The Strong Necessity of Time: The Philosophy of Time in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Literature [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9783110806434, 9789027932549

Citation preview

DE PROPRIETATIBUS LITTERARUM edenda curat C.H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University Series Practica

90

THE STRONG NECESSITY OF TIME The Philosophy of Time in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Literature

by

G. F. WALLER Dalhousie University

1976

MOUTON THE HAGUE - PARIS

© Copyright 1976 Mouton & Co. B.V., Publishers, The Hague

No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

ISBN 9 0 2 7 9 3 2 5 4 9

Printed in the Netherlands

For Jennifer Thy firmnes makes my circle just, And makes me end, where I begunne.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface A Note on Editions Used

Page 1 6

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

7

I. II.

9

III.

Time and the Elizabethans " F r o m Tymes and Moments to Eternitie": the Medieval Tradition "Subject to Change and Unconquered": the Impact of New Philosophy

15 29

PART TWO: THREE LATE ELIZABETHANS

45

IV. "The Pillours of Eternity": Mutability in Spenser V. Sir Walter Ralegh and "the consuming disease of time" . . VI. John Donne's Changing Attitude to Time

47 57 67

PART THREE: SHAKESPEARE

79

VII.

"In Divers P a c e s with Divers P e r s o n s " - Time in Shakespeare's Early Works Vin. "The Rough Torrent of Occasion" - Mutability in Shakespeare's Political World IX. "Things in Motion" - The Time-Worlds of Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra X. "Time will Venom Breed" - Time and Tragedy in Macbeth and Hamlet XI. "The Great Gods" - Time, Tragedy, and Providence in King Lear XII. "Both Joy and T e r r o r " - Time and Providence in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest

81 97 109 123 137 151

Conclusion

169

Bibliographical Note

173

Index of names

174

PREFACE

Certain concerns have gripped men's imaginations more strongly than others. Every age has had its own particular angst, but incessantly the mystery and power of time has perplexed and challenged the creativity of poets, novelists, and dramatists. The nature and meaning of time is also a recurring theme of philosophical speculation. Indeed, the attempt to grasp time's mystery as it passes seems to be one of man's perpetual metaphysical and imaginative preoccupations. The present study attempts to show how philosophical and literary trends were interacting in the crucial years of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. The importance of such a study was suggested by L. C. Knights over thirty years ago when he wrote that "an essay might well be written on the Time theme in Shakespeare" to illuminate some important aspects of Shakespeare's genius and Elizabethan mind. (1*) My study is greatly indebted to Professor Knights, with whose generous encouragement the doctoral dissertation on which it is based was undertaken. I hope that I at least partly carry out what he advocated in an article in TLS, July 26, 1963, where he wrote that "the study of literature cannot remain selfcontained . . . there is important work waiting to be done 'on the frontiers', where the study of literature joins hands with the study of history, philosophy, theology, etc. But it will need to be done by those who really know what literature is, not by specialists in other subjects who merely look to literature for documentation. " The importance of time in Renaissance thought and literature has, of course, been widely acknowledged. In particular, two books have recently appeared on a topic similar to my own, Frederick M. Turner's Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (Oxford University Press, 1971) and Ricardo J. Quinones' The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Harvard University Press, 1972). As my treatment of the philosophical and theological issues at stake should make clear, I find Turner's work superficial and arbitrary in its choice of moral and philosophical themes. A superficial skim over a few philosophical commonplaces is no substitute for the detailed exploration into the intellectual hinterland demanded by the topic. His choice of Shakespeare's plays, too, unnecessarily narrows the topic and there are too few adequate references to other Renaissance writers to show the great changes occurring in Renaissance ideas on the nature and meaning of time. Ricardo J. Quinones' book is a more ambitious work altogether, and reading it prompts me to repeat the remark of Coleridge which appears, regrettably slightly misquoted, on pp. 89-90 of his book: What is the right, the virtuous Feeling, and consequent action, when a man having long meditated & perceived a certain Truth

2 finds another, [ ? & / a] foreign Writer, who has handled the same with an approximation to the Truth, as he had previously conceived i t ? - Joy!(2*) Many scholars have wrestled, like Mr. Quinones, with the Renaissance's recording and exploration of its own sense of contingency and mutability, and yet even his book does not provide what he calls for, a "comprehensive and organic study of time in the literature of the Renaissance" (x). (3*) The theme itself, indeed, is a constant source of frustration; we cannot bite it to the core. It is easy enough to accumulate a vast a r r a y of contrasting and contradictory r e f e r e n c e s to Time, the destroyer, the fulfiller, the cannibal, the bountiful, the thief, in Renaissance literature. What m a t t e r s more, and is more difficult, is to pin down the subtleties of tone or the discrete intellectual or emotional contexts into which such commonplaces a r e put by individual w r i t e r s and a r t i s t s . And f u r t h e r we have to convey the ways in which as Mr. Quinones notes, "for the men of the Renaissance, time is a great discovery" (3). P a r t 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, " T i m e ' s nature is its unchangeability" (430). "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. All events occur by definition, in time, and all may be defined in t e r m s of time. Nevertheless, as I shall show, the problem of t i m e ' s nature and meaning has traditionally been granted a conceptual and metaphysical autonomy, and it was moreover a category to which Renaissance w r i t e r s turned naturally to embody or explore their f e a r or unease before a sense of intellectual or emotional c r i s i s . "For, who s e e s not", as Spenser wrote, "that Time on all doth pray. "(4*) Mr. Quinones emphasises rightly that f o r P e t r a r c h , Shakespeare, or Spenser, time is "more an aspect of p e r sonality than a theological world view" (15). Mutability was not simply a convenient abstraction but bit deeply into everyday experience. And yet such subjective outcries reflect more than personal angst. They gather weight f r o m the shared intellectual history of the age, and it is in their treatment of the history of ideas and the swirling c u r r e n t s of feeling that underlie ideas that previous studies of time in the Renaissance have significantly failed. Mr. Quinones' aim, f o r example, is admirable, "both analytical and historical . . . to p r e s e r v e the individual integrity of an author" and "to bring out the profile and essential dynamics of a historical period . . . " (xii-xiii). Despite a skimpy p a r a p h r a s e of selected pieces of Spenser and occasional crude readings of Shakespeare, the individual authors Mr. Quinones chooses, ranging f r o m Dante through Milton, a r e illuminatingly handled. He gives in particular exciting analyses of P e t r a r c h and Montaigne. But woefully often, when he attempts to "draw the lines of continuity and change" (xii) the author reveals a regrettable superficiality. F o r Mr. Quinones, history moves in easily discernible phases, even j e r k s : in the seventeenth century, for instance, "northern Europe moves into the post-Renaissance world and southern Europe d e clines" (13), the latter observation presumably r e f e r r i n g to those "countries that did not move into the modern world, like Italy or Spain" (499).

3

Eras are constantly distinguished in such clearcut and almost animistic ways. We read of "the medieval neglect of time" (20), while Dante is "in the early days of temporal awareness" (37); by the fourteenth century however, "time operates in a quasi-Manichean way" (463) which must have been somewhat disorientating for it. While at one point in the argument the "End of the Renaissance" (443) is symbolized by Prospero's renunciation of his magic (c. 1612-3), nevertheless by the mid-seventeenth century, Milton's Eve still has motives which are "quintessentially Renaissance" (472). Behind such historiographical crudities lies the alluring spectre of Burckhardt, who, eulogized by Mr. Quinones as "our premier Renaissance historian" (481) inspires such glamorous generalizations about the Renaissance spirit, with its "image of human possibility" (198), to which Dante is the "first witness" (22); in familiar Burckhardtian garb, Dante and Petrarch are asserted to have "something of Ulysses in both of them, and much of the adventurousness of the Renaissance" (132). Like Burckhardt, too, Quinones sees the Renaissance in terms of the secularization of ideals; a Burckhardtian view of fame and generation as key forces by which men seek to overcome time dominates the analysis of his chosen writers. What is consistently and disastrously played down in this particular book is the whole theological dimension to the Renaissance understanding of time. Augustine is occasionally mentioned, Boethius and even the New Testament are referred to briefly. But it is not enough and indeed, I would argue, it is impossible, to separate out time as - to revert to his terms - "an aspect of personality" from time as part of "a theological world view" (15). Even if the discussion takes us beyond the boundaries of literary criticism, the issues a philosopher or theologian like Bruno or Calvin deals with are central to the Renaissance poets' apprehension of time. There is another important matter of methodology raised by Quinones' study. As well as relying heavily on an impressionistic quasi-Burckhardtian historiography, Mr. Quinones tries to stress the importance of his theme by a series of modern parallels. These range from the crude - an analogy between tragic structure and "the events of Dallas" (363), to potentially illuminating parallels with Kierkegaard and Heidegger. To be effective, parallels with modern writers require more than a sprinkling of existential terminology, but an important point of procedure is worth considering. As Wilbur Sanders has recently suggested, mere contemporaneity of "background" material is in itself no guarantee of relevance. (5*) Modern preoccupations with time may be as important to our understanding of Shakespeare as Bruno or Montaigne: part of what makes a writer great is, after all, his uniqueness, even his strangeness, in his own time. And it is certainly true that from Blake onwards an influential tradition of modern writers has dwelt almost obsessively on the temporality of man's life as the dominant fact of his existence. Culturally, at the very least, as Thomas J . J . Altizer comments, "at bottom, the 'time' that modern man knows in his deepest existence is a 'time' created by the death of God". (6*) In the writings of Bruno and Shakespeare in particular, we are at the fascinating point where a cultural revolution, involving the most sensitive minds of a generation, is

4

gaining impetus and self-consciousness. In the course of my study I attempt to suggest ways in which this has occurred. It is a measure of the suggestiveness of a book like The Renaissance Discovery of Time that it prompts its readers to further speculations. But too often in studies of time in Renaissance literature, time has been treated merely as a fashionable literary motif; in Quinones' study, for instance, more important underlying matters have been made peripheral to the book's major interests in the Burckhardtian commonplaces, "children, secular education, and fame" (13). Necessarily, one must be selective, but despite some surface relevance of these motifs, Mr. Quinones is quite unconvincing in his attempt to make them out as central to the works he analyses, let alone to be the dynamics of the whole age. In addition, there are some weird distortions as he straightjackets literary works into his thesis. Hermione's disappearance in The Winter's Tale becomes the "maternal sacrifice that the woman must undergo when she enters into marriage" (438), and in similar, somewhat male chauvinist, vein, it is asserted that "Hermione's innocence ended symbolically with the birth of Perdita" (439). Moreover, to read Shakespeare's sonnets as an "endorsement of the ways of generation" (259), and with the histories as "the greatest Renaissance expression of the newly won faith in progeny" (305), is to lift the first 18 sonnets disastrously out of their context. It is also to ignore both the way those sonnets qualify, by tone and movement, the very assertion of procreation's powers of immortality; and as well, to overlook the urgent insistence recurring through the sequence that although beauty, love, and art may make time meaningful within particular experiences or moments, man, like the rest of the universe, is subject to time. Even Nature herself, as I shall argue Her audit, though delay'd, answer'd must be, And her quietus is to render thee. (7*) The subject of time is, therefore, fascinating, important, and elusive. In pursuing it, Mr. Quinones, like so many others, has raised weighty questions, although as I have suggested many more important ones have been ignored which my own study will hope to cover. So, on the one hand, to return to Coleridge's admonition, it is both reassuring and delightful to know one is writing a study of what is familiar and fruitful ground to potential readers. But on the other hand, there is a disappointment, when considering such previous studies; so much that is vital has been ignored. The definitive study remains to be written. I hope that my own, while not at all exhausting the requirements of the subject, at least burrows more deeply into neglected aspects of it. Parts of this study have previously appeared as follows: part of the Preface in The Dalhousie Review, part of chapter two in Neophilologus, chapter six in Studies in English Literature, chapter eleven in English Miscellany, and part of chapter twelve in The Southern Review. P e r mission to reprint this material is gratefully acknowledged in each case. Among the many other acknowledgments due for the undertaking and completion of this study, the following should be mentioned: the administrators of the Commonwealth Scholarship scheme; the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge for electing me to the

5

Donaldson Bye-Fellowship in 1968-9; the staffs of the Cambridge University Library, particularly in the Anderson Room, the Bodleian L i brary, and the British Museum. Help and encouragement has flowed from teachers, colleagues, friends and students, especially L. C. Knights, the late J. C. Reid, Peter Dane, K. J. Larsen, R. I. V. Hodge, J. E. Stevens, E. H. Gould, J. C. A. Rathmell, G. R. Hibbard, A. M. C. Brown, G. W. Gardner, and M. D. Wheeler. Grateful thanks are also due to my mother, Mrs. J. E. Waller, for retyping a completed manuscript. My greatest debt is, however, to my wife. She alone knows the excitement out of which this book grew, and to her it is thankfully dedicated. G. F. W. NOTES (1*) Explorations (1945), 71. (2*) Kathleen Coburn, ed., The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, II (London, 1962), 2546-2547. (3*) See my review article, "The Strong Necessity of Time", The Dalhousie Review, LII (1972), 469-477, from which some of the following remarks are adapted. (4*) F § , Vn.vii.47. (5*) The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge, 1968), 318-319. (6*) Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred (Philadelphia, 1963), 63. (7*) Sonnet 126.

A NOTE ON EDITIONS USED

Quotations from Shakespeare's works are taken from one-volume William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (1951). In citations, act, scene and line numbers but no page numbers are given, and titles of the plays are abbreviated as currently recommended by SQ, and Shak Stud. Quotations from Donne's poetry are taken from the two-volume The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J . C. Grierson (1912), cited throughout as Poems. In the notes the first and second Anniversaries are cited as 1 Anniv and 2 Anniv respectively. Quotations from Donne's sermons are taken from the ten-volume The Sermons of John Donne, ed. G. R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley, 1953-62), cited in the notes as Sermons. A number of other abbreviations or cue-titles are used in the notes as follows: SCG ST Aristotle City of God Confessions

St. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. English Dominican Fathers, 3 vols. (1923-9). St. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. English Dominican Fathers (1911-22). Aristotle, Great Books of the Western World 8, 9: Aristotle, 2 Vols. (Chicago, 1952). St. Augustine, Of the Citie of God, trans. J[ohn] H[ealey] (1610).

St. Augustine, The Confessions of S. Augustine, trans. Sir T. Matthew (1620). Jean Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion, trans. Institutes T[homas] N[orton] (1561). Plato Great Books of the Western World 7: Plato (Chicago, 1952). Great Books of the Western World 17: Plotinus (Chicago, Plotinus 1952). Great Books of the Western World 5: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Sophocles Euripides, Aristophanes (Chicago, 1952). Spenser Works The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J . C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (1912). The Faerie Queene is cited as FQ. In all texts quoted, the original spelling has been retained, except that all archaic u, uu and i's have been regularised as v, w, and j . The place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated.

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

I

TIME AND THE ELIZABETHANS

"Time" is a category of human experience that needs some close d e f i nition. So much can be subsumed under it that it might easily be rejected as an unhelpfully vague abstraction, a conceptual imperialist that can be extended to include any matter of human concern in which the eager scholar chooses to be interested: all events occur, by definition, in time, and therefore all events may be defined in t e r m s of time. But the nature and meaning of time has been a traditional subject of philosophy; it has been granted, in works of numerous philosophers and poets, a conceptual or even metaphysical autonomy which justifies it as a viable independent subject for discussion. Moreover, as future chapters will demonstrate, it was a category of philosophical explanation to which many Renaissance w r i t e r s turned naturally in o r d e r to embody or explain their f e a r or unease before a sense of intellectual or emotional c r i s i s . Time is an absolute psycho-physical continuum - as when men speak of past, present, future, hour, season, y e a r . Yet time also embodies the more subjective sense of m e n ' s different awareness of t i m e ' s passing flowing, speeding, dragging, wasting. Men's awareness of time cannot easily be separated f r o m its being, as it were, p a r t of their own existence. Newton claimed that "absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself and f r o m its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external", (1*) but this is not time as it seems to affect man's inmost being, his anxieties or d e s i r e s . "Time", says Rosalind in As You Like It, "travels in divers paces with divers p e r s o n s . " P e r h a p s because man is never separated f r o m the mystery of his own being, his awareness of time and change can never be satisfactorily expressed in objective, scientific t e r m s . Although, as Hans Meyerhoff observes, "succession, flux, change . . . seem to belong to the most immediate and primitive data of our experience", and "the question, what is man, therefore invariably r e f e r s to the question of what is time", (2*) it s e e m s nevertheless that men in primitive societies demonstrated their awareness of time largely by elaborate attempts to unmake it, particularly by their participation in r e c u r r i n g myths and rituals which were designed to abolish or t r a n s f o r m the effects of time. F o r such societies, "time is recorded only biologically without being allowed to become 'history' - that is, without its corrosive action being able to exert itself upon consciousness by revealing the irreversibility of events". (3*) What was alone real f o r such societies was the sacred which is timeless, and the reality of life depended on m a n ' s participation in expressions of this timeless world. It was in the higher religions, especially Judaism, that time and history were f i r s t made the object of conscious reflection outside the a r e a of myth and ritual. As time p e r se entered human consciousness, then men seem to have become more concerned with its s l i p ping away and especially with the anxiety of death - an anxiety, as Paul

10

Tillich points out, not necessarily tied to the moment or details of death, but with the uncertainty of having to die sometime in the future, and having to live through each moment with this anxiety. (4*) In this way, the slipping away of time became a r e c u r r i n g subject in song, meditation, poem, and philosophy. As A. N. Whitehead put it: That "all things flow" is the f i r s t vague generalization which the unsystematized, barely analysed, intuition of men has produced. It is the theme of some of the best Hebrew poetry in the P s a l m s ; it appears as one of the f i r s t generalizations of Greek philosophy in the f o r m of the saying of Heraclitus; amid the later b a r b a r i s m of Anglo-Saxon thought it reappears in the story of the sparrow flitting through the banquetting hall of the Northumbrian king; and in all stages of civilization its recollection lends its pathos to poetry. (5*) The nature of time became a fundamental problem of Greek metaphysics; the Christian Middle Ages, mixing together a strange compound of Biblical and Greek concepts, found time indescribable except as a pale i m i tation of God as it slipped away f r o m them. In Augustine's words: "What then is tyme? If no man aske me the question, I know; but if I pretend to explicate it to any body, I know it not. "(6*) Many modern w r i t e r s , living in an age where the concept of a transcendental r e a l m complementary to time seems to many minds to have effectively disintegrated, have been deeply aware of the p r e s s i n g need to find a way to give meaning to the seemingly i r r e s i s t i b l e flow of time towards death. F r o m Kierkegaard onwards, an influential tradition of modern philosophy has dwelt on the temporality of man's life as a dominant and pressing factor of existence. Thomas J . J . Altizer, following Nietzsche's terminology, comments: "at bottom, the 'time' that modern man knows in his deepest existence is a 'time' created by the death of God". (7*) Explicitly f o r such w r i t e r s , and perhaps effectively for most twentieth-century men, what is most r e a l is the profane, the temporal, the absoluteness of time. It seems that certain epochs have been more deeply concerned with time than others. This, I suggest, is true of the Renaissance - p a r t i c u larly, in England, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Elizabethan and Jacobean literature gives widespread signs of a p a r t i c u larly acute concern with the nature and meaning of time which, I shall argue, is connected with a profound, if gradual, intellectual revolution. The medieval religious tradition shows a remarkable surface homogeneity in the answers given to questions about the nature and meaning of time: generally, as chapter two will demonstrate, it was felt that time was created by God, continued and guided by His Providence, and that the individual's life on earth was merely an exile's flight f r o m the destructive flux of time to the stable timelessness of God's Eternity. The apparent homogeneity of the medieval tradition is, in fact, made up of a number of diverse elements, and in the sixteenth century in particular, there are clear signs of a major breakdown in this intellectual uniformity. The old certainties continue to be strongly advocated, but other possibilities become more insistent. It is not a question of a l a r g e - s c a l e rejection of a certain world-view - intellectual changes of this magnitude do not occur

11

instantaneously - but rather that the spectrum of intellectually viable answers seems to be widening. In approaching my study of time in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, therefore, I take the word 'time' to have two main, interconnected senses. First, time is an abstract category or continuum of experience, as when philosophers speak of Time as opposed to Eternity, as in the remark of the sixteenth-century Huguenot theologian Philippe de Mornay: "what greater contraries can there be, than time and eternitie". (8*) Second, there is time in the sense of the passing of moments, the inevitable mutability and change men perceive in their lives, as evoked by Shakespeare's Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end . . . . What is especially important for an understanding of an age's attitudes to time are the intellectual issues that are felt to be closely connected with time and the philosophical contexts into which these issues are put. Two interconnected and recurring matters underlie much of the complex, frequently confused, evidence I have found: first, an insistent preoccupation with mutability, the sheer fact of change in life, the threats it seems to pose to human security and permanence and the consequent problem of finding permanent values in an everchanging world; and second, an unease about the relationship between time and a non-temporal, transcendent Eternity, traditionally expressed in Christian theology by the doctrine of Providence. These two issues, time as mutability, and the relationship between time and Providence, will occupy a great deal of space in this study, and a brief preliminary discussion is in order. For the Elizabethans, mutability could mean insecurity, change, decay, the ceaseless wearing-away of life. It is vividly represented in Spenser's Titanesse: What man that sees the ever-whirling wheele Of Change, the which all mortall things doth sway, But that therby doth find, and plainly feele, How MUTABILITY in them doth play Her cruell sports, to many mens decay?(9*) In the first three chapters, I analyse the widespread sense of mutability in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, while the question of finding permanent values in a mutable world lies as a major preoccupation within many of the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The other main issue I shall be consistently concerned with, the question of the relationship between time and an eternal, transcendental Providence, is of even more fundamental importance. A reading of sixteenth-century treatises, tracts, and sermons bears out Roy W. Battenhouse's claim that "the doctrine of Providence was the chief apologetic interest" of the age. (10*) The traditional Christian doctrine, which saw God as creating and directing time towards a foreordained goal, still dominated most sixteenth-century thought: in the words of Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas:

