three hours he has managed to give the world of Naples and Milan a direction based on knowledge and love. But Prospero cannot eliminate the world of flesh and time to which his power has been applied and through which it must operate. And so there remain at the end of the play the characters who have been made subject to benevolent power but who yet remind us of the limitations of human nature, Sebastian and Antonio, Trinculo and Stephano. Caliban's animality is the symbol or summary of these limitations. Prospero, of course, is well aware of the limitations imposed on human effort by the conditions of flesh and time. As he thinks of the nuptials of Miranda and Ferdinand he thinks too of his own grave (V.i.308, 311).

The resolution of The Tempest, then, brings the events of one generation to happy issue and prepares for a better try at life and time in the next. Past and present have come full circle and the future awaits the reign of Ferdinand and Miranda. In The Winter's Tale Shakespeare wandered freely in time and space, broke the bonds of time and space as it were, to impose the romantic vision upon the sequence of life as it passes from generation to generation. There is world enough and time for a Florizel and Perdita to find each other if the magic of dream and pastoral festival are allowed their play. Hermione in a dream directs Antigonus to place the child Perdita on the shepherd shores of Bohemia where sixteen years later the prince will seek haven from the affairs of court and find the lost princess. And yet sixteen years is a short time after all. We ride the wings of choric Time in thirty-two lines at the beginning of Act IV and come swiftly to the moment when young love will exert itself and resolve the troubled past. In The Tempest we are always aware of just how swift the wings of time are. The troubled past must give way to the transforming love of Ferdinand and Miranda, and the world enough and time in which magic has its play is not so much as a day. It is like three hours. It is not my purpose to argue whether the structure of The Winter's Tale or that of The Tempest is more suitable for romantic comedy. But we should appreciate that for The Tempest Shakespeare did adopt the compressed classical structure as an effective form for romantic comedy. The circular structure and the limitation of time are not peripheral features of the play. They define the form and are of the essence of the play's meaning.

The magnificent poetry of the play is the infusing life of this form. From the beginning there is the rhythm of the passing sweep of time on the one hand and on the other the beatific quest of dream and miracle that the energy of life must come to seek. Prospero's exposition to Miranda in the second scene (ll. 22-186) rolls forth the events of “the dark backward and abysm of time” to the moment of the “auspicious star” on the island to which they were directed by “Providence divine.” Ariel's report on his activities in the storm is of similar tempo and theme. He has been all fire and speed, flaming his way like the transient claps of “Jove's lightnings” through the decks and cabins of the ships. His swift thunder has brought the company from Naples and Milan to the charmed haven of the shore; they are “fresher than before” (I.ii.195-237). As Prospero reviews Ariel's past, we again feel the swift course of time emerging in this moment of auspicious crisis. Ariel has endured much, but in Prospero's poetry the past speeds quickly along. Within the rift of the cloven pine Ariel did

                                                                                          painfully remain
A dozen years. Within which space she [Sycorax] died,
And left thee there, where thou didst vent thy groans
As fast as mill wheels strike.

(I.ii.278-81)

Now the fast wheels give way to the providential moment when Ariel imposes charms and visions that will earn his return to total freedom in the elements.

In the center of the play is the poetic drama of Ferdinand and Miranda. Like all young lovers, they direct their energy with such urgency that they would outrun time and make “fresh morning” of night (III.i.33). From their first meeting they have responded to each other as “spirit” to “wonder,” and so the course of their love is blessed with a grace that precludes the troubles of passion and quickly turns the labor of love into a betrothal that promises a most wholesome fruition. Ferdinand thus looks forward to a life that will pass as blessedly as the day that celebrates the wedding:

                                                                                          As I hope
For quiet days, fair issue, and long life,
With such love as 'tis now, the murkiest den,
The most opportune place, the strong'st suggestion
Our worser genius can, shall never melt
Mine honor into lust, to take away
The edge of that day's celebration
When I shall think or Phoebus' steeds are foundered,
Or Night kept chained below.

(IV.i.23-30)

Time will surely pass on to future days, says Ferdinand, but those days will bear the blessing of that time when the miracle of wedded love suspends time in divine celebration. The very gods will attend that moment: Apollo will hold back the day and Hades the night. That time is now: “She is thine own,” says Prospero, and the celebration of Iris, Ceres, and Juno follows.

But the moment, like all moments, must pass. Ferdinand cannot hold back the horses of time. When the masque must give way to other matters, Prospero translates Ferdinand's thoughts on love and time into a larger theme:

You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air.
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself—
Yea, all which it inherit—shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

(IV.i.146-58)

Life, however ennobled, is, after all, as transient as a play, as passing as a dream. Prospero's vision can image a world in solemn splendor, reaching into the clouds, but his wisdom knows that the vision must fade into sleep with the passing of time. Such is the paradox of life and time in the great globe. But the effort of life must go on, and so Prospero, however vexed, turns to his affairs.

