Time and Space: Intermedial Stratigraphy

Abstract

Shakespeare’s poetic language, combined with the relative simplicity of staging in Elizabethan playhouses, has produced some of the most imaginative verbal descriptions of time and space in Western drama. According to Robert Speaight, ‘The Elizabethan stage had the advantage of being anywhere one wanted at any particular moment; it could remind one of locality, and as easily allow one to forget it’ (1973, p. 15). Since the setting of a scene was constantly reestablished through verbal imagery rather than an elaborate set, the actors could easily describe and discard locations, as well as overlay them in the imagination of the audience. Such a set-up had little in common with the realistic and naturalistic tendencies of later drama and theatre; as Styan points out, ‘It is a modern habit to query the place of the action, here an irrelevance for which Shakespeare cared nothing. He wrote a drama that created its own atmosphere and identified its own locality, if it needed to’ (1967, p. 29). Through the various registers of Shakespeare’s dramatic language, the performers shared their perception of the world with the spectators: they established the timeframe of an event, defined its location, and imbued it with emotions.

HAMLET: […] for, look you, how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within’s two hours!

OPHELIA: Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord.

HAMLET: So long?

Hamlet, 3.2.119–22

HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison […]

ROSINCRANCE: We think not so, my lord.

HAMLET: Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

Hamlet (First Folio), 2.2.242, 247–9

ANTONIO: I hold the world but as the world Gratiano,

A stage, where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one.

The Merchan t of Ven ice, 1.1.77–9