12 God's the maine spring, that maketh every way All the small wheeles of this great Engine play. (11*) In particular, the Calvinist doctrine of Providence, which considerably tightened the relationship between divine Providence and time, was extraordinarily influential upon late sixteenth-century thought when the nature of God's providential control over time became a widespread and even explosive intellectual issue. It provoked a wideranging debate to which, as I shall show, Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded and in some sense contributed. Time is a traditional subject of philosophy, but it is not a purely a b s t r a c t problem. Because time is very much bound up with men's sense of their own inner selves - their awareness of growing old, with the f u l filment or disappointment of their d e s i r e s or ideals, f o r example - the role of the poet, both as s e e r and maker, becomes as crucial as that of the philosopher, in confronting and exploring man's sense of temporality. The crucial role of the great a r t i s t , it has been said, is not to abstract or objectify, but r a t h e r to embrace experience with "a willingness to meet, experience and contemplate all that is most deeply disturbing in our common f a t e " . (12*) If abstract intellectual issues do emerge f r o m Shakespeare's works, f r o m say, his sonnets or King Lear, they do so only because they seem to grow out of a profound imaginative concentration on human realities such as growth, change, decay and death that a r e f a r f r o m abstract. In Donne or Spenser, although the philosophical issues which a r i s e f r o m the Anniversaries or The F a e r i e Queene, for instance, a r e much more obviously p r i o r to the particular work of a r t than they a r e with Shakespeare, nevertheless, as I shall demonstrate, they too a r e keenly aware of and responding to their age's preoccupation with time. It is important to realise what I hope this study will prove: f i r s t , that Shakespeare, Spenser, Ralegh, Donne and their contemporaries had a c c e s s to and were affected by an increasing variety of attitudes towards time; but, second and what is equally important, I want to relate these attitudes to their works without falling into a deterministic historicism. The ultimate value of related background studies - indeed of all c r i t i cism - is that it may open wider human contexts in the experience of wrestling with l i t e r a t u r e . Indeed, as Wilbur Sanders suggests, contemporaneity of "background" material is no guarantee in itself of relevance to particular w r i t e r s . (13*) In fact, time, mutability, and the nature or even existence of eternity a r e questions which many modern philosophers have seen as being as p r e s s i n g and crucial to twentieth-century men as to the men of the Renaissance. It is, of course, essential not to t r a n s f o r m Shake.speare into either a modern philosopher of angst and thrownness or a conservative sixteenthcentury m o r a l i s t . P e t e r Ure relevantly warns that when moral s y s t e m s a r e discovered in Shakespeare's plays "too often they turn out to have an unsurprising likeness to those most favoured by twentieth-century academics and professional c r i t i c s " . (14*) But if it is demonstrable that many late sixteenth-century w r i t e r s were deeply concerned with time and mutability and the problem of finding permanence within human life, then the preoccupation of twentieth-century w r i t e r s with the same or

13 closely related problems may be equally relevant to the discussion. The t e r m s in which their answers to the problems are f r a m e d may differ; the questions and anxieties that underlie them may be significantly similar. Temporality is, as I have suggested, one of the constant and universal f a c t o r s that any attempt to find a meaningful pattern in human experience must always take into account. NOTES (1*) Sir Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles, t r a n s . Florian Cajori (Berkeley, 1934), 6. (2*) Time in Literature (Berkeley, 1955), 1 - 2 . (3*) Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History, t r a n s . Willard R. T r a s k (New York, 1959), 74-75; the whole chapter, 51-92, is relevant h e r e ; see also S. G. F . Brandon, Time and Mankind (1951), 23. (4*) Systematic Theology, I (1953), 215. (5*) P r o c e s s and Reality (Cambridge, 1929), 295. (6*) Confessions, XI. xiii, 604. (7*) Mircea Eliade, 63. (8*) A Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian Religion, t r a n s . Sir Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding (1587), 139. (9*) Spenser, FQ, VII. vi. 1. (10*) Marlowe's Tamburlaine (Nashville, 1941), 86; cf. Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea, 110-117. (11*) B a r t a s His Devine Weekes and Works, t r a n s . Joshua Sylvester, introd. F r a n c i s C. Haber (Gainesville, 1965), F i r s t Week, Seventh Day, 236. (12*) L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes (1959), 45. (13*) Sanders, 318-319. (14*) P e t e r Ure, Review of P e t e r G. Phialas, Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies, Shak. Stud, HI (1967), 311.

II "FROM TYMES AND MOMENTS TO ETERNI TIE": THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION 1 The generalization, Blake remarked, is the m a r k of the idiot. (1*) But a study of the intellectual history of an age ought to state some initial generalizations, if only for the sake of clarity. I shall argue, then, that the apparent uniformity of medieval thought about the nature and meaning of time shows clear signs in the sixteenth century of a gradual breakdown. I shall suggest that the widening of the spectrum of p o s sible answers to questions men raised about time is both evidence and partial cause of a profound uneasiness about the nature of time, its purpose and its effects on human life. This uneasiness emerges in a constant preoccupation with time in Elizabethan and Jacobean l i t e r a t u r e . Time, I have already suggested, has a special kind of status a s a subject of philosophical discourse because it is bound up with so much that affects man's inner nature, in p a r t i c u l a r with its inevitable end death. Although death and the passing of time a r e constants of human experience, certain epochs seem more deeply aware of the threat of non-being than o t h e r s . Huizinga wrote of the later Middle Ages that "no other epoch has laid so much s t r e s s . . . on the thought of death. An everlasting call of memento m o r i resounds through life. " Paul Tillich claimed that "if one period d e s e r v e s the name of the 'age of anxiety' it is the pre-Reformation and Reformation". (2*) But if, as Huizinga claimed, in the two previous centuries men's minds were dominated by the idea of death, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries it is man's awareness of time that becomes a particularly emphatic anxiety: time, which, in the words of J . P . Camus, the early seventeenth-century Catholic Bishop of Belley, " m o r e quicke then quicksilver, runs away being p r e s s t , and slides out of his hand, that strives to hold it. In naming it we loose it, so subtile and glib is it by nature. " "The life of man", wrote the essayist Owen Feltham, "is the incessant walk of time, wherein every moment is a step towards death. Even our growing to perfection, is a p r o g r e s s to decay. Every thought we have, is a sand running out of the glass of life. " The destructiveness of time is a cliché in Elizabethan poetry, where time and death are frequently associated as the ultimate a r b i t e r s of human pretensions: Mans life is well compared to a feast, Furnisht with choice of all Varietie: To it comes Tyme; and as a bidden guest Hee s e t s him downe, in Pompe and Majestie; The three-folde Age of Man, the Waiters bee. Then with an earthen voyder (made of clay) Comes Death, and takes the table clean away. (3*)

16

I want to suggest that in England - to which my discussion will largely be limited - f r o m about the mid-sixteenth century, time becomes a p a r t i c u l a r ly pressing concern in a wide spectrum of l i t e r a t u r e : in the works of the poets, divines, dramatists, philosophers and essayists. It is remarked on, discussed, debated, worried over; it is a preoccupation occurring with such strength that it cannot be explained away by describing it as a m e r e intellectual commonplace. As Ricardo J . Quinones' recent study of time in the Renaissance indicates, there a r e great difficulties in delineating attitudes that a r e specifically 'Renaissance' ones. But the traditional difficulties of describing what exactly the Renaissance was and when it occurred should not prevent our recognition of the immense changes in m a n ' s self-apprehension that a r e observable between, say, Aquinas and Newton. Using E. A. Burtt's t e r m s , we may say that the educated medieval mind treated things in t e r m s of substance and accidents, f o r m and matter, by logical r a t h e r than causal connections, and "instead of the onward m a r c h of time, man thought of the eternal passage of potentiality into actuality". (4*) Time was seen primarily in relation to Eternity, as a passage towards God; by the advent of Newton or Locke, time is more and more seen as a scientific continuum, with the p r e s e n t merely the shifting dividing line between an infinite and vanished past and an infinite undetermined f u t u r e . Somewhere within this transition between two ages, Shakespeare, Donne, and their contemporaries swing uneasily between the medieval and modern e x t r e m e s , aware to varying extents of widening intellectual possibilities. Their differing responses to the mystery of time a r e vitally important for an understanding of their age. 2 It is important to realise that the apparent homogeneity of the view of time the Renaissance inherited f r o m its past was, like many seemingly monolithic intellectual s t r u c t u r e s , made up of a hotchpotch of diverse elements, most of which were derived ultimately f r o m the Greek philosophical t r a dition and the Old Testament. More than any other peoples, the Jews and Greeks seem to have given shape and direction to the ways in which Western man has ordered his time-bound experiences and how he has reflected on or transformed them. (5*) It is useful, therefore, to briefly survey their contrasting views on time. On the one hand, although deeply fascinated by time, the Greek philosophers gave no ultimate meaning to it: true reality lay outside time, beyond the endless, ultimately meaningless, cycles in which men were enslaved. At least as early as Heraclitus, philosophers were concerned with the question of the impermanence of all things, and Cratylus, according to Aristotle, criticised Heraclitus' saying that one cannot enter the same r i v e r twice, holding himself that it could not be done even once. Time and Change remained central problems throughout the Greek philosophical t r a dition and were given detailed treatment by both Plato and Aristotle. F o r Plato, time is "a moving image of Eternity", a changing and imperfect reflection of the unchanging, everlasting F o r m s . Its purpose, like that of any imperfect image of the divine ideas, is to imitate them as fully as its

17

own incomplete nature allows. Its imperfection and dependence makes it meaningless in itself; true reality rests in the atemporal F o r m s . By contrast with Plato Aristotle defined the nature of time more closely. Time, he argued, is not movement, although it is always associated with it; time is the number or measure of movement with respect to before and after. Aristotle's emphasis is the more empirical; he is especially concerned with the measurement of change and with the passage of the potential into the actual within time; but he agrees with Plato that the F i r s t Cause and source of the ultimate meaning of time, the Prime Mover, lies beyond time. F o r Aristotle as for Plato, true reality is seen as existing beyond time and history. (6*) The frequent Greek emphasis on time as a lower order of reality was continued in the early Christian era by Plotinus, who was to profoundly influence the medieval Christian emphasis on the ultimate unreality of time. F o r Plotinus, time is an imperfect emanation of eternity; eternity is "life in repose, unchanging, self-identical, always endlessly complete"; time, by contrast, reflects the World-soul only in its manifestations in the universe as it moves from one imperfect stage to the next. (7*) Time exists only to be negated: and ends, ideals, or ultimate meaning may be striven for in time, but they themselves lie beyond it. On the other hand, unlike the Greeks, the Jews had no tradition of metaphysical speculation on the nature of time, being more concerned with the question of the meaning of the contents of time as it passed. F o r the Jews, time was not a meaningless sequence of events; all Yahweh's acts were seen as so closely bound up with time that time becomes known not by change but by opportunities, as a "series of 'times-with-contents' sent by God for his own purposes, and demanding certain appropriate responses from his people". (8*) The Jews saw time as having providential direction: they looked back to God's dealings with them in the exodus and forward to the time when the chosen people would be gathered and judged. Between these events, time is dynamic, always demanding responses: the Old Testament figures "do not move towards a fated end, but with Yahweh, arguing and creating as they go. They do not have to cheat time of their bit of eternity, but to fill it. "(9*) Hence there is an important contrast between the basic linguistic units involved: between the Greek chronos, the measurement of duration, and the Judaeo-Christian kairos, the moment of opportunity, a contrast which becomes combined and reinterpreted v a r i ously during the long hellenization of the original Christian gospel. Seen in the light of its origins, the revived emphasis in some strains of Renaissance thought on the positive value of time may be traceable to Judaeo-Christian rather than Greek roots. (10*) The New Testament writers transform the Jewish concept of a time of opportunity to the time, the kairos, the advent of Jesus of Nazareth in whom the time is fulfilled. The commencement of a new aion or era was proclaimed, in which men were called to live eschatologically, in a new pattern of living in which the quality of eternal life is revealed in time. Time was thus given a positive meaning, centred on the Incarnation and looking towards the parousia, which was to be prepared for not by escaping from time but by transforming it. Christian eschatological vision and Greek philosophical concepts became entangled very early in the Christian era. The Judaic conception of God's

18 continuous and intimate revelatory action in time was adapted to the quite foreign Greek idea of a contrast between time and a timeless eternity. F r o m the fourth Gospel to Aquinas, the Christian vision was gradually integrated with or challenged by Greek reasoning: the cyclical view of history, expressed most forcibly in the Stoic fatalism of Marcus Aurelius, for example, was met by Eusebius' and Augustine's theories of history moving towards the ultimate City of God; while Augustine's emphasis on time's positive value arose partly in response to the Gnostic revulsion from time as the mere caricature of eternity. Augustine's meditations on time in the Confessions and the City of God are the most important influences on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century, particularly Protestant, attitudes to time; most definitions of the nature of time until the mid-seventeenth century are quotations from or p a r a phrases of Augustine's, (11*) stressing that God created and directs time and that there exists a transcendental realm of eternity which is unaffected by the mutability of the universe and of men's lives. Augustine himself treats time as both a highly precise scientific abstract and a force gnawing at man's own subjective experience. Intellectually he describes time as an aspect of the universe, existing since the creation of the universe by God. But when faced with what time itself is, he acutely observes that we all know until we are asked, but our intuitions are difficult to verbalise. He reduces the three dimensions of time, past, present, and future, to one, the present, in which the past survives in the memory, and the future exists in anticipation. In this way, he closely connects the passing of time with the mind, and the measurement of time is the impression it leaves on the mind as things pass by. Certainly, Augustine gives time a more positive meaning than the Greek philosophers, from whom he derives most of his philosophical terminology: it becomes the medium in which each soul achieves salvation or damnation and is the vehicle of the mediation of the eternal to man. Yet Augustine is still primarily concerned to stress the distinction between time and eternity: the predominantly Greek conception of God as the unmoved mover is respectably Christianized. God is prior to the world not in time but by the unchanging dimension of eternity. Whereas in time men know imperfectly and in sequence, in eternity God knows all simultaneously. Augustine also considers the problem of the meaning of history. He attacks the cyclical view which states that events "recur eternally". He advances the concept of two co-existent cities, the civitas terrena and the civitas dei. History is seen as the building of the latter and it will be fulfilled only when the last of the saints achieves his necessary spiritual growth. Modified only in detail, Augustine's is the theory of history that dominates men's minds until the Renaissance. (12*) The other important medieval figure whose attitudes to time profoundly influenced later thought was Boethius. Acknowledging that all men's a m bitions and happiness are subject to mutability, he saw the source of true happiness as being outside time, in God. The eternity of God, in which all reality has its being, is more than the mere extension of time; it is rather the timelessness of an eternal present, embracing and controlling all time at once. Boethius' treatment of the relationship between Providence and Time provided the basic pattern of most medieval treatments of the subject: that man cannot rise to comprehend the all-inclusive vision of

19 God, who foresees all events, without imposing their existence, and who guides men's actions towards a providential end. (13*) Undoubtedly, within the medieval tradition I have outlined, there are variations in emphasis, but at root, for a millenium following Augustine and Boethius there is an essential continuity of epistemology that can be judged by briefly comparing some representative writers of the sixteenth century. So we get - to take random examples - Luther's definition of time echoing Augustine's: "What the philosophers say is true: 'The past is gone; the future has not arrived; therefore we have, of all time, only the now. The rest of time is not because it has either passed away or has not yet arrived' "; or Essex's chaplain Henry Cuffe writing in 1600 and repeating the commonplaces of generations of divines, that time is not just the measure of motion but an instrument of the Providence of God, whose power extends over all time from the Creation to Judgement. (14*) For men of the sixteenth century, as for Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Petrarch et. a l . , the facts of man's mutability are overwhelmingly set in the context of the transcendent eternity of God. 3 Individual emphases notwithstanding therefore, for the philosophical tradition that dominated medieval Europe and was inherited by the sixteenth century, it was God's control of time that gave its passing meaning and purpose. The distinctive characteristic of time was its ultimate unreality; the distinctive characteristic of man, his temporality. Like the rest of natural things, he was irrevocably subject to transience: "Mans dayes be done / Almost as soone as they be heere begun. " In the words of George Gascoigne, translating Innocent Ill's De Contemptu Mundi, a work written four centuries earlier: From the tyme that any man begynneth to be in this mortall bodye, hee doeth incessauntly travayle to dye. For thereunto tendeth all his mutabilitie in all hys lyfe (if it may bee called lyfe) that hee lyveth to that ende that death may come. For all men are neerer unto death after a yeare finished, then they were before it begonne, to morrowe, then to day, to daye, then yesterday, and even anon, then now. God, however, who "is above all time", is the eternal goal of timebound man's longing for permanence. "There is nothinge", Calvin wrote, "that desireth not to abide continualli . . . we ought to loke unto the immortalitie to come, wher we may atteine a stedfast state that no where appeareth in earth." Calvin here follows the prevalent medieval attitude, summed up by Innocent m that "we have heere no continual mansion place: beeyng made or created of two natures, wherof the one is mortall, and ruleth heere for a time, where fleshe and bloud^bereth the swayj The other is celestial, whiche givethj'eeling, understading, & judgemet, unto the earthly or mortall substace: of the whiche if it be undefiled in this life, they both shal inhabite the place of perpetuall blisse. " In his discussion, Cuffe d i s tinguished three modes of being: God, "who is onely Eternall", and things,

20

including men's bodies, that had both "beginning with time, and shal have their end in time". (15*) F o r most sixteenth-century divines, as f o r Augustine, time is as nothing confronted with the transcendence of eternity. As the Huguenot Philippe de Mornay exclaimed: "what g r e a t e r contraries can there be, than tyme and eternitie". The classic medieval exposition of the relation of time to eternity was made by St. Thomas Aquinas. Whereas time "is the measure of motion", eternity "is the m e a s u r e of a permanent being", and it is "God alone" who "is altogether immutable". To illustrate his view Aquinas d e s c r i b e s an observer watching a convoy of men f r o m a high hill and able to see simultaneously all who a r e marching, whereas each of the company knows only those ahead and those behind. Similarly God "is entirely above the o r d e r of time. He is at the peak of eternity, surmounting everything all at once. Thence the s t r e a m of time can be seen in one simple g l a n c e . " The same attitudes - without Aquinas' intellectual rigour - a r e found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discussions of eternity. W. T. 's A Discourse of Eternitie (1633) defines eternity as "duration alwaies present", which "no time can r e a c h " . Citing Augustine, he asks, "What is the longest time of man to God's e t e r n i t y ? " and observes that "all things p a s s e away in this life, only eternity hath no period". (16*) With such s t r e s s on the ultimate unreality of time, t r a c t s , sermons, and poetry a r e full of exhortations to treat time merely as the gateway to eternity. In the words of Fulke Greville: R e a d e r ! then make time, while you be, But steppes to your Eternity. The moments of repentance and death were of course seen as especially crucial f o r escaping f r o m time into eternity. Camus exhorts his r e a d e r s : "if all this life be but a waying to Eternitie, death is to be tearmed the doore of Eternitie . . . so shall every p r e s e n t moment serve you f o r a gate, by which you may p a s s e f r o m TYMES and MOMENTS to ETERNITIE. " "A forcible meanes to bring us to everlasting life", writes Archbishop Abbott's chaplain Daniel Featley, "is to meditate continually upon our death". According to Justus Lipsius, "it is an eternall decree, pronounced of the worlde f r o m the beginning, and of all things therein, to be borne & to die; to begin and end". The last day of life is consequently "unto us alwayes the f i r s t day to lyfe", and death can be welcomed as "it is the end of our m i s e r i e and g r i e f " in time. Such theological commonplaces had, of course, been echoed by g e n e r ations of medieval poets: Where beth they, beforen us weren, Houndes ladden and havekes beren, And hadden feld and wode ? In the sixteenth century, essentially the same attitudes were found in the soldier-poet Thomas Churchyard's The M i r r o r of Man (1594):

21 O Man r e m e m b e r , Like as thy figure, Doth vanish away, Bring earth into earth,

f r o m hence thou shalt p a s s e : once seene in a glasse, yea so shall thy breath, when strike thee shall death. (17*)

Meditating on t i m e ' s passing, man was supposed to see himself as "an alien sojourner" in a life, the most constant characteristic of which was its uncertainty: "We know not when the last hour will come, or last quarter of that hour. " Consequently man should consider "what haste Time maketh, and how quickly thy glass will run out; how f a s t death is coming, and how soon it will be with thee". The attitude of life represented by these diverse w r i t e r s may perhaps seem morbid to a modern r e a d e r , but certainly in comparison with the strict Platonic view the Christian scheme could give a new meaning to mutability, as in George H e r b e r t ' s playful description of time: Christs coming hath made man thy debter, Since by thy cutting he grows better . . . Thou a r t a gard'ner now, and more, An usher to convey our souls Beyond the utmost s t a r r e s and poles. (18*) 4 In o r d e r to prevent this collage of amalgamated quotations becoming as f o r m l e s s as many of the works f r o m which they a r e taken, it may be u s e ful at this point to consider the one crucial doctrine that underlies and unites them all - the doctrine of Providence. The providential direction of time is the key to the traditional Christian interpretation of t i m e ' s nature and meaning, and to analyse the modifications of the doctrine in the sixteenth century is to chart a significant shift in the intellectual h i s tory of the age. According to Aquinas, Providence "is the plan of the o r d e r of things foreordained towards an end", either directly or through intermediaries which exist by God's abundance of goodness, "so that the dignity of causality is imputed even to c r e a t u r e s " . He is emphatic that causality should not be so exclusively attributed to divine power as to abolish the causality b e longing to c r e a t u r e s , especially to man. In this way, Aquinas upholds a doctrine of 'general' as opposed to 'particular' or 'special' Providence. Views like Aquinas' were, however, roundly rejected by Calvin as making God the r u l e r of the world "in name onely and not in dede . . . because it taketh f r o m him the governement of it". Calvin's disciple John Veron, reviewing the various theories of Providence extant in the sixteenth century, r e j e c t s the theory of God's "generall ruledome" over events which makes God r u l e r "onelye in name and not in deede", and instead claims that God p o s s e s s e s the "whole governemente of al thynges, bothe in heaven and in the e a r t h " . More crudely, but in the same vein, Arthur Dent in A Sermon of Gods Providence (1611), argued against the doctrine of a general Providence on the grounds that as God is perfect, he therefore governs everything. Most sixteenth-century, particularly Protestant, treatments