The resolution of the play is prefixed by Prospero's famed passage wherein he “abjures his rough magic” and prepares to “break his staff” and “drown his book.” Again the poetry is filled with the consciousness of passing time, a time which has raced swiftly and violently along but which has been benevolently directed. Prospero addresses the elves who have chased the sea and the fairies who have made the midnight mushrooms and the powers who have helped him bedim the noontide sun and rattle thunder. But all comes to rest now in a last creation of “heavenly music” that will work the final charm on the senses of all and fade with the ending of the play, just “as the morning steals upon the night” (V.i.33-68).

This poetry not only brings the theme of passing time to its consummation but also suggests a further dimension about the function of time in The Tempest. The passage has, of course, suggested to many an autobiographical meaning, Shakespeare saying farewell to his career as a dramatist. Whether the passage is specifically autobiographical or not must remain in the realm of conjecture, but there is much in this passage and in the whole character of Prospero to suggest Shakespeare's consciousness of the nature of dramatic art in the composition of this play. Prospero creates or controls the play's intrigues and keeps us informed of his plotting as the action develops. With the help of Ariel he presents another play for Ferdinand and Miranda, the masque. At the end he steps forth in epilogue and asks for applause; he now lacks “art to enchant.” Like those of a playwright, his powers vanish with the end of the play.

If these features of the play suggest a parallel between Prospero's art and power and the art and power of a playwright, then the fact that the play presents just three hours of represented time, about the time it takes to act the play, takes on particular significance. We are reminded of the rule of dramatic time worked out by such Italian theorists as Julius Caesar Scaliger and Lodovico Castelvetro. Castelvetro especially makes much of the equation of actual time on stage and represented time. In his commentary on Aristotle he argues that a dramatic subject should be “an action that happened in a short space of time, that is the extent of place and time just such as the actors actually use in the performance. … It is not possible to make the audience suppose that several days and nights have passed when they have the evidence of their senses that only a few hour have gone by.”¹¹ The statement assumes a realistic stage which serves as it were as an exact replica of life and supposes that the audience will be convinced of the imitative nature of drama only in so far as they can equate the passing of represented time with the passing of their own time as they sit in their seats. Such a concept reduces the illusion of dramatic verisimilitude to the size of a photograph and almost denies altogether any imaginative communication between the play and the audience.

Shakespeare evidently knew something of such theorizing about the relation of dramatic time and real time. In Henry V and in The Winter's Tale he faced the question directly and used the chorus to transcend time and space and to invite an imaginative comprehension that made the stage as big as life, not just as big as the space of the stage or the time of the performance. In The Tempest Shakespeare seized the very technique that Castelvetro defined, but his use of the technique creates quite a different effect from the one Castelvetro had in mind. The three hours' time of The Tempest does not reduce the illusion of the play. It rather expands that illusion, we have seen, to encompass the time of past and present and the time of both reality and fantasy. The three hours of the play's action does suggest the time of a play, but the time of a play as it truly imitates life, as it measures life in the fullness of its transitory course, not as it measures the hours in which the audience sits in the theater. The dramatist does have only three hours or so to fill his stage with life, just as Prospero has only three hours in which to manage the affairs of his world. But what the dramatist can do with his time is as magical as what Prospero can do with his. The time of The Tempest is like the time of drama. It is the time of imaginative prescience and expansive truth. There is much to be done before the vision fades like a dream. Prospero, like a dramatist, well knows that the pageant will dissolve, but if the audience is responsive the play will leave its mark on the days to come. In this sense the play can be like “the edge of that day's celebration” that Ferdinand sees as a moment of timeless suspension leaving its effect on all the time of life. Or, more mysteriously, the play can be “such stuff as dreams are made on,” its little life “rounded by a sleep.” It is in this sense that the time of The Tempest is like the time of drama which is like the time of life.

Much has been said about the relations of nature and art as they are expounded in The Tempest.¹² There is Caliban, brute nature, lower nature as it resists cultivation, nurture, art. There are Sebastian and Antonio, nobility degenerate, nature and cultivation corrupted. There is Miranda, a perfection of nature and education, the blend of natural nobility and artful nurture. It is not my purpose to pursue these relations in all their complexity, but I should like to emphasize one dimension of the theme of art and nature that is relevant to the consciousness of the dramatic illusion exhibited in the play. If, indeed, Prospero is suggestive of the dramatic artist effecting his truth in the time of the dramatic illusion, Ariel becomes not only an expression of Prospero's dramatic power but a symbol of the union of art and nature. In The Winter's Tale Polixenes in defending the beauty and naturalness of the hybrid gillyvors flower argues that “art itself is Nature.” Nature, he claims, gives art the means to create the new flower:

                                                            You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend Nature—change it rather, but
The art itself is Nature.

