Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time

Matthew Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136661631
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

That Shakespeare thematized time thoroughly, almost obsessively, in his plays is well established: time is, among other things, a 'devourer' ( Love's Labour's Lost ), one who can untie knots ( Twelfth Night ), or, perhaps most famously, simply 'out of joint' ( Hamlet ). Yet most critical commentary on time and Shakespeare tends to incorporate little focus on time as an essential - if elusive - element of stage praxis. This book aims to fill that gap; Wagner's focus is specifically performative, asking after time as a stage phenomenon rather than a literary theme or poetic metaphor. His primary approach is phenomenological, as the book aims to describe how time operates on Shakespearean stages. Through philosophical, historiographical, dramaturgical, and performative perspectives, Wagner examines the ways in which theatrical activity generates a manifest presence of time, and he demonstrates Shakespeare's acute awareness and manipulation of this phenomenon. Underpinning these investigations is the argument that theatrical time, and especially Shakespearean time, is rooted in temporal conflict and 'thickness' (the heightened sense of the present moment bearing the weight of both the past and the future). Throughout the book, Wagner traces the ways in which time transcends thematic and metaphorical functions, and forms an essential part of Shakespearean stage praxis.

1 First Breath

An Introduction

A play plucks human experience from time and offers an aesthetic completion to a process we know to be endless. The play imitates the timely in order to remove it from time, to give time a shape.

(Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms)

And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop.

(Hotspur, Henry IV, Part I)¹

Must time have a stop? For Hotspur, as he utters his dying words, it would certainly appear so. All things must end, especially from the point of view of one who is himself ending. But from Price Hal’s perspective— and more important, perhaps, from the perspective of the audience—the answer is less clear. Hal continues on; in fact, he rather seamlessly continues on for Hotspur, completing the dying man’s last words, rounding out his sentence.

HOTSPUR: O, I could prophesy, But that the earthy and cold hand of death Lies on my tongue. No, Percy, thou art dust, And food for–

PRINCE HARRY: For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well, great heart.
(Henry IV, Part I, V.iv.82–86)

In the exchange between Hal and Hotspur, we see both time’s stop and its continuance; and this self-contradictory sense of time is not only a part of what the characters say (a thematic presence), it is also a constitutive part of the work of the stage (a theatrical presence). Indeed, the theatre itself is an enterprise whose ‘stop’ is inevitable and remarkably palpable, as we are never far from the end of the play (or from the beginning, for that matter). At the same time, the theatre is doomed to repeat itself, fated to a kind of endlessness. As Richard Schechner once said of Waiting for Godot, near the end of the play,

the actors, do not move—even when the Godot-game is over, the theatre-game keeps them in their place: tomorrow, they must return to enact identical routines. Underlying the play (all of it, not just the final scene of each act) is the theatre, and this is exactly what the script insinuates—a nightly appointment performed for people the characters will never meet (‘There’s Lots of Time in Godot’, 224).

For Didi and Gogo, and the actors who play them, there is waiting and repetition. For Hotspur, there is death, and time itself has a stop. For Hal, time continues on, with him and in him. For the theatre, there is both finality and endurance.

Such temporal complexities of the stage, especially as they are manifest on Shakespearean stages past and present, are the subject of this book. When we create or attend theatrical performance, we give ourselves over to time; more to the point, we give ourselves over to temporal dissonance, to the tension and the matrix created by colliding temporal schemes. Fictive time meets ‘real’ time; past meets present meets future; the time of the play is carved out of, and radically different from, the time of the remainder of the day. ‘Theatrical time’, as we might call it, is in fact a unique temporal experience, one whose characteristics exceed literary theme and transcend the distinction between the ‘actual’ and the imagined passing of time.

My aim is to describe the most prevalent of these temporal characteristics of Shakespearean theatre, and to arrive at a better understanding of how time worked and works as an essential element of Shakespearean stage praxis. The result must be less than comprehensive—a single book provides insufficient time and space in which to address every temporal detail of the plays or, more generally, of the stage. This study is limited to those facets of temporality that emerge most immediately, and most pervasively, from a stage-oriented study of Shakespeare’s plays. Accordingly, three temporal phenomena dominate the book—temporal dissonance, or as Hamlet puts it so succinctly, time which is ‘out of joint’ (I.v.189); temporal ‘thickness’, or that understanding of the present as being heavily weighted by the past and the future; and temporal materiality, the sense, especially prominent in Elizabethan England, of time being material, having a bodily presence in varying forms. In short, the argument of the book is that these three ideas, taken together, provide an overview of how time works as a theatrical component of Shakespeare’s plays: time is material, thick, and in continual and varying forms of disharmony.