22 of Providence are remarkable on two main grounds: for their rejection of a general doctrine of Providence, and for the way their emphasis on God's special Providence affects their treatment of the nature and meaning of time. Rather than a smooth sequential unfolding of God's general government of the universe, time becomes a series of disconnected revelations from God, with each moment of time a new and apparently arbitrary c r e ation. Whereas in Aquinas' doctrine of general Providence God is said to allow certain natural events to happen fortuitously, Calvin eradicates any sense of fortuitousness so that every event, even the falling of a tree, is caused directly by God. (19*) The difference may be clearly seen by considering Calvin's doctrine of Providence. God's sovereign Will, argues Calvin, upholds and directs all temporal events, and man's role is to inexorably advance His glory. "Believers", Calvin claims, "would rather that the whole world should perish than that any part of God's glory should be lost. " But the divine rule over events is not that of general supervision: nothing fortuitous or arbitrary can be counternanced by the Divine Will. God does not merely oversee men's lives and the course of nature but every single occurrence is the outcome of His new and personal decree: "Men . . . can effect nothing but by the secret will of God, and can deliberate on nothing but what he has previously decreed, and determines by his secret direction. " (20*) This doctrine of panergism, by which God consistently intervenes in His creation which is therefore immediately dependent on Him for its existence from one moment to the next, is one that all the early reformers stressed, but Calvin's insistence is especially strong. Each moment of human existence is dependent on God; whether aware of it or not, men are granted every instant of their lives by an individual fiat of God. It is obvious, wrote Calvin, "that every yere, moneth and day, is governed by a new and speciall Providence of God". God's action is not that of idly looking over events, but that of directly guiding "al thynges that come to passe". All of time, " f mutual succeding by turnes of daies & nightes, of winter & somer, shalbe y work of God". (21*) Calvin's doctrines had immense influence in England, needless to say, particularly from the time of Thomas Norton's translation of the Institutes (1561). Translations and selections of Calvin's works were more widely published in sixteenth-century England than those of any other divine, while in the early seventeenth century the most published authors were the Calvinists William Perkins and Henry Smith. Men like Sidney, Spenser, Ralegh, and Marlowe were allured by its sternness and deterministic c e r tainty; lesser minds thundered crude versions of Calvinism from pulpit and tract. The Calvinist doctrine of Providence, in particular, struck a deep chord in many minds of the uncertain post-Reformation e r a . Georges Poulet observes that "the religions of the seventeenth century are all r e ligions of continued grace", in the sense that God is felt to be continually upholding the moments of each man's life. A century after Calvin, an analogous idea emerges in the writings of Descartes, who argues that "from the fact that we now are, it does not necessarily follow that we shall be a moment afterwards, unless some cause, v i z . , that which first produced us, shall . . . continually reproduce us". (22*) Elements in the age's view of time that obviously penetrated deeply into men's awareness of their

23 transience were gradually becoming secularized and integrated into what developed into a significantly different outlook on life. The Calvinist doctrine of Providence, then, tended to emphasise a c e r tain manner of looking at and experiencing time. While a theologian like Hooker continued the tradition represented by Aquinas, the Calvinist e m phasis dominated English theology for at least a century after the writing of the Institutes and overflowed into such non-theological works as Philemon Holland's translation of Plutarch's Morals. The standard ingredients of Calvinist treatments of Providence were a stress on the biblical origins of the doctrine, a discussion of the means by which Providence is manifested, and the listing of specific, either historical or contemporary, examples of the providential direction of events. George Gifford, for example, discussed in detail the biblical origins in his tract on the doctrine of Providence; Calvin distinguished three aspects of God's providential guidance over time: through the laws He gives to His creatures, through the way particular events are directed to His ends, and through the Holy Spirit's governing and directing the Elect. As for historical examples, many writers after 1588 saw the scattering of the Spanish Armada as evidence of the hand of Providence, a sign of God's good will towards his Englishmen, and an admonition to future generations to "hearken . . . what the Lord hath done for England". (23*) I would suggest, therefore, that the Calvinist doctrine of the providential interpretation of time represents a significant modification of the inherited medieval intellectual tradition. It is as well one indication that in the sixteenth century, the nature and meaning of time are becoming matters of a new and urgent concern. Another indication is the pronounced emphasis in contemporary devotional writings on the crucial importance of each individual moment of time - especially for repentance or reparation. The Catholic J. P. Camus stressed how crucial the present moment is for repentance: "I could wish that at every breathing, you would caste an ey towards Eternitie . . . the moment wherupon the good or bad successe of your Eternitie depends . . . is THE PRESENT MOMENT." The Anglican Donne stressed that "upon every minute of this life, depend millions of yeares in the next". Devotional practices also register the same emphasis. The sanctification of time is a motif increasingly stressed in sixteenthcentury primers, and it has been observed that the medieval practice of prescribing fixed hours of prayer or meditation was increasingly being replaced by practices concentrating on events or occasions in the individual's secular life. Edward Browne's Sacred Poems, or Briefe Meditations, of the day in general! and of all the da.yes in the Weeke (1641) is an example of this trend. In order that they should spend time wisely, Browne aims to help his readers by including meditational poems on the morning, dressing, eating, drinking, and other everyday occurrences. It was a widespread trend: Lancelot Andrewes i s another who introduces the practice of meditating upon the days of the week as well as upon special religious occasions. (24*) Religious writers constantly beseech men to value time with an unusual urgency. The West Country parson John Carpenter bewails that "there is nothing more precious then Time, and yet (alas) nothing is founde to bee so vile in these dayes". The Catholic Andreas de Soto confessed that he "too late knew what time is, and of what value it is, and what a precious

24

and inestimable treasure it may be truely found to be". "Time", he claims, "was benignely bestowed on us . . . t o sped it well, to employ it well in good workes", for "time is of more value then is what soever the world hath". The Puritan preacher Henry Smith exhorted men to be "nubring and counting our daies, and houres, and minuts, to see how fast we die". The irreversibility of time is frequently stressed by divines: "Nothing is more precious than time. Wherefore of each possession two may be had togethers or moe: but of time two moments may not be had togethers. And time lost cannot be recovered, for losse of time is short, chaungable, unstable, and unrecouverable. " De Soto stresses that in wasting time, man is misusing God's possessions, hence "who so employeth not time well, God abridgeth him of it". The Jesuit Robert Parsons wrote that "tyme is driven of from daye to daye, untill God, in whose handes onelie the momentes of time are, doe shutt them owte of all tyme, and doe send them to paynes eternall withoute tyme, for that they abused the singular benefite of tyme in this world". (25*) A recurring phrase in the sermons of the age is the Pauline expression, to "redeem the time", which is especially used in exhorting men to use time meaningfully. Like the commonplace Renaissance concept of Opportunity or Occasion, the phrase implies the seizing of a personal kairos, the right time. De Soto wrote that "to redeeme time . . . is the selfe same as is the taking hold of opportunity & occasion offered", referring to the commonplace iconographic usage. Isaac Ambrose wrote that "by time is meant oppertunity . . . . By Redeeming the time, is meant either the avoiding of some hinderances, which would take us off from the opportunity; or the recompencing of some former unfruitfulness, which hath been in the former part of our life: or a gaining, stretching, improving of time by embracing all the occasions of doing all the good we can do. " The Scottish reformer Robert Pont defined the phrase as "recovering the losse by-past, & making much of the time present, & of time to come, so long as they have it, appreheding greedely the occasio offred unto them to do wel". "Some say", moralized Robert Home, Bishop of Winchester, that "youth must have a time, but Christians must redeeme the whole, both of youth & years". Calvin's commentary on the text stresses that "the days are evil . . . so that time cannot be dedicated to God without being in some way redeemed". Probably the most notable sermon on the text was the Banbury Puritan William Whately's The Redemption of Time, first published in 1606, and reprinted in 1673 with a recommendation by Richard Baxter. Its thesis is "that all Christians ought to be very good husbands for their time". The text is applied to matters of buying and selling, evidently to stress its relevance to secular occasions. Men should, Whately argues, "buy out the Time, to traffique with it, as men do with wares . . . Good hours and opportunities and merchandize of the highest rate & price: and whosoever will have his soul thrive, must not suffer any of these bargains of Time to pass him, but must buy up, and buy out all the minutes thereof". The accommodation of Puritanism to the merchant's appreciation of the commercial value of time is plain. Like the thrifty merchant, the Christian should "gain every day, every hour, and every minute . . . from all unprofitable actions, and overworldly affairs, to bestow the same on the duties of Religion and godliness". (26*) Another phrase many preachers favoured was the "accepted" or "due"

25

time. Again, examples can be multiplied. The Jacobean Dean of Canterbury, John Boys, for instance, comments "now is the time, now is the day, neglect not this opportunity . . . after this acceptable time, no m o r e time for repentance". His sentiments are echoed by many a p peals f o r spiritual reformation: man must grasp the opportunities God gives him. Carpenter exhorts his r e a d e r : "O therfore, before that the houre passeth away, which the mercie of thy maker hath given thee to repent . . . He hath time now, to morrow he may not have i t . " There is, for John Boys, "a time for all things, and Almighty God doth all things in his due time; he created and redeemed us in his due time, p r e s e r v e t h , justifieth, sanctifieth in his due time, and he will also glorifie us in his due time". (27*) Lancelot Andrewes' sermon "Of the Nativity" (1609) is worth a little attention, particularly for its representing a view of God's relationship with time that is a continuation of the medieval tradition as expressed by Aquinas, r a t h e r than giving it the fashionable Calvinist emphasis. The s e r m o n ' s subject is the "fulness of time". Andrewes visualises time as a m e a s u r e to be filled by God, and dwells on t i m e ' s importance consisting in its continual openness to God's activity and its sequential movement towards greater spiritual realities. Time is not just a s e r i e s of disconnected moments, as it is f o r the Calvinists. God pours eternity into time as an hour-glass is filled with sand. "Of itself time is but an empty measure, hath nothing in it . . . that which filleth time is some memorable thing of God's pouring into it. "(28*) Andrewes, like Hooker, is following an interpretation of time closer to Aquinas' than to Calvin's, but he is nevertheless influenced by the prevalent sixteenth-century concern with the importance of the moment, the kairos, either in a personal or a cosmological sense. It is an emphasis that, like the predominant Calvinist emphasis on God's particular Providence, demonstrates the widespread modification the received medieval tradition was undergoing in the s i x teenth century. 5 Notwithstanding these important modifcations of the traditional i n t e r p r e tations of the nature and meaning of time, it is undeniably t r u e that for most sixteenth-century w r i t e r s time is still a religious notion, marked by an emphasis on the transience of human life, the inevitability of death and judgement, the transcendent eternity of God, and His constant guiding of time towards his own mysterious ends. Time is consistently seen as ultimately unreal: "onely such things . . . be in Time as a r e subject to mutations, changes, risings, and fallings. " Time, "the generall r u s t of the world . . . weareth, eateth, consumeth, and perforateth all thynges". (29*) A brief glance forward at this point is useful. Similar attitudes to time can be found in the writings of the later seventeenth century, but it is evident that by the time of Newton or Locke that other, significantly different, attitudes a r e becoming more widespread. In contrast with these sixteenthcentury, essentially religious, concepts of time is the definition of John Wilkins in 1668; f o r Wilkins time can be most usefully considered simply

26

as "continued successive Quantity". His empirical approach to time is seen in his s e r i e s of definitions: time becomes a mode or division of space, with no mention of its n e c e s s a r y dependence on eternity. Seventy y e a r s before, Hooker had rejected as incomplete a notion of a purely scientific definition of time, and discussed time f i r m l y within the context of God's Providence. Similarly, Gervase Babington in the 1590's had written that "time is not onely taken as Philosophy taketh it, f o r measure of moving, according to f i r s t and latter", since despite Aristotle, who was not "able by naturall wit to s e e " it, there was a God-given "difference betwixt time and eternity". But by the late seventeenth century the p r e dominant emphasis was becoming that of seeing time as an objective component of a mechanical universe. In the words of Isaac Barrow, "whether things run or stand still, whether we sleep or wake, time flows on in its even tenor". For Newton, "absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself and f r o m its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external". (30*) B a r r o w ' s and Newton's definitions show how seventeenth-century science, "in so f a r as it concerns itself with time, is p r i m a r i l y interested in c[uantit£, in measurement". (31*) P a r t of the function of the following chapters will be to analyse the important intellectual and emotional shifts involved in the gap between these definitions. NOTES (1*) William Blake, Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses, Poetry and P r o s e of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (1961), 777. (2*) J . Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1955), 140; Tillich, The Courage to Be, 65. (3*) A Draught of Eternitie, t r a n s . Miles Car (Douay, 1632), 58; Owen Feltham, Resolves, ed. J a m e s Cumming (1806), 212; The Complete Poems of Richard Barnfield, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (1876), 194. It is significant that a recent study of the medieval lyric devotes a chapter to the theme of death, while time as a separate motif or theme does not even appear in the index of Themes and Subject-matter. See Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1968), 309-355, 425-426. (4*) The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925), 13. (5*) Lotte and Werner Pelz, True Deceivers (1966), 19. (6*) Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1010a, I, p. 529; Physics, 218b, p. 298; 219a, 220a, pp. 299-300; 267b, p. 355; Plato, Timaeus, 37, p. 450. (7*) Plotinus, Enneads, III.vii.8, p. 126; the whole discussion, 122-129, is relevant. (8*) John Marsh, The Fulness of Time (1952), 22; The Greek d r a m a t i s t s , in fact, come closer than the philosophers to the highly imaginative vision of the Old Testament. Man's temporality is a favourite motif in Greek d r a m a . See e . g . Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonnus, 120. F o r a f u l l - s c a l e treatment, see Jacqueline de Romilly, Time in Greek Tragedy (Ithaca, 1967). F o r a discussion on the distinctions between Greek and Hebrew views on time, see Thorlief Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek, t r a n s . Jules L. Moreau (1960), 123-154. (9*) Pelz, 34.

27

(10*) A similar suggestion about the origins of the Renaissance individually has been recently made by Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (1970), 187, 269, 439. (11*) C. A. Patrides, "The Renaissance View of Time: A Bibliographical Note", N§, CCVIII (1963), 408-409; for the Gnostic view of Time, see Henri-Charles Peuch, "Gnosis and Time", Man and Time: Papers f r o m the Eranos Yearbooks, III (1958), 38-84. (12*) F o r Augustine's view of time, see Confessions XI. x-xxviii, 597638; City of God, XII. xiii-xix, 452-460. F o r detailed treatment of the Augustinian philosophy of time, see Herman Hausher, "St. Augustine's Conception of Time", The Philos. R e v . , XLVI (1937), 503-512. (13*) The Consolation of Philosophy, t r a n s . I. T . , ed. William Anderson (Arundel, 1963), III, P r o s e viii, 70-71; m , P r o s e xii, 80-82; IV, P r o s e vi, 97-100. (14*) Bartas, I. i, p. 2; Martin Luther, Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, XIII, Selected P s a l m s : II (Saint Louis, 1956), 100-101; The Differences of the Ages of Man's Life (1607), 44-45; cf. Batman uppon Bartholome . . . De Proprietatibus Rerum (1582), fol. 142r. (15*) Bartas, I . i , p. 24; The Droome of Doomes day, in The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. John W. Cunliffe (Cambridge, 1910), II, 432-433; Henry Ainsworth, The Orthodox Foundation of Religion (1641), 18; Calvin, Institutes, Ill.ix. 5, fol. 169r ; cf. Gascoigne, II, 222; The M i r r o r of Mans l.yfe, t r a n s . H. K. (1576), sig. Aiir-v ; Cuffe, 6-8; he echoes Aquinas, Opusc. X, de Causis, lect. 6, in St. Thomas Aquinas: Philosophical Texts, selected and t r a n s . Thomas Gilby (New York, 1960), 83. (16*) Mornay, Christian Religion, 139; cf. William Brent, A Discourse upon the Nature of Eternitie . . . (1655), 13-14, 41; ST, I. ii. 3, 242 5 ; I . x . 4 , 103;I. ix. 2, 92; Commentary, I Perihermenias, lect. Gilby, 84-85; W. T . , A Discourse of Eternitie (Oxford, 1633), 4, 63, 64; cf. Brent, sig. A2 r , 13-14, 41 and Donne, Devotions (Ann Arbor, 1959) 89. (17*) Caelica, Sonnet 82, in Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (Edinburgh, 1939), I, 131; Camus, 449, 457-458; cf. Luis de Granada, Of P r a y e r and Meditation (1599), 49-52; Featley, Clavis M.ystica (1636), 281; Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, t r a n s . John Stradling (1595), 37; The M i r r o r of Mans lyfe, sig. D i v v ; Philippe de Mornay, A Christian View of Life and Death (1593), t r a n s . A . W . , 62-63; "Contempt of the World", Medieval English Lyrics, ed. R. T. Davies (1963), 56; The M i r r o r of Man And manners of Men (1594), sig. A 2 r . (18*) Calvin, Commentary on the F i r s t Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, t r a n s . John W. F r a s e r (Edinburgh, 1960), 160; Robert Home, Life and Death (1613), sig. A 5 r ; Richard Baxter, P r e f a c e to William Whately, The Redemption of Time (1673), sig. B5V; cf. Roger Matthew, The Flight of Time (1634), 2-4; Brent, 4; "Time", The Poems of George Herbert, introd. Helen Gardner (1961), 113. (19*) Aquinas, ST. I.xxii. 3, p . 311; Calvin, Institutes, I.xvi. 4, fol. 58V; John Wilkins, A Discourse concerning the Beauty of Providence (1649), sig. A3 V ; A Fruteful treatise of Predestination . . . (1563), fols. 85 r , 86 r , 105 r ; Dent, A Sermon of Gods Providence (1611), sigs. A 6 r A 7 r ; cf. Donne, Sermons, I, 278; Calvin, Institutes I.xvi. 2, fol. 57 v ;

28

Donne, Sermons, II, 147. cf. Aquinas, ST, I, xix. 8, 274-275; Calvin, Institutes, I. xvi. 4-6, f o l s . 58r-59v. (20*) Commentary on Galatians, t r a n s . T. H. L. P a r k e r (Edinburgh, 1965), 99; Institutes, I.xviii. 1, fol 6 8 r . I have at this point p r e f e r r e d the translation by John Allen (Philadelphia, 1936), I, 253, to bring out the meaning more clearly. (21*) Institutes, I.xvi. 2, fol. 57 v , I.xvi. 4, fol. 5 8 r , I.xvi. 5, fol. 58 v . (22*) Poulet, Studies in Human Time, t r a n s . Elliott Coleman (Baltimore, 1956), 18; René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, A Discourse on Method, e t c . , t r a n s . John Veitch (1912), 173. (23*) Plutarch, The Philosophie commonlie called, The Morals . . . , t r a n s . Philemon Holland (1603), 627; The Great Mystery of Providence (1695), 3-6; Calvin, Institutes, I.xvi. 4, fol. 58V; E. Topsell, Times Lamentation (1599), 57. (24*) Camus, 451-452; Donne, Sermons, III, 288; McCutcheon, 116-117; Browne, Sacred Poems, or Brief e Meditations . . . (1641), 1, 4 - 9 . (25*) Carpenter, A P r e p a r a t i v e to Contentation (1597), 319; de Soto, The Ransome of Time Being Captive, t r a n s . J . H. (Douay, 1634), sig. *4 V , 41, 23, 106, cf. Gascoigne, II, 402-403; W. T . , Discourse of Eternitie, 64; Smith, Sermons (1595), 288; De Proprietatibus Rerum, fol. 142 r ; P a r s o n s , The F i r s t Booke of the Christian Exercise . . . (1582), 371. (26*) De Soto, 172; Ambrose, Redeeming the Time (1674), 1; Pont, A New Treatise of the Right Reckoning of Yeares . . . (1599), 97; Horne, 32; Calvin, Commentary on Ephesians, t r a n s . T. H. L. P a r k e r (Edinburgh, 1965), 202-203; Whately, 3, 6, 7. (27*) II. Cor. 6 . 2 ; John Boys, Workes, (1622), 114, 223; Carpenter, 319, 321; cf. Calvin, Commentary on Galatians, 73. (28*) Ninety-Six Sermons, ed. J . P . W. (Oxford, 1841), I, 48; the whole sermon, 45-63, is relevant h e r e . (29*) David P e r s o n , Varieties . . . (1635), 29; John Banister, The Historie of Man (1578), sig. Bii*". (30*) John Wilkins, An Essay towards a Real Character, And a Philosophical Language (1668), 186; Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, V.lxix. 1-3, Works, II, 486-490; Babington, Works (1637), 4; Barrow is quoted by J . Alexander Gunn, The Problem of Time (1929), 53; Newton, Principles, 6. F o r a discussion of Newton's and Locke's views of time, see A. Cornelius Benjamin, "Ideas of Time in the History of Philosophy", in The Voices of Time, ed. J . T. F r a s e r (New York, 1966). It is noteworthy, as Benjamin points out, p . 19, that in the second edition of the Principles, Newton added a note indicating his belief in a transcendant God, obviously disturbed by c r i t i c i s m that his views led to atheism. (31*) Gunn, 52.