(IV.iv.92-97)

In The Tempest the dramatic artist seems to find much the same union with the spirit of nature, with Ariel, the wanderer of fire, air, sea, and earth. Prospero and Ariel operate together so intimately that the fruits of their effort are a very perfection of both art and nature. Prospero is the artist mending nature, but his very means is nature: “The art itself is Nature.”

And yet Ariel is a puzzling and evasive figure. At the end his departure to the elements leaves the play with an inconclusive effect. He has served well the romantic vision that turns the course of life into the promise of a brave new world, and he may now wander “Merrily, merrily … Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.” In such a time perhaps there is the fulfillment of life. The artist may rest, and nature is at peace. But the moment of fulfillment passes as it is realized into the mystery of inscrutable time. We might in some sense predict the measure of the new life and time of Ferdinand and Miranda, but the measure of the time and course of Ariel is beyond comprehension.

Notes

1. Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Last Phase (London, 1954), p. 223.

2. Bernard Knox, “The Tempest and the Ancient Comic Tradition,” English Stage Comedy, English Institute Essays, 1954 (New York, 1955), pp. 52-73.

3. Frank Kermode, The Tempest (Arden edition; London, 1961), pp. lxxiv-lxxvi. For a complete study of the five-act structure as evolved by the Terentian commentators, see T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere's Five-Act Structure (Urbana, 1947).

4. Kermode, pp. xlii, li-liv, lxxvi.

5. Kermode suggests some relation between structure and time in the play. He generally associates unity of time with the intensive form of the play, refers briefly to the relation of past and present in the protasis of the play, and draws attention, as I have indicated, to the significance of an adult Caliban presented in the context of his past (ibid., pp. lxxi, lxxiv-lxxvi).

6. “Perspecto argumento, scire debemus hanc esse virtutem Poëticam, ut à novissimis argumenti rebus incipiens initium fabulae, & originem narrativè reddat spectatoribus. authorémque praesentem sibi exhibeat, ubi finis est fabulae. hunc enim ordinem & circulum Poëticae artis, vel virtutis non modò secuti sunt Tragici, Comicíque authores, sed Homerus etiam & Virgilius tenuerunt” (P. Terentii Afri Poetae Lepidissimi Comoediae [Parisiis, 1552], p. 49).

7. “Rodolphus Agricola libro tertio Inventionis Dialecticae cap. 7. scribens de differentia poëtica dispositionis ab historia. Est, inquit, simile in comoedia atque tragoedia. Si intuemur enim faciem rerum, quae deducuntur in actum, quáeque personarum imitatione exprimuntur, naturalis videtur ordo: ad totum verò fabulae complexum respicienti, cum persaepe ab his quae circa finem eius sunt incipiant scriptores, & quae priora sunt personarum verbis per occasionem explicentur, quáeque prima sunt, ea ultimis quandoque iungantur, ut in Andria Terentii simul naufragium Phaniae aperitur, & nuptiae Pamphili Glyceriique confiunt. Haec qui videat, facile est cognitu arte authoris hunc ordinem, non rerum natura constare” (Terentii … Comoediae, p. 193).

8. Other Shakespearean comedies embody the circular structure in varying ways. The discovery of a past history becomes a crucial part of the immediate action in such plays as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and Measure for Measure.

9. My quotations are from the text of G. B. Harrison, ed., Shakespeare: The Complete Works (New York, 1952).

10. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), pp. 326-36.

11. Translated from the 1576 edition of Castelvetro's Poetica d'Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta by Allan H. Gilbert, ed., Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (New York, 1940), p. 310 n. In this passage Castelvetro refers specifically to tragedy, as opposed to the epic, but it is clear that he has in mind the dramatic method generally. See, also, Gilbert, pp. 310, 318. In the latter of these two references Castelvetro is more generous and grants a time of twelve hours for a play, perhaps having in mind the length of the artificial or “daylight” day for the represented time. See also Marvin T. Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism (Urbana, 1946), pp. 80-81, and H. B. Charlton, Castelvetro's Theory of Poetry (Manchester, 1913), p. 84. A passage from Scaliger's Poetices libri septem (1561) which relates represented time and the time of the performance can be found translated in F. M. Padelford's Select Translations from Scaliger's Poetics (New York, 1905), p. 60. Sir Philip Sidney, of course, reflects these Italian theories about dramatic time and place in his Apologie for Poetrie (see G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays [London, 1904], 1, 196-98). Neither Scaliger nor Sidney insists so exactly on the equation of stage time and represented time as Castelvetro does, but they do refer the credibility of the represented time to the passing of real time. Ben Jonson, it is interesting to note, had much to say about the dramatic unities, but he never referred the idea of limitation of represented time to the measure of the acting time. For a study of these and other Renaissance critics concerning the unities, see my unpublished doctoral dissertation, “The Dramatic Unities in the Renaissance” (University of Illinois, 1959).

12. For an extensive study of these themes, see Kermode, pp. xxxiv-lix.