The emphasis on theatricality is significant. The bulk of existing work on time in Shakespeare primarily offers thematic or historicized treatments. This book is intended to augment (rather than overturn) such offerings, and demonstrate the ways in which time, in addition to being a well-ploughed thematic field for Shakespeare, forms a major and essential part of his stage craft. A quick reading of one of the key 20th-century authors on the subject might emphasize the distinction I wish to draw between time as a thematic element of the plays (a more or less literary question) and time as a theatrical element. Ricardo Quinones suggested in 1965 that ‘three basic conceptions of Time emerge’ in Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets; these are: ‘augmentative time, contracted time, and extended time’ (‘Views of Time in Shakespeare’, 328).² He casts augmentative time as Time the destroyer, but he also uses the rubric to include the human strategies—particularly the begetting of children—to battle Time’s destructive force. Contracted time, for Quinones, represents the view of time wherein there is no battle possible against Time’s ravages: ‘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’ (‘Views’, 336). ‘Extended time,’ he suggests, is rife in the late Romances, and operates as a kind of ‘harmonization of the conflicting tensions of the other two’ (‘Views’, 328). Throughout his discussion, Quinones reads all three of these basic conceptions as ideas about time that emerge in the plays, and can be traced in an historical framework; they are ‘concepts’, either moral or psychological— however accurate, they are of the text and the context, not of the stage. Consider, for example, his description of the effect that contracted time has on a selection of Shakespeare’s tragic characters:

Extension of 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. (‘Views’, 336)

Quinones works through the idea in terms of what happens to the characters, but what of the theatre underpins such a convergence? The ‘termini of existence’ here refer to the fictional lives of a Hamlet, a Romeo, a Cleopatra, but the theatre itself—the very act of staging these characters—has its own pronounced termini of existence, which form an elemental part of the theatrical force of a character’s narrative trajectory. The time of the theatre, in other words, is an anchor for the time of the character, and it is the material, experiential buoy for the concepts or views of time that may emerge in the staging of a play.

It is worth noting at this point that throughout the book I prefer the words ‘theatre’ and ‘theatricality’ (and their derivatives), rather than ‘performance’, ‘performativity’, and their associated terms. This is partly because the connotations of performance and performativity are now so multivalent that their use becomes unwieldy. Additionally, ‘theatre’ more narrowly pinpoints the specific brand of performative activity that characterizes Shakespeare’s plays, and the term also more accurately captures the kind of live performance that interests me in this study. Although I believe, then, that many of the claims I make herein could be expanded to include a broader spectrum of performance activity, my chief goal is to focus on that specific endeavour that we associate with the putting up of plays on stages.

This distinction between theatre and performance is most noteworthy in the next chapter, wherein a central claim is that the theatre can heighten our sense of temporality. More specifically, theatre sharpens our awareness of different, often conflicting schemes of time, and of the ‘thickness’ of the present, past, and future. An objection may be readily raised here: is this not true (if it’s true at all) also of dance, or mime, or film—in short, of any ‘performative’ activity? Indeed, is it not true of literature and arts in the broadest of terms? In a broader study, I would suggest that such a claim is indeed applicable to those art forms, though in different ways. Those comparisons, however, are beyond the scope of this book. Here, my intent is not to (re)claim some sense of superiority for or uniqueness of the theatre based on the proposition that it is somehow ‘more temporal’ than its kin, but rather to revitalize our temporal sensibilities in respect to the theatre, and especially to Shakespearean theatre.

The focus of what follows, then, is very much theatrical, and ultimately directed at time as a stage phenomenon and as a dramaturgical underpinning of Shakespeare’s plays. To discuss time on Shakespeare’s stage, though, does require an exploration of time on the stage in general. It also calls for some degree of historical contextualization—time in Shakespearean England was a different thing than it is today. The trajectory of the book, then, is first to establish some key arguments about time and the theatre and about time in Shakespearean England, then to trace those arguments through the dramaturgical make-up of four plays, and finally to examine their use, and usefulness, on today’s Shakespearean stages.

∞

A few years after it was published, G.F. Waller made this critique of Ricardo Quinones’ The Renaissance Discovery of Time:

Part of Mr. Quinones’ problem, like my own, is to define what he means by “Time”. On one page, he can say “Time is change” (428); two pages later, “Time’s nature is its unchangability”. “Time”, as so many treatments of the topic show, can become a category so unhelpfully vague, so much a conceptual imperialist, that it is extendable to include any matter of human concern in which the eager scholar chooses to be interested. (2)

However accurate and understandable a critique this may be of Quinones’ book, it is a bit like taking the ocean to task for being too wet. Shakespeare’s own use of the word ‘time’ was extremely varied, and those variations only multiply when we consider the word in its broader cultural contexts, both then and now. Diverse connotations of ‘time’ surface in the following pages of this work as well, and it would be fruitless to attempt to cram them into only a few set meanings. The definition of ‘time’ is fluid across the Shakespearean canon, and that fluidity should be one of the points to articulate in a study of Shakespeare and time.