Ill "SUBJECT TO CHANGE AND UNCONQUERED": THE IMPACT OF NEW PHILOSOPHY

1 The title-page of Ezekiel Culverwell's Time Well Spent in Sacred Meditations (1635) is a useful illustration of the transition in ideas of time in Renaissance literature and thought. It depicts Father Time, flanked by a preacher and a scribe, with each foot placed on a significantly different symbol of time's passing - an hourglass and a mechanical clock. (1*) The design neatly epitomises the transitional nature of Renaissance thought on the nature and meaning of time. I have suggested how the medieval Christian tradition was being modified by such influences as Calvin's doctrine of Providence. I want now to set forth the more radical strains of thought that, diversely, were challenging the traditional views - and so presenting sensitive intelligent minds with an uncomfortable widening of the intellectual spectrum. The obvious factor I have so far ignored is, of course, the influence of classical thought. Certainly the carpe diem motif echoes through generations of medieval and Renaissance poetry, and Petrarch is of course deeply affected by classical attitudes to temporality. Ricardo J. Quinones has, for instance, focussed on the Renaissance's revival and variations of the essentially classical motifs of fame and continuity through procreation. But Renaissance Europe remained a civilisation deeprootedly Christian in its philosophical assumptions - and challenges to the traditional Christian cosmology had to find their place within a Christian context. Nevertheless, in an influential minority of sixteenth-century writers, the understanding of time is being stimulated by ideas and moods other than the received religious ones. If we call them "secular", it is not entirely for want of a more precise term. The word "secular", from the Latin saeculum, meaning 'of this age', or 'related to this world' is, it has been pointed out, itself essentially a time-word, describing the world in its temporal aspect. (2*) In the Middle Ages, it denoted a realm of life metaphysically beneath the 'religious', which had to do with the changeless world beyond time. The spacial or cosmological levels of existence embodied the higher or religious perspective while the changing world of man's life, as we have seen, the lower or secular one. It is with the seemingly growing autonomy of this lower world of time and mutability that I shall be concerned. The Dutch philosopher Cornelis van Peursen has suggestively divided human intellectual history into three general periods. The first is the period of myth, in which man is overwhelmed by the natural forces that surround him, possessing no sense of history and where the typical type of thinking is that something is; the second period is that of ontology, in which man has put some distance between himself and the surrounding

30

world and where the typical mode of thought is what something is. The Renaissance m a r k s the transition between the ontological period and what van Peursen t e r m s the e r a of functional thinking, in which the typical mode of thought is how something functions. (3*) Intellectual changes of this magnitude obviously do not occur overnight: I have given ample evidence for the continuing r e a s s e r t a t i o n and elaboration of the traditional religious attitudes to time, and it must be admitted that the psychological revolution gradually effected by the secularization of men's concepts of time has obviously never permeated all levels of modern life and l i t e r a ture - which still at times yearns f o r the eternal, the timeless. But the transition, to adapt van P e u r s e n ' s t e r m s , f r o m an e r a when the important question was what time was to one where the more prevalent questions a r e how time works in the universe and how it can be best used, is n e v e r theless a r e a l and fundamental transition. In this, as in other transitional f e a t u r e s of Renaissance thought, English thinkers and w r i t e r s lagged behind. There are signs that in the works of Bruno, Montaigne, and even e a r l i e r , in some of the Italian humanists like P e t r a r c h or Pompanazzi, that certain European philosophers were more advanced than any English thinkers in exploring new attitudes to time. Montaigne is a relevant example, if only because he appears to have been widely read in England, and by both Shakespeare and Donne. His e s s a y s are deeply concerned with the mystery of "swiftgliding T i m e " and its effects on human personality. He finds it impossible to pin down the essence of man except in the present instant: "I describe not the essence", he exclaims, "but the passage; not a passage f r o m age to age, or as the people reckon, f r o m seaven y e a r e s to seaven, but f r o m day to day, f r o m minute to m i n u t e . " Because, he argues, his life is "but a twinckling in the infinit course of an eternall night", man must "tooth and naile retaine the use of this lives p l e a s u r e s , which our y e a r e s snatch f r o m us, one a f t e r another". He feels life as a continual flux in which "time is a fleeting thing . . . with the matter ever gliding, alwaies fluent, without ever being stable or permanent". In particular he f e a r s what time ultimately brings, the i r r e s i s t i b l e end of death: "We a r e never in our selves, but beyond. F e a r e , desire, and hope, draw us ever towards that which is to come, and remove our sense and consideration that which is, to amuse us on that which shall be, yea when we shall be no m o r e . "(4*) Montaigne is a man haunted by the t e r r o r of change, and yet without the traditional a s s u r a n c e s to fall back upon. He pays occasional and r a t h e r ironical lipservice to the traditional solutions, but more insistent r e sponses a r e a repeated s t r e s s that "to Philosophie, is to learne how to die", and an insistence on the need to "husband time as well as wee can": I wil stay the readines of her flight, by the promptitude of my holdfast by it; and by the vigor of custome, recompence the haste of her fleeting. According as the possession of life is more short, I must endevour to make it more profound and full. (5*) Such attitudes, of course, echo generations of carpe diem poems and plaints; what is important is that in the late sixteenth century they should be being set forth as an intellectually tenable philosophical position and as a f o r c e ful alternative to the traditional solution to m a n ' s mutability. It could be

31

argued either that many Renaissance thinkers were coming to find such secular, often classically-derived, sentiments increasingly appropriate to describe their attitudes to time's passing, or else that centuries of common feeling towards time and mutability were at last coming to the surface in an intellectually viable form. Certainly, Montaigne's attitudes to his sense of his own temporality are an important crystallization of changing attitudes to time in the period. A large and important area of life where the secularization of time can also be seen vividly and increasingly is in the realm of public affairs and political theory. The traditional view that temporal events were all directed by divine Providence had as a corollary a degree of fatalism, in theory if not always in practice, towards any temporal status quo. As I have suggested, in the sixteenth century, the Calvinist doctrines of Predestination and Election deepened this sense of the determined nature of political events. F o r , in Calvin's words, if men "doo nothyng but by secrete commaundement of God", then regardless of men's precautions or strivings, all events can be seen as predetermined, so proceeding, as Calvin puts it, "from his determyned counsell that nothyng happeneth by chaunce". Wars, plagues, poverty, are all visited unavoidably upon men by God. And the inevitable end of time, death itself, is the outcome of God's wrath. (6*) The element of temporal determinism in Reformed theology proved useful for the upholders of the political status quo in England. It was not simply, as works such as The Mirror for Magistrates demonstrated, that kings and magistrates were instruments of God's justice, but that all human disasters could be interpreted as necessary and morally salutary expressions of God's wrath. They provided essential links in the temporal chain by which God leads men to their predestined end. The commonplace Elizabethan conception of the tyrant as the necessary "scourge of God" is one example of a belief in a providential hand of God directing massacres, disasters, and wars in this way. The idea received vigorous and highly satirical - if not entirely unambiguous - treatment in Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great. (7*) In one sense one may say that such fatalism is profoundly unchristian; certainly it seems an inhuman doctrine, yet it seems to have long objectified a widespread yearning for temporal stability. But it is interesting to note that in the sixteenth century there are hints that time is being regarded not simply as a preordained procession of divine wrath and human misery, but more autonomously - indeed, more as the medium of human autonomy, challenging men to view political changes as a matter for purely human not divine responsibility. Karl Mannheim, commenting on the Anabaptist revolution in Germany in the 1520's, writes that "longings which up to that time had been either unattached to a specific goal or concentrated upon other-worldy objectives suddenly took on a mundane complexion . . . it is at this point that politics in the modern sense of the term begins, if we here understand by politics a more or less conscious p a r ticipation of all strata of society in the achievement of some mundane purpose, as contrasted with a fatalistic acceptance of events as they are, or of control from 'above'. "(8*) In England, any widespread acknowledgement of a tension between the theory of the providential control of events and the temporal ends and

32

motives of politics lagged somewhat behind the Italian political theorists like Machiavelli, but by the mid-sixteenth century, there was among many political w r i t e r s a growing assumption of the temporal autonomy of political actions. In Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials there is printed a quite remarkable letter by William Thomas, one of Edward VI's a d v i s e r s , e n titled A Discourse made by William Thomas, esq, f o r the King's use; whether it be expedient to vary with time. It s t a r t s with a discussion of the nature of time. "Wherfore", Thomas argues, "seeing time is both the father and devourer of al things, and consequently that nothing is to man more precious than time; it followeth, that he who in time can take his time, is most happy in this w o r l d . " He states that man's most joyful and acceptable goal in life is prosperity, "which he esteemeth so much, that he refuseth no labour, nor in maner any peril to attain it". The means by which man attains this aim, he suggests, is pragmatically accepting time as the sole medium in which to achieve his goals. "Loose therfore neither advantage nor time", he argues, "the winning wherof is accounted the greatest matter among princes . . . let him not think to p r o s p e r in this world, that wil not vary in his procedings according to time . . . when doings and time agree, there is nothing more happy. " Thomas' letter reveals his half-awareness of the break with traditional providential theory he is making when he t r i e s to reconcile the contradictory sets of values that lie uneasily together behind his attitudes. As Felix Raab puts it, Thomas' view is that "God will certainly help us, but if we do not help ourselves we may none the l e s s be ruined in this wicked world. "(9*) Shakespeare's awareness of this growing strain of thought, uneasy and confused in Thomas, will be a matter of m a j o r concern in later chapters. So f a r , then, what can be observed both in Montaigne's essays and in Thomas' letter, is a new emphasis on the purely secular use of time. F o r Andreas de Soto, writing in the inherited religious tradition, the use of time is to find "how it may be redeemed"; for Montaigne or Bacon, the use of time is largely to profit through spending it in the world. (10*) Similarly, the Renaissance Italian capitalist entrepreneur Gianazzo Alberti advised businessmen "not to lose even one iota of that most precious good, Time", claiming that "I use my body, my soul, and my time in as reasonable way as may be. I try to save as much as I can of each, and to lose as little as possible . . . whoso loses no time can a c complish almost everything; and he who has the gift of employing his time wisely will very soon be m a s t e r of every circumstance. " Karl Marx had a relevant comment on certain aspects of Renaissance capitalism. Under capitalist enterprise, he wrote, time became "everything, man is nothing; he is at the most, t i m e ' s c a r c a s e . Quality no longer m a t t e r s . Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for d a y . " Marx also noted how the clock affected the development of capitalist methods. "The clock", he suggested, was "the f i r s t automatic machine applied to practical p u r poses; the whole theory of the production of regular motion was developed through it . . . There is also no doubt that in the eighteenth century the idea of applying automatic devices (moved by springs) to production was f i r s t suggested by the clock. " Historical psychoanalysis is a dangerous pursuit, but it can be seen how time in this way might easily seem to a c quire a new value and use. Enterprising merchants and bankers would necessarily set their eyes on temporal success, and so measure time out

33

according to their economic needs. Mumford's over-general but certainly useful comment is that the result was that business, dinner, pleasure, were "all carefully measured out . . . timed payments: timed contracts: timed work: timed meals: from this period on nothing was quite free from the stamp of the calendar or the clock. " Tawney quotes G. Malynes on the pattern of successful business methods: "one thing driveth or enforceth another, like as in a clock where there are many wheels, the first wheel being stirred driveth the next and that the third and so forth, till the last that moveth the instrument that striketh the clock." Tawney's comment is that "the spirit of modern business could hardly be more aptly described". (11*) Such attitudes mark profound changes not only in man's understanding of his environment, but also in his self-understanding. These fundamental changes to man's attitudes to time are inevitably reflected in what might be termed the verbal mythology of the Renaissance, phrases and terms that carry, partially unconsciously, the assumptions of the age. The subtle changes of attitude towards the use of time and the secular value of time can, I think, be further clarified by a brief glance at the essentially classical cult of fame, personal glory, virtù, as it was diversely expressed. In Chaucer's The House of Fame, as might be expected, fame resting on popular applause is seen as transient and unreal in comparison with the eternity of God. True fame is seen as the gift of God for a virtuous life, with its consummation beyond time with God in heaven. But in much Renaissance thought and literature, as is well known, fame increasingly becomes a secular concept. For Machiavelli, it is earthly fame that is one of the Prince's prime goals. The Mirror for Magistrates treats fame predominantly as an ideal to be striven for and rewarded within time, whereas in Lydgate's Fall of Princes, to take an earlier comparable work, it was an expression of the strivings of a transitory world and rewarded or punished in God's timeless eternity. In the Mirror, Hastings beseeches Baldwin, not God, to "shyeld my torne name, / From sclaunderous trompe of blastying black defame. " The Epistle Dedicatory speaks of the "desire of fame, glorye, renowne, and immortalitie (to which all men well nighe by nature are inclined, especially those which excell or have any singuler gift of fortune or the body)". As Theodore Spencer comments, in spite of the medieval cast of the Mirror, no preface to a medieval book would have voiced such sentiments. Man's striving for fame to overcome the threat of time becomes, of course, a cliché in Elizabethan and early Jacobean poetry. Jonson, for example, in his commendatory poem to Ralegh's History, credits the historian with the special power of immortalizing famous men: From Death, and darke oblivion, neere the same, The Mistrisse of Mans life, grave Historie, Raising the World to good or evill fame, Doth vindicate it to eternitie. (12*) Here, it is interesting to note, eternity is conceived of as the indeterminate future, mere perpetuity, rather than the timelessness of God. Now, given such challenges to the supremacy of the transcendent implied in the cult of fame it would follow that the more pious would revile it. Indeed, traditionally-motivated attacks on ambition are commonplace

34 in the literature of the age. The essentially pagan spirit of the cult is criticized by Greville, whose lines explicitly indicate the obviously widely-felt connection between the pursuit of purely temporal fame and the acceptance of time and flux as absolutes: Who worship Fame, commit Idolatry, Make Men their God, Fortune and Time their worth. In an age in which the felt pressure of eternity seems to be slackening and where fame may seem a surer means of immortalization than eternity, the importance of seizing each moment is paramount. The figure of Opportunity, Occasio, like its religious equivalent, the call to "redeem the time", is familiar in Elizabethan literature: Not one word more of the consumed time. Let's take the instant by the forward top; F o r we are old, and on the quick'st decrees Th'inaudible and noiseless foot of Time Steals ere we can effect them. Robert Pont refers to the conventional iconographic image of Opportunity or Occasion when he writes: we know how occasion is paynted, as the verse sayeth: Fronte capillata est, post hac occasio calva. Occasion on the fore head hath haire, But ay behinde she is naked and baire. In the widening spectrum of possible interpretations and responses to time, the exhortation to "redeem the time" was therefore gradually becoming rivalled by that to "take the instant by the forward top", or, in Gabriel Harvey's words, by "y e gaining of tyme, & winning of Honour". (13*) 2 In the previous chapter I argued that the key issue underlying the sixteenth century's changing attitudes to time was the doctrine of Providence. If this argument is sound, then there should be evidence for a gradual reappraisal and even rejection of the traditional doctrine and its sixteenth-century Calvinist modifications. Such reappraisals would then provide further evidence for the intellectual transition I have suggested is occurring - the gradual shift by which a temporal, not a transcendental or providential, perspective becomes the means by which meaning is given to the process of living. Nietzsche, Camus, and many modern philosophers have described the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as those of the "death of God", (14*) seeing the past two centuries as the culmination of powerful historical tendencies making belief in a transcendent realm over and above time increasingly untenable, if not altogether impossible. The late sixteenth century, I suggest, gives unmistakable signs of this movement gathering impetus and starting to acquire a marked degree of self-consciousness.

35

The traditional doctrine of Providence had made the unfolding of temporal events depend upon the atemporal and transcendent will of God. Obviously, the more sophisticated were sceptical of the over-simplifications of the traditional scheme. Montaigne warns against "a common custome among us, which is to ground and establish our religion upon the prosperitie of our enterprises", thereby apparently proving the existence of the providential direction of events. But more revealingly, there is a notable number of indignant, even occasionally hysterical, reactions to what was felt to be growing scepticism towards Providence and Eternity in the period: the charges of atheism against Marlowe and Ralegh are only two of many. "Atheist" became, like "Machiavel", a term of general abuse against the upholder of any conventional opinion or action. Many men, John Carpenter wrote, were discussing strange and dangerous questions, presuming "to touch even the high majesty of our most gracious God". Such men, claimed George Gifford, are "not able to behold eternity, and to looke upon that which continueth for ever and that doeth make them esteeme this world, as if it were all in all. "(15*) According to Calvin's disciple John Veron, there were current in the mid-sixteenth century a number of conflicting views on Providence: one stating that God's relationship with the world was one of foreknowledge but not government; the traditional "general ruledom" of God as presented by Aquinas; a classically-derived doctrine of an "ydle and carelesse" God who ruled only things above the "myddle region of the aire", leaving all the rest of life to the sway of Fortune; and, in Veron's view at least, the "true" doctrine of God's rule and government of all actions. Calvinist writers seem particularly concerned at a tendency to set up Fortune as a kind of autonomous cosmic force to rival the traditional view of Providence as the ultimate arbiter of men's lives. Atheism and Fortune become coupled in the minds of many orthodox Christians. Sidney's Pamela r e minds Cecropia that "Eternity, & Chaunce are things unsufferable together. " Certainly, for Machiavelli, for one, God and Fortune become almost identical as representing the unforeseeable elements in life that threaten the Prince's stability. Even a brief glance at Renaissance iconography reveals a widespread fascination with the figure of a semi-pagan, classically-derived Fortuna, who exercised her sway over men independently of any ultimate control by Providence. Originating especially from the common classical motif, found for instance in Horace, the fickleness and unpredictability of Fortune and her wheel is a recurring motif in Elizabethan art and literature. Renaissance iconography frequently shows fortune - sometimes more specifically identified as Occasion or Opportunity - as a woman standing on a wheel, bald except for one long strand of hair at the front, which the bold man tries to grasp. What is especially stressed is the temporal arbitrariness of Fortune, who "having the raigne of all estates in her hand, disposeth like a blind guide, setting up and pulling down, whom she list to overthrowe or advance". Fortune may occasionally favour the bold, but the philosophy behind Fortune's domination in the age's literature is generally pessimistic, and is frequently associated with the destructiveness of Time. (16*) Again, some cautious speculation might be useful. It may be conjectured that for a significant minority of writers at least the ever-present element of fortuitousness in life was becoming more acceptably attributed to a

36

changing view of Fortune than to the mysterious workings of an atemporal Providence. Machiavelli suggested that "Fortune is the mistresse of one halfe of our actions; but yet . . . she lets us have rule of the other halfe, or little lesse. " Machiavelli's concept of Fortune has a distinct Renaissance ring, very unlike the Boethian view of Fortune which dominated the Middle Ages. For Boethius, Fortune was seen as strictly under God's providential control and therefore ultimately good. What bad effects it had could touch only externals. All the chances of Fortune were controlled ultimately by Providence, the power governing all the world's vicissitudes and changes. In Dante's Inferno, Fortune is portrayed as a guiding spirit distributing wealth and opportunity under the control of Providence, and in De Monarchia he describes it as the "agency we better and more rightly call the divine providence". Chaucer's knight voices a similar opinion. (17*) The interpretation of Fortune as ultimately controlled by Providence continues into much Renaissance literature, but the habit of associating them is becoming less automatic. Writing of the habitual identification of the two, Camus argues that "we onely change Gods name into another, and . . . it is the divinitie which we name by paraphrase". Fortune, says Ralegh, is "nothing else but a power imaginarie, to which the successe of humane actions and endevours were for their varietie ascribed; for when a manifest cause could not bee given, then was it attributed to F o r tune". (18*) A number of orthodox Christian writers came even more explicitly onto the attack against any tendency to give Fortune a quasimetaphysical status. Calvinists, for instance, obviously could not allow for any element of chance in human lives - except as events unforeseen by men though not by God. Calvin described Fortune as a heathen concept; Veron attacked the prevalent habit of men's saying "this was fortunes wyl, where they oughte to say: this was Gods wyll" . Likewise, Philippe de Mornay argued against the existence of Fortune even as an agent of God or a metaphorical representation of the workings of Providence: If ye meane fortune as she is peynted by the Poets, blynd, standing on a bowle, and turning with every wynd: it is as easie to wype her away as to paynt her. For who seeth not that there is an uniforme order, both in the whole world, and in all the parts therof, and how then can one that is blynd be the guyder therof? . . . Seeing then that there is so certein order in all things: it followeth that fortune beareth no sway in any thing, and therefore that there is no fortune at all . . . it hath no ground or being but of and in our owne ignorance. But, obviously, doubts could not be so easily quelled. The seriousness of the attacks on the idea of Providence may be shown by the large number of both fullscale and incidental defences of it, in France and England in particular, towards the end of the century, suggesting as William R. Elton suggests, that the increasing questioning of the traditional doctrine may well have reached something of a climax. In 1590 for instance, A Defiance to Fortune attacks the "vaine opinions they hold, ^ tearme thee a goddesse . . . for what can the servant doe without sufferance of the maister . . . for what is fortune, but a fayned devise of mans spirite . . . so that . . .

37

we must confesse, that all thinges are ruled and guided by the providence of God, and not by blinde fortune. " John Carpenter writes in 1597 of "that daungerous sin which hurteth mans soule with a desperate wound: vz. A deepe distrust of the Divine Providence, by faith in the which, men have a chief comfort in this life, and without the which, they run into a labyrinth of e r r o r s " . Henry Cuffe, in 1600, attacking the classical origins of Fortuna, describes Democritus as "the archpatron of fortune, who will have the World Eternall, and withall chanceable: But Eternitie and Chance, being (as the learned Sir Philip observed) things unsufferable together; If Chanceable, then not Eternall. "(19*) Eternity or Chance ? Providence or Fortune ? The choice, so obviously pressing to so many writers, raised the vital question of the ultimate meaning of time. Did God direct time to his own mysterious ends or was he withdrawn so far beyond his own creation that mutability ruled supreme - even, did "new philosophy" imply there was no room for God? If so, where were the stable values to be found in a world where time and mutability were autonomous and supreme ? Wilbur Sanders has recently argued that Shakespeare's contribution to this controversy is built around a concept of natural Providence, what he terms "an act of faith in the morality of the universe", in contrast with the crudities of the traditional and particularly the Calvinist view. He finds analogies in Hooker's discussion of human destiny on the naturalistic plane while at the same time relating "the logic of the natural realm to the supernatural purpose which it subserves". (20*) Shakespeare's contribution to the debate will be explored at some length in subsequent chapters: initially, I would argue that Dr. Sanders' case is somewhat over-simple. Hooker's doctrine of Providence is still very much an e x pression of the traditional view as presented by Aquinas, and, as I shall show, Shakespeare's treatment of the relationship between time and Providence is a developing one, and his mature position, expressed e s pecially in King Lear and The Winter's Tale is far more radical than Dr. Sanders has allowed. I want in fact to argue now that in addition to the vociferously stated received positions - the traditional medieval view, represented in the sixteenth century by, say, Hooker or Andrewes, and the Calvinist view, there was a scattered number of thinkers, notably the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who took an alternative standpoint. Bruno's thought, while drawing on medieval philosophers like Nicolas of Cusa has part of its roots, as well, in the Renaissance revival of classical thought, p a r ticularly that of Lucretius and Epicurus, who were linked in the minds of many orthodox writers as the sources of what they saw as the age's widespread atheism. (21*) It is to a discussion of these more radical views of Time, Mutability, and Providence as exemplified by Bruno, that I want now to turn. 3 In the 1540's, Calvin had attacked those who held "that there is only one existent spirit, that of God, who lives in all creatures". (22*) It was such "libertines", as Calvin termed them, who were, in effect advocating an

38

alternative to the traditional view of the nature of Providence and the relationship between Eternity and time. Giordano Bruno is the most important thinker of the century to present such ideas with any substantial impact. Arguably, one of the most important developments in recent Renaissance scholarship has been the revaluation of Bruno. The pioneering work of Frances A. Yates and others has focussed attention on his transitional position in Renaissance thought and also upon his influence in England. Although deeply engrained in medieval and Renaissance hermeticism, Bruno's cosmological thought also points forward to the seventeenth-century mechanical universe;(23*) in the same way his ideas on time both look back to the medieval cosmological framework and forward to later vigorously immanentalist philosophies. In his two years in England, Bruno seems to have variously interested, irritated, and inspired a number of English intellectuals, notably Greville, Sidney, Ralegh and Spenser. A number of scholars from the late-nineteenth century have attempted to find Bruno's influence upon English writers from the 1580's onward. One of the earliest, Paolo Orano, suggested in 1916 there was a close connection between Bruno's Italian dialogues and Hamlet. Indeed, he sees Hamlet's death as an analogue of Bruno's own death. Orano's parallels seem far-fetched, to say the least, but it would be strange if a number of English intellectuals of the late sixteenth century had not been aware of at least the main outlines of Bruno's thought. Some half-dozen books by Bruno were published in London between 1583 and 1585. In this period he was lecturing in Oxford and on familiar terms with, among others, Sidney and Greville. His name at least seems to have been known, if the name of the anti-pope in Faustus is an indication, to Christopher Marlowe. There are interesting parallels between Bruno's Spaccio and the Mutability Cantos of Spenser's Faerie Queene, and, as Jack Lindsay suggested, Donne seems to have been aware of the general tenor of his thought. A number of German scholars in the late nineteenth century tried to show some connection between Bruno's ideas and some of Shakespeare's plays, and although there would appear to be no firm evidence for any definite influence, Shakespeare may well have been aware of the general nature of Bruno's philosophy. It seems certain that he read and pondered Marlowe's plays deeply, and if Miss Yates' speculations about some of the obscurities behind Love's Labour's Lost are valid, there may be some definite evidence for the existence of some kind of interest in Bruno. (25*) Bruno certainly seems to have set up intellectual vibrations among a number of English intellectuals. Searching for a Zeitgeist is often a way of admitting the lack of more definite evidence, but in this case - especially when considering connections between Bruno and Shakespeare - it may well be that analogous reactions to the pressures of living in a particular age are as important as direct influences; intellectual echoes, similar tones and frissons may demonstrate a growing current of feeling, a common reaction to an age by contemporaries who might otherwise seem to have only the most tenuous inter-connections. Obviously, this kind of link can only be speculation, but it is worth bearing in mind as the present study proceeds. Bruno is a figure of still largely unrealised significance and his views of time, mutability, and Providence are worth close attention, both in themselves and for their influence. (26*)

39

Notwithstanding certain inconsistencies or developments in his thought, Bruno's doctrine of God radically undermines the traditional concept of an immutable divinity outside time. He sees God as something variable, subject to the "fate of Mutation" like the r e s t of the universe. F o r all his p r o t e s t s at his trial, his concept of God consistently opposed the orthodoxy of Aristotle or Aquinas: f o r them, God existed outside the universe, which He willed into existence as its P r i m e Mover. For Bruno, God is the immanent principle pervading all nature, and is not to be described in traditional Aristotelian t e r m s as the P r i m e Cause. His views on the nature of the divinity grow out of his belief in the infinity of the universe and he consistently describes the relation between God and the universe in pantheistic t e r m s , seeing the universe as a living reflection of God's infinity; hence "natura est deus in r e b u s " . His view of the universe is one of a number of relativistic worlds, moving f r e e l y through space of their own accord, without any overriding primal being as their f i r s t cause maintaining them in existence. Bruno's doctrine of Providence follows f r o m his idea of an immanent deity. It is important to our understanding of the transitional nature of his thought to note how he wants to use the traditional terminology of, say, Aquinas' discussion of Providence, but with greatly changed a s sociations. Providence for him is in one sense identical with fate; in another sense it seems to be identified with the prudence men should take up towards the opportunities the passing of events p r e s e n t s them with. Bruno deals in the Spaccio with the issues raised in the debate over the meaning and relationship of Fortune and Providence. Like Spenser's Mutability, Bruno's Fortuna challenges the powers of the Gods, and she is rebuffed not because she does not deserve a place in heaven, but b e cause Jove admits that she is the highest power of all and so ultimately has all the gods' seats at her disposal. (27*) To see infinity as coincident with the finite, to redefine Providence as representing man's determination and prudence before temporal events is radically to r e j e c t much of the traditional religious cosmology. It is, moreover, to be confronted with the anxiety of finding ultimate values within, not beyond, the mutable world. It is at this point that Bruno's thought makes direct contact with the widespread sense of m u t a bility in Elizabethan l i t e r a t u r e . The typical Renaissance attitude to m u t a bility is one of f e a r or resignation; unless, like Spenser's mutability the traditional Christian context can be evoked. The Cantos of Mutabilitie, indeed, provide a useful comparison h e r e . F o r Spenser, the principle on which the undeniable changes of the universe r e s t and into which individual transience is subsumed is that of Providence. T i m e ' s destructiveness is p a r t of a l a r g e r purpose, by which time is transcended by an eternal r e a l m which . . . is contrayr to Mutabilitie: F o r , all that moveth, doth in Change delight: But thence-forth all shall r e s t eternally With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight: O that great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabbaoths sight. (28*) But f o r Bruno, the discovery of mutability a s an autonomous principle of

40 the universe is an exciting and liberating one. He sees man as being continually challenged to reach out to the future, since his destiny can be achieved only through the passage of time. "Man", he says, "is placed upon the limits of time and eternity, between perfection and its faint imperfect image. " Only by reaching for the infinite within time can man achieve his authentic stature, and, Bruno asserts, even "though the soul does not attain the end desired and is consumed in so much zeal, it is enough that it burns in so noble a fire". Bruno is here obviously responding to the Lucretian vision of the continual flux of the universe, although he adds his own particular note of ecstatic welcome to the facts of mutability. Men, he writes, "are fools who dread the menace of death and of destiny, for all things in the stream of Time are subject to change and are unconquered by it; and this thy body, neither as a whole nor in its parts, is identical with yesterday". In the everchanging world of nature, the passing of time is to be rapturously welcomed, since "if in bodies, matter, and entity there were not mutation, variety, and vicissitude, there would be nothing agreeable, nothing good, nothing pleasurable". Bruno asserts that every instant of time's passing contains eternity in itself. Commenting on the commonplace motto, Amor instat ut instans?, Bruno states that the instant and not any sequential flow is the fundamental and uniquely real aspect of time, "because if there were not the instant, there would not be time, for time in essence and substance is nothing more than an instant". Ecstatically, Bruno calls on courageous minds to "take up arms against the darkness of ignorance and to ascend that high rock and eminent tower of contemplation", in order to transfigure the threat of time and not "waste time, whose speed is infinite, on things superfluous and vain; for with astonishing speed the present slips by and the future approaches with equal rapidity". (29*) Because it is in the very changes of time that the fulness of experience can be discovered, the wise man, in Bruno's view, has no reason to fear death. Death marks neither annihilation nor a translation to another timeless world, but a transformation within the universe, where we are " r e newed from day to day, from hour to hour, from moment to moment", within the "unity, which through mutability has all things in itself". (30*) 4 With his radically immanentist interpretation of Eternity and Providence, and his almost Nietzschean view of change and mutability as bearing the fulness of life, Bruno's thought does much to fill in the gap between orthodox sixteenth-century religious considerations like those of Hooker, and the implicitly immanentist, scientific views of Newton or Barrow. Bruno's views are immanentist and yet religious. Although his philosophy is hardly a 'secular' one in the narrowest sense, it is sufficiently caught between the worlds of Aquinas and Newton to suggest that there is occurring a significant widening of the spectrum of intellectually acceptable discussions of the nature and meaning of time. In this particular area of intellectual change, what sets many thinkers in the late sixteenth century apart is not so much the wholesale rejection of certain modes of thought, but the growing awareness of a wider choice among possible topics, contexts, or atti-

41 tudes by which to express men's universal preoccupations. The r e c u r r i n g medieval question, "what may ever laste"(31*) is still being asked, but the traditional r e a s s u r a n c e s seem no longer a s intellectually convincing or emotionally satisfying. The traditional answers no longer possessed the same authoritative ring. NOTES (1*) It is conveniently reproduced in Arthur M. Hind, Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1952-64). (2*) Colin Williams, Faith in a Secular Age (1966), 34. The word " s e c u l a r " will be broadly used with this meaning in this discussion; cf. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (1965), 19. (3*) "Man and Reality - The History of Human Thought", in A Reader in Contemporary Theology, ed. John Bowden and J a m e s Richmond (1967), 115-120. (4*) The Essays of Michael Lord of Montaigne, t r a n s . John Florio, introd. A. R. Waller (1910), II, 489; III, 23; II, 232; I, 261, 25. (5*) Montaigne, I, 86; I, 73; HI, 385, 380-381. (6*) Institutes, I . x v i i i . l . fol. 681"; I . x v i . 4 , fol. 58v ; cf. Sermon on Matthew 26. 36-39; see Ronald S. Wallace, Calvin's Doctrine of the Christian Life (Edinburgh, 1959), 267. (7*) F o r an orthodox exposition of the idea, see e . g . George Whetstone, The English Myrror (1586), 82, 202; cf. A commentary upon the Prophecie of Isaiah, t r a n s . C. Cfotton] (1609), 120. (8*) Ideology and Utopia, t r a n s . Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (1936), 190-191. (9*) John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials . . . (Oxford, 1822), 365, 366, 371-372; Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (1964), 48. (10*) de Soto, titlepage; cf. Montaigne, I, 89; F r a n c i s Bacon, Essays (1937), 102, 174. (11*) Alberti, quoted by Werner Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism, t r a n s . M. Epstein (1915), 108-109; Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, ed. C. P . Dutt and V. Chattopadhyaya (n. d.), 47; Marx to Engels, 28 January, 1863 in Karl Marx and F r i e d r i c h Engels, Correspondence 1846-1895, t r a n s . Dona T o r r (1934), 142-143; Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 42; Malynes, Lex Mercatoria (1622), quoted in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth, 1938), 181. (12*) The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F . N. Robinson (1957), 293. F o r a discussion of the theme in Chaucer and other medieval poets, see J . A. W. Bennett, Chaucer's Book of Fame (Oxford, 1968); Niccold Machiavelli, Prince, trans. E. D. (1640), 179-182; The M i r r o r for Magis t r a t e s , ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge, 1938), 293; M i r r o r f o r Magis t r a t e s , ed. J . Haselwood (1815) I, 4; Spencer, Death and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, M a s s . , 1936), 45; Jonson, "The mind of the F r o n t ispice of a Booke", Works, VIII, 175. (13*) An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, Poems and Dramas, I, 213; A WW, V. iii. 38-42; Pont, 104-105. F o r an account of Occasio, and its relation to Fortuna, see Panofsky, Iconology, 72; Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1913), 199.

42 (14*) e . g . Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1967), esp. 20-23, 102-112; William Hamilton, The New Essence of Christianity (1966), esp. 53-66. (15*) Montaigne, I, 230-231; Carpenter, 102; Gifford, Eight Sermons, upon . . . Ecclesiastes (1589), fol. l l r . (16*) Veron, fol. 8 5 r - v . Du Bartas also echoes the Calvinist rejection of the doctrine of a "general" Providence, I.vii, 235; Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, The P r o s e Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1965), I, 407; Machiavelli, 202-203; f o r Occasio, e. g. F r a n c i s Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598), fol. 154 r ; H. R . , A Defiance to Fortune . . . (1590), sig. A3r-v. (17*) Machiavelli, 203; Boethius, II, P r o s e v, 51-52; III, P r o s e xii, 8082; Dante, Comedy: Hell, VII. 73-96, t r a n s . Dorothy L. Sayers, (Harmondsworth, 1949), 112, 115; Chaucer, The Knight's Tale, Works, 33. (18*) Camus, 48; Ralegh, History, I . I . i. 15, 20. (19*) Calvin, Institutes, I.xvi. 8, fol. 6 0 r ; Veron, fol. 88V; Mornay, Christian Religion, 217-218; cf. Henry Bullinger, Decades, t r a n s . H. I. (Cambridge, 1851), IV, 181; S. Goulart, A Learned Summary Upon the famous Poeme of William of Saluste Lord of Bartas (1621), I, 307; Elton, King Lear and the Gods, 17; H. R . , A Defiance to Fortune, sig. MIV; Carpenter, 232; Cuffe, 13. (20*) Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea, 119, 117. (21*) e . g . Bartas, I.vii, 235; Goulart's comment, 305, on Bartas' defence of Providence is that it is written against "Epicures, Atheists, Nullifidians, Libertines, Idolators, and others". See also p. 307. (22*) Against the Libertines, quoted by Albert-Marie Schmidt, John Calvin and the Calvinist Tradition, trans. Ronald Wallace (1960), 63. (23*) See e. g. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), 450ff; The Art of Memory (1966), 224; G. F . Waller, " 'This Matching of Contraries': Bruno, Calvin and the Sidney Circle", Neophilologus, LVII (1972), 331-343. (24*) See Paolo Crano, Amleto e Giordano Bruno (Milan, 1916), e. g. 35-36, 47-48, 74-75, 83; Dorothy Waley Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought with annotated translation of . . . On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (New York, 1950), 35-45; for his influence on Greville see Napoleone Orsini, Fulke Greville tra il mondo e Dio (Milan, 1941), 111112, Franklin B. Newman, "Sir Fulke Greville and Giordano Bruno: A Possible Echo", P § , XXIX (1950), 367-374; see Angelo M.Pellegrini, "Bruno, Sidney, and Spenser", SP, XL (1943), 128-144; Jack Lindsay, "Donne and Giordano Bruno", TLS nos. 1794, 1797 (1936), 523, 580; Richard Nice, "Donne and Giordano Bruno", TLS no. 1795 (1936), 544. As well as the examples listed by Orsini and Newman, see the f i r s t stanza of Caelica, 7, Poems and Dramas, 76, which seems to have possible echoes of Bruno's thought, although the context into which Greville puts his Brunoesque meditation is closer to that in Spenser's Mutability Cantos. (25*) See Oliver Elton, "Giordano Bruno in England", Quart. R e v . , CXCVI (1902), 483-508; Frances A. Yates, "Giordano Bruno's Conflict with Oxford", JWCI, n (1938-39), 227-242; Yates, A Study of Love's Labour's Lost (Cambridge, 1936), 89-101. (26*) Bruno, Infinite Universe, I, 261-265; The Expulsion of the Triumphant

43

Beast, trans. Arthur D. Imerti (New Brunswick, 1964), Explanatory Epistle, 75; Sidney Greenberg, The Infinite in Giordano Bruno (New York, 1950), 24-25; cf. Aquinas' strictures against doctrines like Bruno's, ST, I. iii.8, 42-44; Giordano Bruno's The Heroic Frenzies, trans. P. E. Memmo, J r . (Chapel Hill, 1964), I.iv, 140; cf. Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, trans. Jack Lindsay (Castle Hedingham, 1962), V, 135, Greenberg, 46 ; Expulsion, ni.ii, 235. (27*) Expulsion, II. i, 141-143, II. ii-iii, 176-178; cf. Aquinas, ST, I. xxii. 1, 303. (28*) Faerie Queene, Vll.viii. 2. (29*) Bruno, De Immenso, as translated by I. Frith, Life of Giordano Bruno (1887), 224; Heroic Frenzies, I.iii, 117; De Immenso, in William Boulting, Giordano Bruno 1917, 235; Expulsion, I.i, 89; Heroic Frenzies, I.v, 175, II. ii, 219-220. (30*) Infinite Universe, II, 285, IV, 332; Cause, Principle and Unity, IV, 141. (31*) Chaucer, The House of Fame, Works, 293.

PART TWO: THREE LATE ELIZABETHANS

IV

"THE PILLOURS OF ETERNITY": MUTABILITY IN SPENSER

1 In analysing the intellectual preoccupations of the Elizabethans it is obviously important not to reach eagerly for some kind of scholarly litmuspaper to test for the 'medievalism' or 'modernism' of individual writers. I have tried to stress throughout my survey of the conflicting intellectual traditions available to Shakespeare, Donne, Spenser and their contemporaries, that intellectual revolutions, if they occur at all, do not occur overnight. There is no date or other landmark to which we can point and say that all on one side are medieval, Ciceronian, or transcendentalist, and all others are modern, anti-Ciceronian, or libertine naturalists. In the next three chapters, I want to display just how confused and contradictory the currents of thought about time were in the age, and very briefly indicate how three important writers, Spenser, Ralegh, and Donne, all respond and contribute to the debate on the nature and meaning of time. All in some sense are open to the disturbing, naturalist views of time becoming current in the late sixteenth century; all are deeply imbued with the continuing medieval tradition; all react to and combine these traditions differently and individually. 2

The intellectual superstructure of most Elizabethan literature before the 1590's is still largely a medieval one. The traditional Christian emphasis on the contrast between time and eternity recurs strongly on all levels of Elizabethan literature, from Spenser's powerful expression of the . . . stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd Upon the pillours of Eternity, That is contrayr to Mutabilitie - to the jingle of John Hagthorpe's plea: . . . that Man (a changling ever) Mighte learne to worship him that changeth never. (1*) Not only can one observe this kind of intellectual continuity between Medieval and Renaissance thought and literature, but it is also clear that in dealing with such a subject as time, certain human responses and artistic conventions have remained fairly constant in the whole history of Western literature, however the spirit in which they have been used may have changed.