That said, my use of the word more often than not refers to an experience of temporality—this may be the speed at which we feel time to be passing, it may be the degree to which we feel time is coherent (the solidity of the relationship between the past, the present, and the future), or it may be a sense of coming face to face with what we might call ‘time itself’. Indeed, this focus on theatrical time as a sensory (or extrasensory) encounter forms the basis of the argument that time is manifest on the Shakespearean stage. The senses with which we perceive time are not necessarily the five physical senses, but nor is the encounter merely one of intellectual understanding. I have in mind here something akin to Gaston Bachelard’s statement that ‘Forces are manifest in poems that do not pass through the circuits of knowledge’ (xvii). As time gains form and shape on the stage, it does so most often in ways that are neither literally seen or heard, nor only understood; rather, such temporal embodiment acts more holistically upon our sensory and cognitive modes of perception, turning the abstraction of time into a present—that is, immediate, in both the here and the now—reality.³

In this respect, the argument that time is embodied or manifest on the Shakespearean stage runs as an undercurrent through many of the other arguments in the book. Though I initially treat temporal dissonance and temporal thickness as characteristics of theatrical time in their own right, the movement of the book weaves these traits through that of temporal embodiment, especially in the analyses of the plays in Chapter 4 and of the contemporary stage in Chapter 5. What emerges, I hope, is a picture wherein we see these three traits of time in Shakespearean theatre as distinct from one another, but we also understand temporal thickness and temporal dissonance as means of making time manifest on the stage.

Although I privilege this experiential connotation of the word ‘time’, it is also important to note that Shakespeare often employed the word to mean ‘an age’ or a segment of historical chronology: thus his famous depiction of the players in Hamlet as ‘the abstract and brief chronicles of the time’ (II.ii.504), or Hamlet’s lament that ‘the time is out of joint’ (I.v.189). A crucial point to bear in mind is that while one meaning may dominate in any given circumstance (either in the mouth of a Shakespearean character, or in my usage in this book), other meanings are usually carried along with the utterance. When Hamlet, then, proclaims ‘the time is out of joint’, we can take to heart most editors’ notes that he means ‘the age’ is unsettled. But as we’re dealing with a slippery term and a dramatic poet, we cannot help but hear, for instance, ‘time itself is broken’.

That latter connotation, in fact, crystallizes one of my two key arguments about theatrical time: that it is, especially in Shakespeare, dissonant and ‘rough’, rather than smooth and harmonious. The second main argument has its sum in Lady Macbeth, who upon reading her husband’s letter describing the witches’ prophecy, proclaims that she is ‘transported beyond this ignorant present, and now feel[s] the future in an instant’ (I.v.54–56). Where Hamlet captures the sense of dissonant time in the theatre, Lady Macbeth articulates the way in which the theatre renders the close proximity—indeed, the dimensional layering—of past, present, and future. On both fronts, it is the experience of time as well as an idea about time that is germane here; as Hamlet gives voice to the notion that the time is out of joint, the theatrical experience itself underscores any cognitive understanding of the words. This is not merely a case of an audience giving itself over to the fiction of the stage, and processing the idea that in Hamlet’s world, something is deeply, cosmically wrong; rather, the theatre itself operates (temporally, at least) by presenting an audience continually and inherently with dissonant time schemes. As an audience member—or an actor, for that matter—I may not feel this disjointedness precisely or explicitly when Hamlet utters his lines; but the whole of the theatrical enterprise has me primed for such a temporal phenomenon. How it does so makes up half the focus of Chapter 2.

The other half of that chapter’s focus is trained on ‘feeling the future in an instant’. This is, in Edmund Husserl’s terms, the ‘thickness’ of time; or more specifically, it is the thickness of the present moment. Robert Dostal crystallizes Husserl’s characterization of the present moment like this:

In contrast with this one-dimensional view of time, Husserl offers us a three-dimensional view. The present, for him, is not the nondimensional point of the instantaneous now. Rather, we might say that the present is ‘thick’ to the extent that, within the present, we find both the past and the future. (146)

This description of the present is a particularly apt way to conceive of theatrical time—it is a temporal experience wherein the present moment always bears the weight of past and future, and their extreme manifestations of beginning and end, birth and death. Husserl argues that this thickness is the nature of the present moment in our everyday lives, but we have formed myriad ways of glossing over that thickness; the theatre, I suggest, does not so readily allow us such a gloss. On the contrary, it ensures that what has been and what’s to come are never far from view.

Dissonance and thickness are two chief traits of theatrical time; whatever else we might say about time on the stage, it is my contention that we find some form of these two temporal phenomena across the spectrum of stage activity. As I discuss in Chapter 5, the degree to which either trait is a prevalent part of the theatrical experience alters with varying stage conventions; but that each is a foundational element of theatrical time is the argument that I forward here. It follows, then, that they are phenomena that must be attended to when asking after time in Shakespearean theatre, and they are, in fact, elements of stage ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. First Breath: An Introduction
• 2. Time and Theatre
• 3. The Bodies of Time
• 4. Time and the Play
• 5. Time and the Contemporary Shakespearean Stage
• 6. Final Words: An Ending
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index