48

The passing of worldly happiness, the fading of human love like the flowers, or waning like the seasons, are all universal themes. The analogy between the passing of love and the seasonal pattern is common to Horace, Ovid, the Carmina Burana, and a Renaissance sonneteer like Daniel, as is its frequent corollary, the invitation to take the time, to gather rosebuds, to seize love, and not waste time in contemplation or study. What especially distinguishes a particular age's apprehension of time is obviously not such recurrent motifs so much as something l e s s easily defined - a special tone or timbre in its writings, and in particular the especial metaphysical, moral, or psychological contexts into which its intellectual attitudes to time are put. Medieval poets, for example, when meditating on the passing of time in a wider context than just r e cording a passing mood, tend naturally to juxtapose their awareness of mutability with an appeal to a transcendent eternity: Thereinne is day withouten night, Withouten ende, strenkthe and might, And wrecke of everich fo, Mid god himselwen eche lif, And pas and rest withoute strif, Wele withouten wo. (2*) Although the rebirth of love in Spring is itself a poetic motif common to many ages, the Spring can also be used as an image of religious or spiritual regeneration, and in medieval poetry the two senses are frequently combined. In the early medieval latin hymns, for example, the rebirth of nature is often seen primarily as a shadow of the Eternal Spring in Heaven. As James Wilhelm comments, "Spring qua spring is nothing; spring qua Easter is everything, and there is only one word to express its miraculous effect upon the soul: gaudium, joy, a word that one almost never finds unqualified in classical expressions of the spring motif. "(3*) Similarly, such painful human experiences as the passing of youth and the waning of human love are in many medieval poems subsumed into the context of an eternal, Providential scheme and so the progress of time, however painful to each individual, tends to be seen as a whole, as a divine comedy. In Piers the Plowman, the dreamer's search for Piers, although never-ending, is nevertheless given ultimate meaning through the Crucifixion and Atonement of Christ in Passus XVIII. Bodily decay and earthly sin are compensated for by Eternity, and hence frequently human transience may be used as a spur to repentance: For thou woost not today that thou shalt live tomorewe, Therfore do thou evere wheel, and thanne shalt thou not sorewe. (4*) So while the passing of time may be measured by its sorrows or deceptive ness, men can still be enjoined to rejoice because of transcending power of divine love. Thus the blow of the world's transience is softened for the individual personality by seeing time's passing in the ultimate light of eternity, Providence, or the indestructible forces of Nature. One of the most widespread ideas to permeate the philosophical thinking of the Middle Ages

49

was the doctrine of plenitude which stressed that the purpose of time was to unfold all potential things by means of continual generation. Aquinas, for example, wrote that multitude and distinction in creation were part of God's will that His divine goodness might be "bettered and multiplied as much as possible", and "therefore God wishes things to be multiplied, because He wills and loves His essence and perfection". (5*)

The doctrine of plenitude implied that by taking his small part in the universe's creativity, man could defeat time through sexual generation, since the perpetuation of the race made up the gaps in humanity depleted by time and death. Chaucer, translating the Le Roman de la Rose, writes of men's duty to God and to Nature to perpetuate the race so that "oon may thurgh another rise". Mankind as a species could thereby defeat the destructiveness of . . . tyme, that may not sojourne, But goth, and may never retourne, As watir that doun renneth ay. (6*) Thus men's individual awareness of the destruction of youth, love, beauty and eventually life itself is shifted onto another plane, becoming part of a general philosophical question about the universal forces of nature and God's purposes in the world. The medieval tendency is to treat the individual's highly personal revulsion from his own mutability as part of a larger question about the powers of God, Providence, or natural forces. Time and death are in this way overcome by the assertion of an eternal perspective to compensate for or transcend time. The intellectual continuity already noticed between the sixteenth and earlier centuries can be seen in Elizabethan literature, therefore, both in conventional laments over the power of time, probably found in one form or another in any age, and more specifically, in the continuation of the particular context into which medieval writers placed the problems of time and transience. So one can trace throughout Elizabethan poetry not only the continuation or revival of such classically derived motifs as the world's decay from a Golden Age, the search for worldly fame, and the carpe diem and carpe florem motifs, but also typical medieval concerns with the horror of death and judgement and the transcendence of human by divine love. Sidney's sonnet "Leave me, 6 love . . . " for example, with its mood of recoiling from earthly love, is essentially medieval-Platonic in tone: LEAVE me, 6 Love, which reachest but to dust, And thou my mind aspire to higher things: Grow rich in that which never taketh rust: Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings. Spenser's The Ruines of Time, drawing on Petrarch's Trionfi, evokes in typical medieval vein the transience of all earthly kingdoms: O vaine worlds glorie, and unstedfast state Of all that lives, on face of sinfull earth,

50

Which from their first untill their utmost date Tast no one hower of happines or merth, But like as at the ingate of their berth, They crying creep out of their mothers woomb, So wailing backe go to their wofull toomb. Spenser's remedy for all the apparent futility of transient human aspirations and achievements is the traditional medieval exhortation to turn back to God: So unto heaven let your high minde aspire, And loath this drosse of sinfull worlds desire. (7*) In treating the Renaissance as an era of intellectual transition, it is important to note that such continuities are obviously not just a matter of a superficial, anachronistic intellectual hangover: the religious and moral fervour of writers like Sidney or Spenser obviously found real meaning in the traditional Christian attitudes to time and death. But increasingly, other contexts, perhaps present in fragmented form in the literature of the Middle Ages, are seen by sixteenth-century writers to become more convincing and appropriate. What sets the Renaissance apart from the preceding centuries is not so much a change or rejection of certain values but the awareness of a wider choice among possible contexts, topics, motifs, themes or attitudes in which to express man's universal preoccupations. (8*) Hence the complications, and frequently contradictions, in the Renaissance's treatment of the poetic or iconographic motifs of time which have been exhaustively catalogued by Samuel C. Chew, Claes Schaar, and others, are the outcome of a more than ordinary intellectual transition in the age. (9*) Generalisation at this point is difficult. Time is mercurial and multi-faced - for the modern scholar as well as for Elizabethan writers. An iconographic figure of great antiquity, Father Time was typically pictured in Renaissance art as an old man - in his role of Occasion or Opportunity - bald except for one long strand of hair. He frequently carried a scythe, or an hour-glass to signify the threat of death. On the other hand, he could be depicted as a youth or a boy, bringing truth or beauty to light: seen optimistically in this way, time was the bearer of all good: Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides, Who covers faults, at last with shame derides. An especially popular phrase in sixteenth century England to express the creative role of time was "Temporis Filia Veritas", which was adapted from classical origins for religious and political propaganda, royal pageants, and mottos. In Respublica, for example: Veritee the daughter of sage old Father Tyme Showith all as yt ys bee ytt vertue or Cryme. (10*) But the creative function of Time was less insistent as a motif or theme than that of Time the destroyer. Recurring throughout late Elizabethan

51

and early Jacobean literature, especially in the 1590's, is an overwhelming sense of time's destructiveness and the mutability of life. Fulke Greville, a poet who was acutely conscious of time's powers, describes his feeling that: The World, that all containes, is ever moving . . . The present time upon time passed striketh. Time is the destroyer, the thief: Mis-shapen Time, copesmate of ugly Night, Swift subtle post, c a r r i e r of grisly care, Eater of youth, false slave to false delight, Base watch of woes, sin's pack horse, virtue's snare; Thou nursest all, and murd'rst all that are. Time is a cannibal, greedily devouring all its own creations - Ovid's Tempus Edax Rerum: Thou tyme the eater up of things, and age of spyghtfull teene, Destroy all things. And when that long continuance hath them bit, You leysurely by lingring death consume them every whit. Time despises, wastes, corrupts all things, for it . . . being made of Steele and rust, Turnes snow, and silke, and milke to dust. The most bewailed victims of time are therefore youth and beauty since they are the most precious products that time has nursed. As Samuel Daniel writes in one of his sonnets to Delia: Then beautie, now the burthen of my song, Whose glorious blaze the world dooth so admire; Must yeelde up all to tyrant Times desire: Then fade those flowres which deckt her pride so long. All human values and aspirations are equally subject to Time the destroyer; Daniel's The Complaint of Rosamund describes the degeneration of the ideals and "simple beauty" of youth by time, which first corrupts by producing a false sophistication and finally strips all illusions until age and death conquer life itself. Ultimately, "Time, that devour'st all mortality", is seen to triumph over all man's values and aspirations. What so by thee hath life, by thee is slain, From thee do all things rise, by thee they fall. Constant, inconstant, moving, standing still; Was, Is, Shall be, do thee both breed and kill. (11*)

52

It would be superfluous to list the almost unending variations on these basic themes of time both as creator and destroyer. What matters more is the particular tone in which the poet treats the theme, and the particular contexts in which it is set. Recurring concerns are the poet's desperate unwillingness to accept the irreversibility of time, and the problem of finding ways to resist its action. Certain experiences or values, it may be asserted, can transcend time, especially values derived from man's inner life as opposed to the everchanging surface of physical and worldly attributes: Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen; Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green. Since youth and beauty are so fragile, lovers are often urged to seize every opportunity to enjoy their passion; variations on both the carpe diem theme and the figure of Time as Occasion or Opportunity are commonplace in both dramatic and non-dramatic poetry of the age. Another common means by which, it was often asserted, time could be resisted, was through the immortality of art: this verse vowd to eternity, Shall be thereof immortall moniment: and tell her prayse to all posterity. (12*) Again, no great purpose is served by listing the huge number of variations on the theme of defying time in Elizabethan poetry. This brief survey does, however, prompt some important observations. First, bearing in mind the widespread, occasionally profound, and often hysterical, concern with time found in the sermons, tracts, and treatises of the late sixteenth century, the evidence culled here from Elizabethan poetry r e inforces the conclusion that such a wide ranging concern with time and its effects on life is more than just a literary fashion. Time and mutability seem to be categories of existence deeply affecting the most sensitive minds of the age. Second, the conceptual or moral framework in which time is seen by the great majority of writers is still largely the traditional medieval religious one, frequently reinforced by Calvinism. There is also obvious evidence of a widespread exploitation of classical themes, many of which had philosophical implications that, consciously or not, were at odds with the traditional Christian solutions to problems raised by time and change. Some poets, like Spenser, explicitly Christianize Ovid or Lucretius; others, like Daniel, are content to exploit a carpe diem motif without recourse to the traditional Christian context. The signs are that from the late sixteenth-century onwards, in the poetry of the age as in the philosophical writings, more secular attitudes to time such as Montaigne's or Bruno's are becoming known. Spenser's deeply Christian mind is disturbed by the new naturalism of writers like Bruno, and The Faerie Queene in particular provides fascinating evidence for the shock the received tradition was receiving from the seemingly dramatic widening of the late sixteenth century intellectual spectrum.

53 3

Time and mutability, it is well known, are pressing problems throughout Spenser's poetry. The Ruines of Time, for example, depicts man's life as dominated by the transience of all his achievements and values: All is but fained, and with oaker dide, The everie shower will wash and wipe away, All things doo change that under heaven abide, And after death all friendship doth decaie. The Shepherdes Calender is constructed on an interpretation of life as set in the context of overall seasonal change, from springtime, youth, and love, to winter, age, and decay. Mortality is bound up with mutability, and the shepherds are exhorted to see the "trustlesse state of earthly things" in terms of an eternal perspective, through which the pains and disappointments of time will be compensated for by the "fieldes ay fresh, the grasse ay greene" of Elysium. (13*) The mutability for which all the changes of the months give such poignant evidence is held within a cosmic framework by being seen as the ordered manifestation of God's eternal Providence. Similarly, a main unifying strand of The Faerie Queene is Spenser's concern to establish an eternal perspective within which to set the mutability of life so evident to all creatures. The Garden of Adonis (FQ, III. vi) is an image of the universal conflict between the creative and destructive forces of nature, and in spite of its philosophical inconsistencies is a good illustration of Spenser's acceptance of an essentially medieval context into which to merge the problem of time and change. The Garden is the source "of all things, that are borne to live and die". It is dominated by time and change. Time is seen as the arbiter of human life, the destroyer of youth, beauty, and the original perfection of human society. Time . . . with his scyth addrest, Does mow the flowring herbes and goodly things, And all their glory to the ground downe flings . . . All things decay in time, and to their end do draw. But time is a necessary factor in the generative purposes of nature, and so the negative picture of time with its destructive scythe presents only a partial truth, since without time the generative cycle could not fulfil its purpose. Time therefore becomes the divinely-directed unfolding of the Universe's creative potentiality. What matters is not that individual creatures are inevitably subject to transience, but that through all change, the universal and God-given natural principles of procreation and fertility continue. The creative principle, like Adonis, is "eterne in mutabilitie" but, it should be noticed, time is thus transformed only by subsuming the individual's transience into a higher natural process: here again, Spenser's view is in accord with the doctrine of Plenitude as expressed in, say, the Romance of the Rose. Likewise Britomart is praised for embodying an active procreative love with a public, ultimately cosmic, destiny. Her

54

individual mortality and fruitful marriage are seen as parts of the overriding purpose of: . . . the streight course of heavenly destiny, Led with eternall providence. (14*) The problem of time's sway over individual lives is again taken up in the Mutability Cantos. If any avant-garde ideas from Lucretius or Bruno are referred to here, they are invoked only to be rejected. The Lucretian law that all things are powerless to resist time is firmly set in the dual context of the underlying creative order of nature and the explicitly Christian perspective of God's eternity. In Bruno's Spaccio, Fortuna, like Spenser's Mutability, argues for the gods' recognition of her sway over all things and it is conceded that she underpins all the universe. But there is a crucial difference in tone: for Bruno, the discovery of mutability as an autonomous principle of the universe and life within it is an exciting and liberating ideal; for Spenser, mutability, however attractive, exists ultimately to be complemented by a timeless Eternity. For Bruno, Fortuna becomes as basic and as autonomous a principle in the universe as Eternity is for Spenser. There is a sense for Bruno, as I have argued, in which Fortune and Providence are identical. The same can hardly be said for Spenser's view. In Spenser's poem, (VII. vii) Mutability's claim is that both heaven and earth are subject to change: For, who sees not, that Time on all doth pray? But Times do change and move continually. So nothing here long standeth in one stay; Wherefore, this lower world who can deny But to be subject still to Mutabilitie? Unsatisfied by Jove's denial of her claim Mutability appeals to Nature. An expression of the traditional doctrine of Plenitude, Spenser's Nature is the manifestation of the God-given creative forces of the universe. For Spenser, the principle on which the undeniable changes of the universe rest and into which individual transience is subsumed is ultimately controlled by a transcendent Providence. The more Mutability demonstrates the facts of change in the universe, the more it is obvious that Nature itself includes Mutability, that change and even death are part of a universal order. Time and its destructiveness are seen to be part of a larger purpose, which in the final stanzas (FQ. Vll.viii. 1-2) Spenser explicitly puts in the orthodox Christian framework, in which time is transcended by an eternal realm which: . . . is contrayr to Mutabilitie: For, all that moveth, doth in Change delight: But thence-forth all shall rest eternally With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight: O that great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabbaoths sight. The individual's awareness of his own transience becomes subordinated to the question of man's relationship with eternal Providence; it is changed

55

in effect, from an emotional or psychological problem into one to be fitted to an abstract philosophical or theological system. The purely human burden of time's passing is shifted on to an abstract plane and, in a sense, never really faced. I have, of course, barely done even a semblance of justice to Spenser's richness and complexity as a poet in this brief treatment of his interest in time. I am concerned with the underlying intellectual drive of his poetry, and while the power and persuasiveness of The Faerie Queene cannot be denied, nevertheless Spenser stands firmly within the continuing medieval tradition in his attitudes to time and mutability. And, especially as his growing disillusion darkens the later books of his epic and he pens a deeply moving conclusion to an unconcludable poem, we see that his is, although sensitive, basically a defensive traditionalism. Time and man are locked in a battle which is resolvable only within the wider context of the overall purpose of the universe. Both the Cantos of Mutabilitie and the Garden of Adonis movingly evoke the unavoidable facts of individual decay, corruption, and death. But in each case, the individual's fulfilment and in a sense immortality is guaranteed only by the naturally and ultimately divinely guided pattern of universal order. As individuals, we cannot overcome time; Nature, and on a higher plane God, can provide us with a cosmic context that will enable us to transcend our individuality. Spenser's affirmation, if troubled, is clear. In the next chapters, I shall consider two poets whose affirmation of faith is more ambiguous. NOTES (1*) Spenser, FQ, VII. viii. 2; Hagthorpe, 21. (2*) Early English Lyrics, ed. F. Sidgwick and E. K. Chambers (1966), 165. (3*) James J . Wilhelm, The Cruelest Month (New Haven, 1965), 76. (4*) See e. g. Davies, 106-107, 174. (5*) Aquinas, SCG, I.lxxv, 164-165. (6*) Chaucer, The Romaunt of the Rose, in Works, 569, 610. (7*) Spenser, The Ruines of Time, 11. 43-49, 685-686. (8*) A similar point is made by H. R. Richmond, The School of Love (Princeton, 1964), 224-225. (9*) See Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life, and Schaar, Sonnet Themes and Sonnet Problem. (10*) KL, I. i. 280-281; Respublica, ed. W. W. Greg (1952), 2. For d i s cussions of the iconographical background, see Fritz Saxl, "Veritas Filia Temporis", in Philosophy and History, ed. Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (Oxford, 1936), 197-222. Another predictably popular motif was the assertion that the Queen alone conquered time. See e.g. George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar, II. iv. 113-116, The Works of John Peele, ed. A. H. Bullen (1888), 259; and cf. Ralegh's remark on Queen Elizabeth as "a Lady, whom time had surprised", quoted by Willard M. Wallace, Sir Walter Raleigh (Princeton, 1959), 206. (11*) Caelica, Sonnet 7; Shakespeare, Luc, 11. 925-929; Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV. 158-160, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. John Frederick Nims (New York,

56

1965), 384; Ralegh, Poems, 21; Daniel, To Delia, Sonnets 30, 31; John Marston, The Insatiate Countess, I I I . i v . l ; A . W., "To Time", Elizabethan Lyrics, ed. Norman Ault (New York, 1949), 353. (12*) George Peele, "His Golden Locks Time Hath to Silver Turned", in Ault, 146; Spenser, Amoretti, 69. (13*) The Ruines of Time, 11. 204-207; The Shepheardes Calendar, November, 1. 189. (14*) F g , m. iii. 24.

V SIR WALTER RALEGH AND THE CONSUMING DISEASE OF TIME

1 Fulke Greville's celebrated aphorism "I know the world and believe in God" might stand also as Sir Walter Ralegh's motto. If Ralegh ultimately lacked Greville's frightening clear-sightedness and refused to push his belief in a Calvinistic doctrine of man's depravity to its logical conclusion and see all the world, including himself, as totally beyond redemption, Ralegh is nevertheless fascinated by the same deterministic realism in human life and attracted to a similar strain of piety peculiarly disengaged from the world. In so far as we can generalize about such a fascinating and multi-sided figure, it can be said that in both his public life and writings, Ralegh struggles to retain as much human autonomy as possible - especially for Walter Ralegh, politician and courtier while wanting in his writings and beliefs to uphold a strict Calvinist doctrine of Providence. Perhaps more than any major public figure and writer of the late Elizabethan age Ralegh reflects the confusion and contradictions of an age undergoing a profound and confusing intellectual transition. Spenser is the last great poet to find adequate depth and scope in the medieval philosophy of time. History as exemplified, say, by the pageant of Britomart and her line, is the working out through time of the will of Providence; and as the Garden of Adonis or the Cantos of Mutability show, Spenser's philosophy of time has its roots deep in medieval Christian philosophy rather than in the new radical doctrines of Bruno or the Italian libertines. For Spenser all temporal misfortunes, the changeableness of man's life, the decline of affections, loss of youth, beauty, even the inevitable changes of nature itself, are reconcilable and acquire substantial meaning within God's beneficent providential scheme. Spenser, like so many of his contemporaries was deeply moved by time's powers, but his awareness of the new strains of philosophy in the 1580's and 1590's provoke him ultimately to subsume, quite unambiguously, individual mutability into a larger transcendent context. Time is beneficent, but only because Eternity wills it so. Unlike Bruno, who rejoices in change and variety, Spenser looks to the time when no more Change can be, But stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd Upon the pillours of Eternity, That is contrayr to Mutabilitie. (1*) But Spenser's achievement is the last of its kind. In the writings of Ralegh, Greville, Donne, and Shakespeare the cracks are evident; the banks are

58

starting to b u r s t . 2 Ralegh's attitudes to the same issues Spenser t r e a t s with so. much detail in The F a e r i e Queene provide a fascinating revelation of how the t r a ditional intellectual framework was being undermined. In particular, in the culminating work of the l i t e r a r y side of his c a r e e r , The History of the World (1614), Ralegh takes over the traditional view of time as the beneficent unfolding of the will of Providence - and yet f r o m a p e s s i m i s m engendered by his own intimate experience of the instability of the political world, he ends by ignoring the grand optimistic sweep of traditional eschatology and substitutes what is essentially a nihilistic view of t i m e ' s passage and its effects on man. The best of Ralegh's poems a r e differentiated f r o m the m a s s of Elizabethan songs and sonnets not by their quality, which v a r i e s greatly, but by a personal fervency which gives unusual life to the conventional themes and tropes. In particular, there is an unusual and often d i s locating tone of earnestness, particularly associated with his awareness of time. Time is, of course, one of the stock motifs of the Elizabethan lyric: time is the destroyer, the thief; deceptive, ravaging, lying, r u s t ing, and, as well, the c r e a t o r , the reconciler, the harbinger of truth. (2*) A poem like Ralegh's "The Nymphs reply to the Sheepheard" is solidly within the commonplace tradition; and his "To his love when hee had obtained h e r " is again a stock though effectively t e r s e expression of the carpe diem motif: Thinke that beauty will not stay With you allwaies, but away; And that tyrannizing face That now holdes such p e r f e c t grace, Will both chaing'd and ruined bee; So f r a i l e is all things as wee see, So subject unto conquering Time. (3*) The strengths of this particular poem lie in the direct speaking voice working through the conventions, and bringing out what degree of p e r sonal significance they can be made to evoke. This directness is s o m e times combined with a skilful handling of more elaborate rhetorical equipment, as in the complex chronographia: But Time which nature doth despise, And rudely gives her love the lye, Makes hope a foole, and sorrow wise, His hands doth neither wash, nor dry, But being made of Steele and rust, Turnes snow, and silke, and milke, to dust. Indeed, this poem is a superb example of Ralegh's strengths in reworking a commonplace. After eloquently building up the picture of the ideal m i s -

59 tress created by Nature, he then depicts the savagery of Time's uncourteous destruction of beauty and then with heavy emphasis on excretory and sexual imagery, displays the full horror of time's barbarity: The Light, the Belly, lipps and breath, He dimms, discolours, and destroyes, With those he feedes, but fills not death, Which sometimes were the food of Joyes; Yea, Time doth dull each lively wit, And dryes all wantonnes with it. ( 4 * ) Here the "food of joys", ceaselessly fed into the maw of death by time are remorsely turned into excretia; the moistness of the mistress' wanton and witty interior charms is rendered dried and useless. (5*) After this degree of physicality, the poem's peroration has fine effectiveness. Such climaxes seem to point inevitably at some peculiar personal interest of Ralegh's working through this particular convention. It is the personal voice searching urgently for the personal response. (6*) Similarly, in the fragmentary "Ocean to Scinthia" (ca. 1592) can be seen, through often tormented, half-finished lines, Ralegh's intense involvement with something behind the conventions or which the conventions are designed to express. There emerges most strongly the ambitious Ralegh's knowledge of time's power over his aspirations and honours. We are caught in the middle of an unfinished, never fully resolved, internal debate which has both personal and philosophical implications of frightening proportions. In this long fragment, "Ocean to Scinthia", Ralegh is revealed as a man frighteningly aware that time can, has, and would again sweep into oblivion any public glory he might achieve, that honours frequently corrupt and are not worth any eventual gain, and yet allowing himself to be drawn back into the r a t - r a c e . The "love" he wins from Scinthia (Elizabeth) includes favours that open doors not only to service and glory, but also to ruin and death. And yet it is as if he cannot help himself "seeke new worlds, for golde, for prayse, for glory", (7*) with the tragic result that: Twelve yeares intire I wasted in this warr, Twelve yeares of my most happy younger dayes, Butt I in them, and they now wasted ar, Of all which past the sorrow only stayes. (8*) Ralegh is deeply at odds with himself. The result of his "twelve yeares" war has been imprisonment and disgrace. Yet although it has been deeply born in upon him that the achievements of the politician and courtier are transient, he is helpless before his own inability to give them up. "Trew reason" shows a wiser course, (9*) yet he cannot abandon his aspirations, although he recognises that of all things, power and honour are most subject to mutability: Butt as tyme gave, tyme did agayne devoure All chandge our risinge joy to fallinge care . . . All droopes, all dyes, all troden under dust

60

The person, place, and passages forgotten The hardest Steele eaten with softest ruste, The firme and sollide tree both rent and rotten. (10*) Ralegh, therefore, must accept the triumph of time over his continued devotion to ambition. He "knows the world". In particular, he knows that the only stable factor in the public man's life is the acceptance of instability and the necessity of ruthless "emulation". (11*) It is the same principle to which Shakespeare's arch-pragmatist Ulysses appeals to stir Achilles into action. It is a principle which, as Troilus and Cressida makes clear, is forced upon man by the instability of the public world, and the dominance of that world by time: Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, A great-siz'd monster of ingratitudes. Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour'd, As fast as they are made, forgot as soon As done. Perseverance, dear my lord, Keeps honour bright . . . For emulation hath a thousand sons That one by one pursue; if you give way, Or hedge aside from the direct forthright, Like to an ent'red tide they all rush by And leave you hindmost; Or, like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank, Lie there for pavement to the abject rear, O'er-run and trampled oru. Then what they do in present, Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours. (12*) Ralegh's fragmentary poem therefore demonstrates his intimate awareness of the power of mutability over the public world; his History, completed some thirty years later, shares a similar deeply ingrained awareness of time's effects over public life, and in addition, sets this awareness in a significantly confused metaphysical context. Again, like Shakespeare's Ulysses, there is a constant gap between the empirical facts of political life - "I know the world" - and the principles Ralegh wishes, sometimes desperately, to apply to them - "and believe in God. " His History is therefore, an immensely important document both in the history of a courageous, ambitious and sensitive man, and as a document epitomising the deepest intellectual transition of the age. In the History, Ralegh expresses the historian's task in terms of the commonplace medieval and Renaissance approach to history; he is concerned with all three kinds of history that advanced Renaissance historians were gradually tending to distinguish and treat separately - human, natural, and divine. (13*) Providential history in particular was already becoming suspect to many historians. In 1606 Edmund Bolton, the Catholic antiquarian, had criticised traditional historians for ignoring secondary causes in human affairs, writing that "Christian Authors, while for their ease they shuffled up the reason of events, in briefly referring all causes immediately to the Will of God have generally neglected to inform their

61

Readers in the ordinary means of Carriage in Human Affairs, and thereby singularly maimed their Narrations. " (14*) In the works of Bacon or Bodin, there can be seen the seeds of a more pragmatic, metaphysically uncommitted approach to history. The tendency among late sixteenthcentury historians is, as C. A. Patrides puts it, a movement from "the supernatural to the natural, from the universe to the nation or to the principality or to the city, and finally - as hagiographies were displaced by the biographies - to individual members of the civitas terrena". (15*) Ralegh, on the other hand, tries very hard to stay within the f r a m e work of the traditional scheme. He treats the biblical narrative as sacrosanct; he claims that the study of history reveals universal moral truths, most especially that the hand of divine Providence can be seen in past events. Indeed, he attempts to make the doctrine of Providence, the cornerstone of Christian history, occupy the same place in his own scheme. He defines Providence as "an intellectual knowledge, both foreseeing, caring for, and ordering all things", which "doth not only behold all past, all present, and all to come, but is the cause of their so being", and although he endeavours to avoid committing himself to a belief in strict predestination he does try to relate all human events ultimately back to God's providential will. (16*) It is, however, important for our understanding of Ralegh's view of time to see precisely what in his eyes the actions of Providence consist of. The overriding impression emerging from his History is that the direction of Providence is almost exclusively seen in the tragedies and miseries visited on a corrupt world by a just and vengeful God. All events in human history are controlled by God, "the Author of all our tragedies", who "hath written out for us and appointed us all the parts we are to play", and it is history's task to reveal "how the corrupted affections of men, impugning the revealed will of God, accomplish neverthelesse his hidden purpose". (17*) Invariably it is the rise and fall of nations and individual public figures that is cited to prove God's sway over time. Ralegh is most embittered in considering the sins and betrayals of monarchs, and especially those of England: Now as we have told the successe of the trumperies and cruelties of our owne Kings, and other great personages: so we finde, that GOD is every where the same GOD . . . Oh by what plots, by what forswearings, betrayings, oppressions, imprisonments, tortures, poysonings, and under what reasons of State, and politique subteltie, have these forenamed Kings, both strangers, and of our owne Nation, pulled the vengeance of GOD upon them-selves, upon theirs, and upon their prudent ministers! (18*) Inevitably throughout the work, the rise and fall of statesmen and rulers are interpreted in terms of mutability. The greater part of the work, he pointedly observes, deals with kingdoms no longer existent: "By this which we have alreadie set downe, is seene the beginning and end of the three f i r s t Monarchies of the world; whereof the Founders and Erectours thought, that they could never have ended. "(19*) The statesmen and leaders have, like himself, struggled for glory and position and have been annihilated by time:

62

F o r who hath not observed, what labour, practise, perill, bloudshed, and cruelty, the Kings and P r i n c e s of the world have u n d e r gone, exercised, taken on them, and committed; to make t h e m selves and their issues m a i s t e r s of the world? And yet hath Babylon, P e r s i a , Egypt, Syria, Macedon, Carthage, Rome, and the r e s t , no f r u i t , flower, g r a s s e , nor leafe, springing upon the face of the Earth, of those seedes: No; their very roots and ruines doe hardly remaine . . . All that the hand of man can make, is either overturnd by the hand of man, or at length by standing and continuing consumed. (20*) Because they a r e so like his own, Ralegh can see to the bottom of the ambitions of the public figures he depicts, to their motives for gaining power, and to the transience of their achievements. Yet, somehow, because of his stern religious fatalism which r e l a t e s all events back to the will of a vengeful God, he seems unable to see man in any context other than one of predestined m i s e r y and violence, or to commit h i m self to values more positive than the necessarily destructive and t i m e bound search f o r public position and reputation. He thus manages to combine an essentially medieval contemptus mundi attitude with a Renaissance emphasis on the value of earthly fame: the net result is that each attitude cancels out the other. The French moralist P e t e r de la Primaudaye, discussing in traditional medieval tones the fate of seventy assassinated Roman e m p e r o r s , comments: "I cannot sufficiently admire . . . the folly of men, which commonly affecteth them with an u n m e a s u r able desire to rule, whereby they a r e all their life time slaves to a m bition. "(21*) According to the values of the traditional Providential world-view within which he attempts to write, Ralegh would have agreed in theory: in practice, as a Renaissance public figure, he would have continued the struggle. Like Shakespeare's Hector, (22*) his nature r e veals a deep moral ambivalence, an ultimate blindness, a failure of moral nerve, and provides f u r t h e r evidence of a fascinating schism in the collective mind of the age. Ralegh's position, caught between two attitudes towards time and h i s tory, is f u r t h e r seen in his consideration of the secondary causes of history. Dealing with the r i s e and fall of pagan civilizations, he seems to modify his main overriding theme of providential control to come closer to the empirical attitudes of say, Bodin or Bacon. He writes, f o r example, that "to say that God was pleased to have it so, were a true, but an idle a n s w e r e " . (23*) Man e m e r g e s more as a shaper of events, but insistently in his frequent perorations, Ralegh r e l a t e s all events back to God's direction. It is He who dictates the path of all events through men's affections, passions, and actions, and because fallen man is irretrievably corrupted, history becomes a predetermined tragedy, leading inevitably to m i s e r y and death. What is most significantly lacking in his scheme is the traditional Christian eschatological perspective, the goal of h i s t o r y ' s consummation in the ultimate civitas dei. For Ralegh, history has no final goal, no ultimate meaning or consummation. It consists only of the continual vengeance of an angry God until "the long day of mankinde is drawing f a s t towards an evening, and the world's Tragedie and time neare at an end". (24*)

63

The real shaping force behind the History is Ralegh's own melancholy and pessimism arising from years of disappointed ambition and imprisonment. During his imprisonment, the study of history becomes an ally in the fight to defeat time's ravages, for history "hath triumphed over time, which beside it, nothing but eternity hath triumphed over". (25*) For Ralegh, Time's progress is a measure not of growth but of increasing corruption and decay. Time's destruction is total, "for whatso-ever is cast behind us, is just nothing; and what is to come, deceiptfull hope hath it". (26*) Because men are unable to profit from the lessons of the past, history can only be a tragic repetition of sin, violence, error, and exploitation, with any striving for stability swallowed by the maw of time. Therefore the only relief is death, the inevitable end of time, which alone may bring men to an awareness of their natures: "It is therfore Death alone that can suddenly make man to know himselfe . . . He holds a Glasse before the eyes of the most beautifull, and makes them see therein, their deformtie and rottennesse; and they acknowledge i t . " (27*) The History ends with a note added when Ralegh realised it would never be completed - a powerful and profoundly pessimistic acknowledgement of the unassailability of time and its inevitable end in death: O eloquent, just and mightie Death! whom none could advise, thou hast perswaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised: thou hast drawne together all the farre stretched greatnesse, all the pride, crueltie, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hfc jacet. (28*) There is no eschatological hope, no assertion of the permanence of some human experience or relationship, no sense of the inexhaustible significance of any few moments, no imaginative transformation of time's passage, only these, two narrow words, hfc jacet. On the eve of his execution, Ralegh took up the last verse of the lyric written twenty-five years before on the ravages of time Even such is tyme which takes in trust Our yowth, our Joyes, and all we have, And payes us butt with age and dust: Who in the darke and silent grave When we have wandred all our wayes Shutts up the storye of our dayes. - and appends to it in two new lines the only hope he could conceive of, a deus ex machina to rescue him from the grip of time's corruption into eternity: And from which earth and grave and dust The Lord shall rayse me up I trust. (29*)

64

In spite of the note of affirmation, in human terms it is a cry of desperation, not a transformation of time. Ralegh recognises that the victor in his life has been "the consuming disease of time". (30*) As one of his age's most representative and revealing writers, Ralegh demonstrates just how strong the sense of mutability was for the Elizabethans and, in particular, how confused and contradictory ideas could be united by an underlying concern about the nature and meaning of time. In his confusion over the validity of traditional Providentialism, too, he reflects the strain of his age. He never really grasped or r e sponded to any viable or positive alternative to the traditional interpretation of time and his own fascinatingly distorted, Calvinistic expression of it. 3 Ralegh's place in the intellectual and literary history of the late Elizabethan age is, I would argue, therefore, a crucial one. Not only is he typical of the age in his preoccupation with time, but the particular facet of time's power that dominates his work is one that is crucial for our understanding of his age: the sway of mutability over civilizations, states, princes and ultimately the individual public figure himself. It was a preoccupation which dominated Ralegh's life, and one which he faced with a fascinating mixture of courage and blindness. Right to his death, he was convinced he could know and serve both the world and God; but increasingly, he came to see his service of the world as leading to nothing but change, misery, ruin, and destruction. The God whose existence he asserted was above time, certainly; but so far above that time is effectively experienced by Ralegh as frighteningly autonomous. Time's progress is consequently one of unavoidable and increasing destruction and disillusion. Ralegh knew the world, that it was dominated by time's ceaseless changes; he believed in God, but his God is either vengeful, unpredictable, and malicious or else remote, eternally above all violence and misery of the temporal realm he transcends. Ralegh can see no redemption of time, only a fortuitous, undeserved, even arbitrary rescue from it by this ambiguous and terrifying deity. NOTES (1*)FQ, Vll.viii. 2. (2*) Claes Schaar, An Elizabethan Sonnet Problem (Lund, 1960), 60-72; cf. Samuel C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven, 1962), 12-34; Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1939), 69-93. (3*) The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. Agnes M. C. Latham (1951), 20. (4*) The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, 21. (5*) The excretory image is obviously analogous to Shakespeare's "Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back . . . " , in Tro. HI. iii. 156-164. See the discussion below, 112-114. (6*) See "A reading of 'The Ocean's Love to Cynthia' ", in Stratford-upon

65 Avon Studies 2: Elizabethan Poetry (1960), 73. (7*) Poems, 27. (8*) Poems, 29. (9*) Poems, 30. (10*) Poems, 34. (11*) Tro. n i . i i i . 156. (12*) TYo. ni.iii. 145-164. (13*) For a further discussion of this point see the unpublished diss. (Ohio State University, 1961) by John Racin J r . , "An Analysis of Sir Walter Ralegh's The History of the World", 49-50; cf. Bodin, 28. (14*) Hypercritica, Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy, ed. Joseph Haslewood (1815), II, 224-225. (15*) Patrides, 39. (16*) Ralegh, History, I . I . i . 13, p. 18; 1.1.i. 14, p. 19. (17*) History, Preface, sig. Div, I . E . xix. 4, p. 524. (18*) History, Preface, sigs. B3?, C2?. (19*) History, I . V . v i . 12, p. 775. (20*) History, Preface, sigs. A2V-A3i\ (21*) The French Academie, trans. T . B. (1586), 223. (22*) Tro. n.ii. 186-193. (23*) History, I . I I . x i x . 6, p. 512. (24*) History, I I . v i . 9, p. 97. (25*) History, Preface, sig. A 2 r . (26*) History, sig. D i v . (27*) History, I V . v i . 12, p. 776. (28*) Ibid. (29*) Poems, 72. (30*) History, Preface, sig. E3V.

VI

JOHN DONNE'S CHANGING ATTITUDE TO TIME

1 Modern fashions have distorted our view of Donne. He has been treated too exclusively as a poetic innovator, the originator of the so-called "Metaphysical" line of the seventeenth-century poetry. By contrast, to set Donne's early work firmly in the time in which it was written - the age of Shakespeare and Spenser - rather than in the 1630's, when it was first collected and published, is to open up the possibility of new, indeed startling, connections and influences. Donne's early poems have intellectual preoccupations in common with writers who are too often regarded as belonging to an earlier generation. His divine poems, and his voluminous prose works, take their place among writings growing out of the concerns of the late Elizabethan age. Donne's greatness - his vividness, ability to surprise, or suddenly clarify - has resulted in our pulling him out of his generation and bringing him as close as possible to our own concerns. But in fact, Donne's greatness lies not in his abandoning the preoccupations or prejudices of his age, but in writing from within them. We do not appreciate his greatness until we can place him historically. Time, for example, was a matter of fascination to Donne throughout his life. His is one of the most sensitive minds caught up in his age's debate on the nature and meaning of time, and his responses and contribution to it are singularly revealing. 2 As seventeenth-century science matured, I have suggested, the nature and meaning of time gradually became a matter for purely empirical investigation. For Newton, "absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external". But earlier in the century, during Donne's lifetime, time is still treated primarily as a theological matter. (1*) Donne was obviously fascinated by the most technical questions of theology from early in his career, and the nature of time, a matter bristling with metaphysical niceties, is one that underlies many of his earliest works. There is, however, an initial problem to deal with before Donne's early poems can be opened to an adequate reading. Collectively, and frequently within a single poem, Donne's poetry presents such a variety of tones and moods that it is often difficult to pin down the centre of serious commitment that purports to lie behind it. (2*) It is obviously wrong to construct a systematic metaphysic of love out of the totality of Donne's poems: each poem grows out of or evokes a different, often isolated mood in the vast

68

and contradictory range of human love experience. What is impressive about the variety of moods of the poems is Donne's fidelity to individual moments of experience and to the importance of crucial points of time. His best lyrics give the impression of a sudden awareness of limitless significance and it is only in a rare mood of cynicism that the significance is exhausted. "The good-morrow", for instance, suggests how the sudden realization of the uniqueness of certain moments can remake the lovers' apprehension of their pasts: I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I Did, till we lov'd ? The insistent "did" stresses the sudden revelatory quality of the moment of waking. It is important to note how the assertion of this kind of significance is typically set in the context of a noticeable agnosticism towards any systematizations of love - except that defined by the lovers themselves. For a medieval love poet, or even a contemporary, like Spenser, even though time might destroy lovers' temporal enjoyments, the orthodox Christian contemplation of an atemporal eternity can be naturally invoked as compensation. Donne certainly draws heavily on many medieval traditions, but his independence of any systematic metaphysical implications is a marked feature of his most serious love poems. In his later works, his solution to the problems raised by time and mutability becomes the traditional Christian one. In his earlier work, however, although the problems posed by time appear no less pressing, there is evidence of a greater restlessness, a rejection of any particular metaphysical context as equal to encompassing the complexity of human experience. Many of Donne's poems evoke a lack of fixity as the necessary medium in which all human relationships must exist - as in "Womens constancy": Wilt thou then Antedate some new made vow? Or say that now We are not just those persons, which we were? An urgent preoccupation that lies behind many of the love poems is a search for a fixed source of permanence within this flux to give ultimate meaning to the mutability of life. The quest takes two main forms. The f i r s t is a search within concrete human experience for significant moments within the passing of time which, even though time passes, may capture a sense of stasis, an eternal moment within time. In this connection, D. W. Harding has argued that rather than facing up to change and disillusion, some of Donne's poems are "fantasies of permanence", attempting to escape the pressures of mutability on human life by anticipation or artificial prolongation of the event. (3*) The virtue of Harding's argument is certainly in his attempt to relate the poems to inner emotional dilemmas lying somewhere beneath them, but he does assume an oversimple relationship between expression and psychology. In the f i r s t place, the poems' dilemmas are not just Donne's but ours. Second, "fantasy" is an inappropriate term for the kind of imaginative elaboration of the

69

experienced moment evoked in a poem like "The good-morrow", where the tone may be one of anticipation, but the dwelling on future fulfilment returns to its very concrete source - the woman beside him. Oddly, enough, there is little of the carpe diem theme in Donne: the awareness of time and death may be all-important in, say, "The Anniversarie", but there is no hint of a melancholy seizing of fleeting joys, only the joyous affirmation of the moment that fulfils time while time's passing is admitted and faced. This aspect of the poems, seemingly overlooked by Harding, leads onto the second means by which Donne attempts to face time, which requires some more detailed examination. Time and mutability are overwhelmingly admitted by Donne to be categories bound up with man's essential nature, as in "Song": O how feeble is mans power, That if good fortune fall, Cannot adde another houre, Nor a lost houre recall! But time - and death, which is inextricably bound up with time - may be negated by the sheer quality of living because of, not in spite of, time. "A Feaver" asserts that . . . I had rather owner bee of thee one houre, then all else ever. It is noticeable that the source of this kind of reality is found not in the individual lovers themselves, but in their explored and growing relationship. "Aire and Angels" rejects the e r r o r of anchoring the reality of love in anything but the indefinable, changing love of their union. "The Anniversarie" depicts a mutual love that is limited and yet fulfilled by time. Indeed, it is precisely because of time's passing that love exists and grows. The real fears that transitoriness, loss, and death can bring are faced clearly and then calmly set aside. There is no sense of escapism in the conclusion: Let us love nobly, and live, and adde againe Yeares and yeares unto yeares, till we attaine To write threescore: this is the second of our raigne. There is a similar note of serenity at the end of "The Sunne Rising", a dismissal of time's passing, and an awareness that such moments provide a realisation of something beyond time's grasp, even while time's p r e s ence is accepted: Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clyme, Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time. The dismissal of time as irrelevant because of the eternal importance of certain moments, and the acceptance of time as the essential medium of this kind of importance - these are the two ways in which Donne faces the problem of time in human love experience. They provide a tension through-

70

out Donne's writings that greatly illuminates his struggle with time and mutability. It is epitomised by a line from "Loves growth", that "Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do". Using these two traditional terms of mystical theology, Donne focuses on two means of facing time's progress that I have so f a r examined: that of 'being', contemplation, stasis, and that of 'doing', activity, changing. Donne vacillates between one solution and the other. He wants to express a belief in the highest possible significance for certain human, timebound experiences, and is searching for both a vocabulary and a style of life in which to do so. On the one hand, he wants to assert that the world of lovers involves a deeper reality than other activities in the changing world. Love, the most fundamental expression of 'being', is ultimately not to be subject to that of 'doing', to ambition, wealth, or politics which are ruled by time. On the other hand, love - and other human values have to be validated in action through time's passing. Part of the p e r plexing tone of "The Canonization" - a poem which varies in mood from sulkiness to flippant exaltation - arises from a frustrated desire to justify the qualitative experience of love in a world of quantitative activity. It would seem that two strains of Renaissance thought intertwine and conflict in Donne: the contemplative-mystical strain inherited from medieval Christianity and reinforced by neo-Platonism, and a tradition of secular activism represented in Donne's age by, say, Montaigne or Bacon. Two attitudes to time conflict here: either time is redeemed from outside by values that lie beyond time's grasp, or else time is something that must be used or exploited from within. In the words of Giordano Bruno, whose views on time seem strikingly akin to Donne's on this point, true reality by this latter view lies "amid the changes and chances of life", for if "there were not mutation, variety, and vicissitude, there would be nothing agreeable, nothing good, nothing pleasureable". (4*)

Donne, I suggest, was therefore searching for both a fixed point in and yet out of time, and yet also for the fulfilling variety of experience that could come only through the acceptance that, as he puts it in "Elegie i n , Change": Change' is the nursery Of musicke, joy, life, and eternity. In the most satisfying poems, the tension created between the two ways of meeting time is fruitfully explored. The lovers' seemingly s e l f sufficient world can be complete only by accepting the need for time's passing. Just as "love must not be, but take a body too" ( " A i r and Angels"), so love's growth can occur only through time. In the triumphant note at the end of "The Anniversarie", the life of 'doing' harmoniously complements that of 'being'. "Love's growth" further suggests that the fullest experience of life involves the acceptance of change: Me thinkes I lyed all winter, when I swore, My love was infinite, if spring make it more. Love is "elemented" and must "endure / Vicissitude, and season, as the

71

grasse". And yet, by the very intensity of their love, growth and decay of the rest of Nature can be triumphantly transcended as their love grows through and yet in defiance of temporal change. "A Valediction: forbidding Mourning", rejecting the conventional Platonic analogies to describe the lovers' disdain for temporal and spatial separation, also ends on a concrete note affirming simultaneously the necessity of both eternal fixity and temporal movement. Indeed, the very movement of the free compass arm through time and space describes a circle, the symbol of eternity. Here time and eternity are one. Such poems, I believe, provide the core of an answer to charges like Harding's, that Donne's love poetry lacks a serious centre of commitment which does not flinch before the inadequacies and losses of temporal experience. 3 Donne's intellectual development between 1605 (the probable terminal date of his love poems) and 1615 or 1617 marks off a distinct period in his life and writings. It was a decade dominated by the pressure of personal family matters: poverty, illness, death, lack of advancement, and melancholy all contribute to what William Empson described as "the slow approach to capitulation". (5*) Donne's letters in verse and prose reveal his frustration. In 1604, he wrote to his publicly active and successful friend Wotton, "At his going Ambassador to Venice": 'This therefore well your spirits now are plac'd In their last Furnace, in activity. A typical note is his inability to "husband all my time"; in a letter of 1608, he wrote: "every Tuesday I make account that I turn a great hourglass, and consider that a week's life is run out since I went. But if I ask myself what I have done in the last watch, or would do in the next, I can say nothing. "(6*) As Helen Gardner has shown, most of Donne's Holy Sonnets belong to this middle period of frustration:(7*) their fervent wrestling with God's eternity and his own instability and sinfulness r e flect not the impassioned divine but the doubt and turmoil of a soul in transition. Perhaps the most revealing evidence for the intellectual transition Donne was undergoing in this decade is to be found in the discussion of time and mutability in the Anniversaries. The poems do not, as an older generation of scholars believed, provide evidence for his eager embracing of advanced philosophical and scientific ideas. Donne's reaction to new stars and multiple worlds is significant for the surprisingly commonplace context into which this new knowledge is put - that such changes in the heavens are signs of the universe's mutability, that the only permanence men are offered is in an eternity beyond the vicissitudes of time, and that the world's evident decay and man's consequently urgent need to repent are directed by God's Providence. Donne's discussions of the issues here, in 1611-2, are substantially the same as in later sermons and essays. (8*) More importantly, the emotional reverberations that arise from many

72

lines of the poems reveal Donne as a man fleeing the deepest source of inspiration in his early poems, the trust in the value of his own restless aspiration to find eternity through the intensity of human experience: whereas in "The Canonization", searching for an appropriate explanation for the inexplicable, he toyed with the concept that it was the phoenixlike uniqueness of the lovers that immortalized them, now he bewails that . . . every man alone thinkes he hath got To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee. Love is seen as deceptive; the inevitable changes of time as tragic, destructive and bewildering: Poore cousened cousenor, that she, and that thou, Which did begin to love, are neither now; You are both fluid, chang'd since yesterday; Next day repaires, (but ill) last dayes decay. In his early poems, Donne welcomed mutability and change as the medium of life's variety; here they are evidence of its fragmentariness. Time is now conceived of as a dreadful and inevitable rush towards death, a vehicle of impermanence: And what essentiall joy can'st thou expect Here upon earth? what permanent effect Of transitory causes ? Love, friendship, sexual delight, are rendered ineffective by the implications of such questions. Donne's fascination with time is slowly becoming a deep despair in the face of unbearable tensions, necessitating a search for less fragile certainties. He finds them in Christian orthodoxy, in his vocation as preacher and divine. While the sheer bulk of his sermons alone makes generalization difficult, it is nevertheless crucial to analyse the peculiar consistency of his treatment of time in his later writings, and it is to these that I shall now turn. 4

A constant theme of Donne's sermons and devotions is the brevity of time in comparison with eternity. He writes that "if we consider eternity, into that time never entered; eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is a short parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been." Donne constantly interiorizes time, stressing man's subjective awareness of its irretrievability and unreality. Time is especially felt not as an objective measurable entity, but as an inner pressure, a sense of life experienced as isolated or f r a g mented experiences gaining meaning only from contact with Eternity. The constant yearning for the future, the embracing of change in human

73 life that are so noticeable in Donne's early poems have become in his religious works a quest for the permanent beyond time and an acknowledgement that nothing permanent can be found in temporal experience. The source of this permanence is God's eternity, and the authority of the Church which, he now argues, "hath . . . all transitory things . . . under her feet". In the Devotions he exclaims: "What poore elements are our happinesses made of, if time, time which we can scarce consider to be any thing, be an essential part of our happiness!"(9*) Donne's changed attitude to time is an indication of a whole reshaping of a personal world-view, a gradual but definite conversion. "Believe me", he wrote just before his ordination, '1 do not cast into the account of my years, these last five which I have lived otherwise than as nights slept out, which indeed are a part of time . . . rather than a part of life. " (10*) Henceforth, only the eternity of God was able to give the transience of time any real meaning since "Not one houre my selfe I can sustaine." (11*) Donne's writings then, progressively come to show his acceptance of the traditional Christian antithesis of time and eternity. For Donne, the difference has become a radical one of quality: eternity "hath . . . no limits, no periods, no seasons, no moneths, no yeares, no dayes . . . Creation and . . . Judgement are not a minute asunder in respect of eternity, which hath no minutes". Eternity, he asserts, "had been the same as it is, though time had never been". (12*) Time is now seen as important not for its providing the challenging and creative medium in which lovers may grow towards self-fulfilment, but for its leading towards death and judgement. Life leads towards "my minutes latest point", (13*) which looks forward to the fearful possibility of damnation. Now it is important to admit that in both poems and sermons there are admirably serene moods in which death is seen to have no ultimate reality as in the superb ending to his sonnet: One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die. Many of the sermons look forward eagerly to the resurrection, which can be welcomed as providing a culmination to earthly life essentially in continuity with it; "so death" as he exclaims triumphantly, "doth touch the Resurrection". The assurance and serenity of the magnificent "Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse" has none of the shrillness or revulsion of so many passages in the sermons. Similarly, there are occasions when the restless, aspiring young intellectual reasserts himself, as when he writes of man's "undeterminable desire of more, then this life can minister unto him . . . Creatures of an inferiour nature are possest with the present; Man is a future Creature. In a holy and usefull sense, wee may say, that God is a future God. " Nothing here is irreconcilible with his Christian orthodoxy, but the spirit is that of his younger self. (14*) But the difficulty of generalization notwithstanding, the more typical note is of the horrific reality of judgement which interposes itself between time and eternity, and consequently the unknown possibility either of salvation or damnation obsesses him as he envisages "the day of Judgement, when as all Time shall cease . . . The joy, and the sorrow that

74

shall be then, shall be eternall, no end, and infinite, no measure, no limitation . . . " In such passages it seems that no longer can Donne feel that time can be redeemed from within; as time passes there is only "Despaire behind, and death before": Onely thou art above, and when towards thee By thy leave I can looke, I rise againe. (15*) Donne's despairing revulsion from time, and his obsession with the minute that will wrench him from it, is worth contrasting with George Herbert's more serene acceptance of time as the medium of growth and renewal, as, for instance, in "The Flower". For Donne it is not even God's gradual maturing of his purposes through time so much as His plucking him out of the nothingness of time that is so much stressed. Above all, Donne fears suffering "eternall notbeing after his dissolution by death . . . if God did not preserve that beeing". (16*) He often quotes Calvin approvingly and his frequent emphasis that "not one houre my selfe I can sustaine" is similar in spirit to the typical Calvinistic description of man's inability to effect anything but what is determined by God's will, or his emphasis that "every yere, moneth and day, is governed by a new and speciall Providence of God". The rigid Providentialism typical of Calvinism obviously had great temperamental appeal to him. He sees man's life, as does Calvin, as totally dependent from moment to moment on God's Providence; it is "but a parenthesis", "a gallery into a better room", a struggling in time until death and Judgement when the promise that "time shall be no more" will be fulfilled. (17*) Consistently, it seems that for Donne the relationship between one moment of time and eternity is a closer and more real one than between one moment of time and the next. Time is a series of radically discontinuous instants, linked rather to eternity than to each other. For a contemporary divine of a different temperament, Lancelot Andrewes, time is the harmonious expression of cosmological pattern, the gradual unfolding of God's Providence, and is mirrored in both the liturgical and natural year. But for Donne, time is merely a means of entering eternity. In his Christmas sermon of 1625, he stresses that eternity "hath . . . no limits, no periods, no seasons, no moneths, no yeares, no dayes". Preaching on the same text, Galatians 4 . 4 , which includes the phrase "the fulnesse of Time", Andrewes' concern is rather with the unfolding of time as redemptive history. For Andrewes, time overflows into eternity; it is of value in itself. For Donne, time is of value only as it can be negated or transformed from without. (18*) Donne's insistence - one might say, his psychological need - for time to be negated by eternity leads him to dwell on the paradoxes in Christianity that reverse time's order. His insistence on the temporal nature of the Incarnation is not to establish its historical verification, but to stress the paradoxical negation of time by the eternal. Individual men, reborn as Christians, participate in a paradoxical reversal of time: "I was built up scarce 50. years ago, in my Mothers womb, and I was cast down, almost 6000. ye^rs agoe, in Adams loynes; I was borne in the last Age of the world, and dyed in the f i r s t . " A similar fascination for special or paradoxical moments overflows into a number of his religious poems. One of

75

his sonnets marvels at the fact of "Immensity clo.ysterd in thy deare wombe", and the occasion in 1608 of the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day obviously caught his fancy as an emblem of the paradoxical nature of the Christian transformation of time. (19*) Donne continually stresses the infinite importance of every moment of life, since, as one of the sonnets asks, "What if this present were the worlds last night?" Poised on the threshold of eternity, "my minutes latest point", the importance of the present moment is that in it God offers man salvation, possibly for the last time: "If there be a minute of sand left, (There is not)", he importunes his congregation near the end of a sermon, "this minute that is left, is that eternitie which we speake of; upon this minute dependeth that eternity . . . this minute makes up . . . your eternity, because it may be your last minute. " In the life of every man "upon every minute of this life, depend millions of years in the next". (20*) It becomes the preacher's duty to harp incessantly on the need to grasp each opportunity to accept the offered moment, to redeem the time. The word "now" has a fascination for him. Preaching on Romans 13.11, "For now is our salvation nearer than when we believed", he states that "there is not a more comprehensive, a more embracing word in all Religion, then the first word of this Text, Now". God eternally offers all men a continual string of "nows"; every instant becomes another "now": "That Now, that I named then, that minute is past; but God affords thee another Now . . . and if thy conscience tell thee that he speaks to thee, now is that time. "(21*) What can be seen here are the main constituent parts of Donne's highly charged preoccupation with time: his own inability to stop time's flow, to pin down each "now" as it passes, his despair and consequent relief as he grasps the recurring series of "nows" that God offers him. Time is not a harmoniously flowing continuum of God's beneficent purposes, but merely a series of disconnected fragments, each, unless taken immediately, a lost opportunity never to return or bring man closer to permanence except through the fiat of God. Donne's sense of time's fragmentariness and his psychological craving for a belief in God's providential upholding and directing of time are seen particularly vividly in his much-discussed attitude towards death. Many of his meditational sonnets draw on the medieval memento mori tradition, but they acquire a dramatic urgency largely from the strength of his own inner concern with time. His fascination with death is a permanent and increasing aspect of his religious writings, developing frequently into a morbid obsession that cannot be explained away simply by reference to a contemporary revival of memento mori. In 1627 for instance, Donne preached a wedding sermon, and took as his main subject the corruption of the body in the grave; his curious preparations for death have been widely dwelt on by his biographers. His letters, too, in the latter years of his life show an obsession with death and decay. (22*) Donne embraced death in his imagination as eagerly as he embraced life; what is repellent is that he should so often have mistaken one for the other. Intellectually, death acquired its enormous importance for Donne because of what it led to: judgement, then salvation or damnation. Hence part of time's importance was its moving men relentlessly towards the enormous consequences of the precise day of death. But the thought of being bound to time and so

76

moving irrevocably towards dissolution was obviously more than just an intellectual concern for Donne. In Biathanatos, written in depression and illness, he speaks of "that naturall d e s i r e of dying" and what one critic has described as "the death wish of John Donne"(23*) points to a deepseated and continuing obsession with death. In his final sermon, "Death's Duell", Donne looks back on life as but "a week of deaths . . . Our birth dyes in infancy, and our infancy dyes in youth, and youth and the r e s t dye in age, and age also dyes, and determines all". Time has thus become f o r Donne a r e a l m of h o r r o r , which brings him inexorably closer to extinction; life is "but a going out to the place of Execution, to death", and then to judgement. Innocent Hi's De Contemptus Mundi, so popular in the Renaissance, s t r e s s e d how "tyme passeth away and death approacheth nighe", and Donne's preoccupation with time as leading to death can be paralleled by many medieval and Renaissance w r i t e r s , as can his insistence to p r e p a r e f o r death throughout life since "onely hee shall never feele death, that is exercised in the continuall Meditation thereof". But as always, tone is all-important. What is striking about Donne's obsession with time and death is certainly the degree of p e r sonal involvement that he brings to such stock motifs; but there is, as well, something as striking, that the man who puts such a continual e m phasis on the ultimate unreality of time, the putrefaction of the body, and a despairing p r a y e r that God will "have a c a r e of us in the houre of death"(24*) should have once been the man who wrote "A Valediction: forbidding mourning", "Loves Growth", and "The Anniversarie". 5 I have displayed what I have believed to be the radical changes in Donne's treatment of time between his early and later writings. Given Donne's background, ambitions, and the p r e s s u r e s of his age, it might be argued that such a development contains much that is predictable. On the other hand, the very strength of many of his early commitments, both in his m a r r i a g e and poetry, might have suggested something other than a slow capitulation to orthodoxy. A glance back at his love poetry may help h e r e . The basic tension in Donne's apprehension of love, I argued, was that between a drive towards a fixed timeless metaphysic of love and an acceptance of the limitations of time upon it. The urge to find or create a metaphysical framework beyond the grasp of time eventually triumphed. Many of his love poems celebrate the moment - but the moment never l a s t s . It is the problem of the isolation of the moment of revelation and of the lovers in that moment that Donne never adequately, or p e r m a n e n t ly, solves until his later religious writings. However magnificent as poetic statements, the serene acceptance of "The Anniversarie" or "Love's growth" r e p r e s e n t s a r a r e mood in Donne's love poems: a s he grows older, he seems unable to accept the challenge of finding a way of fulfilment through, not despite, t i m e ' s passing - as Shakespeare does in his romances, especially The Winter's Tale. Donne's apprehension of time and mutability in his love poems is, however striking and powerful, oddly limited by its very strength, and his later intellectual development, his capitulation to religious orthodoxy, may paradoxically have its

77

roots in the very strengths of independence and isolation that his love poems demonstrate. NOTES (1*) Newton, Mathematical Principles, 6. It is noteworthy that in the second edition of the Principles, Newton added an affirmation of his belief in a transcendent God, obviously disturbed by criticism that his views led to atheism. For late sixteenth-century rejections of any treatment of time as purely a matter of natural philosophy see e . g . Gervase Babington, Works (1637), 4. (2*) A mistake made in regard to "The Canonization" in an otherwise most suggestive book - Wilbur Sanders, Donne's Poetry (Cambridge, 1970). (3+) D. W. Harding, Experience into Words (1963), 11-13. (4*) De Immenso, quoted I. Frith, 213; Expulsion, 89. (5*) "Donne in the New Edition", C§, VIII (1966), 274. (6*) The Life and Letters of John Donne, ed. Edmund Gosse (1899), I, 190. (7*) The Divine Poems of John Donne (1952), xlix-1. (8*) Cf. Essays in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford, 1952), 25; The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley, 1953-62), VI. 323; cf. Le Roy, fols. 2 v - 3 r ; Ralegh, History, I.I. 5.v; Cuffe, 58, 86-87. The last reference is especially interesting because Donne owned and presumably read the work in question. See Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne (Cambridge, 1957), entry no L. 56. (9*) Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (Ann Arbor, 1959), 89. (10*) Quoted by Augustus Jessup, John Donne (1897), 86. (11*) Poems, I, 322. (12*) Sermons, VI, 331; cf. V, 283; Devotions, 89; Sermons, IV, 240, VE, 77-78, IX, 154, 335. (13*) Poems, I, 324. (14*) Sermons, VIII, 75; cf. Frith, 224. (15*) Sermons, V, 294; Poems, I, 322. (16*) Sermons, VIII, 144. (17*) Calvin, Institutes, I.xvi.2; cf. Donne, Sermons, III, 188, 203, 110. (18*) Cf. Donne, Sermons, VI, 331; Andrewes, Ninety Six Sermons, I, 47-48, 56. (19*) Sermons, VII, 78; Poems, I, 319, 335. (20*) Sermons, VII, 368-369, II, 59, 139, III, 288. (21*) Sermons, II, 250, IX, 327; cf. Devotions, 89, 91. (22*) See Sermons, VIII, 94-109; see especially 98; Gosse, II, 269-283. For Donne's relation to memento mori and other medieval traditions, see Stanley Archer, "Meditation and the Structure of Donne's 'Holy Sonnets", ELH, XXVIII (1961), 137-147; Bettie Anne Doebler, "Donne's Debt to the Great Tradition: Old and New in his Treatment of Death", Anglia, LXXXV (1967), 15-33. (23*) D. R. Roberts, "The Death Wish of John Donne", PMLA, LXII (1947), 958-976.

78

(24*) Sermons, X, 234, II, 197, X, 231; cf. The Mirror of Mans lyfe, sig. DV1^

PART THREE : SHAKESPEARE

VII

"IN DIVERS PACES WITH DIVERS PERSONS" - TIME IN SHAKESPEARE'S EARLY WORKS

1 In this study so far, I have suggested some of the ways in which the meaning and nature of time raised issues of compelling relevance for the Elizabethans. Something more than convention or temporary fashion is involved in the fact that so much literature of the period betrays a consistent concern with the effects of time and mutability on human life. (1*) It was an issue that enables us to pin down the intellectual allegiances of most Elizabethan and Jacobean poets, essayists, dramatists, and divines. Above all, it was an issue that Shakespeare, the most sensitive and perceptive of the writers of the age, took as an urgent and constant concern in his work. The rest of this study will therefore be concerned to explicate the complex and changing exploration of time that Shakespeare carried out. With his poet's sensitive antennae exploring his own responses to living in the late sixteenth century, Shakespeare seems more acutely aware than any of his contemporaries of the perplexities time poses to men. Even in his early plays, he touches on aspects of time which impressed themselves deeply upon so many of his contemporaries. And in the sonnets, the culminating sequence of the great Elizabethan age of lyric poetry, time is again and again thrust to the forefront, as the poet's most anxious concern. The present chapter will analyse these concerns, first in two of Shakespeare's early plays, Love's Labour's Lost ( c. 1594), and Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595), and then in his sonnets. 2

First, a brief consideration of the importance of time in Shakespeare's comedy: as he experimented in his early plays, Shakespeare developed a form of comedy as a kind of ideographic ballet, which engaged with the spectator's world by ironic commentary as well as idealistic c e l ebration. Drawing heavily on the Elizabethan romance tradition, his brand of comedy, however, predominantly concentrates on the idealistic possibilities of life; it deliberately plays down anything which might seriously block the play's final harmony. Such a general description, of course, does not fit each of his early comedies exactly; Shakespeare's confidence in his developing art is shown in the subtlety of his variations on this basic outline. And, it is interesting to note, how radical variations on the pattern are seen to arise where time and mutability become p r e s s ing, even disruptive, preoccupations within the comic structure. Time is an aspect of reality that romantic comedy must ignore or transform, and as his comic art matures, Shakespeare seems particularly to con-

82

centrate on the destructiveness of time in order to represent with the comic structure the 'reality' continually challenging the wishfulfilment tendencies of 'romance'. The general temporal movement of the comedies is, as Northrop Frye has shown, from estrangement or loss to reconciliation, the final harmony often symbolised by a marriage in which the characters "atone together", and where the parts of the original, sundered society are reunified. (2*) Where tensions or counterbalances to this final harmony arise, as with Jacques or Malvolio, they function largely as aesthetic counterpoints within the overall pattern without seriously challenging the validity of the final joy or reconciliation. Again, refinements and exceptions to this pattern exist: Love's Labour's Lost begins and ends under the shadow of death, Twelfth Night puts heavy stress on the chances and accidents of life, The Merchant of Venice sweeps over or perhaps never faces - the human problems raised by the alienation of Shylock. These exceptions provide significant growing points in the development of Shakespeare's art, and also some clues to the more consistent, urgent interests behind his work. It would, however, be obviously falsifying any of the early plays to argue that a concern with time provides either the bulk of the intellectual interest in them or a degree of profundity that I will suggest emerges from later plays like King Lear or The Winter's Tale. But undeniably, a number of these plays do provide important evidence for the development of Shakespeare's art and intellectual interests. The basic temporal pattern of the comedies is the commonplace that I have discussed in an earlier chapter, time as the reconciler or healer, "time . . . the nurse and breeder of all good". (3*) But within this overall pattern, Shakespeare works subtle variations. Almost invariably in order that harmony should be finally achieved, the central characters are brought to face up to ironic or potentially tragic aspects of experience, and in particular to their own time-bound natures. Love's Labour's Lost s t r e s s e s how men may try to escape from time's pressures into the fantasy of courtly games; Two Gentlemen of Verona poses the dilemma of whether travelling or staying at home is the better means to maturity, with each theory tested by time's passage. In As You Like It, time seems to have a dual role: it is both the pressing sequential rhythm identified with the "workingday world" of the court, and also a larger movement, associated with the seasons and bringing about the ultimate harmony of love, marriage, and the redeemed society. But As You Like It also dwells on man's subjective sense of time. Each character's response to time reveals how he imposes his own order on experience, as the comic dialogue on the relativity of time makes clear. "Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. " For the lover, even the rapid passing of time seems a delay: " . . . if the interim be but a se'enight, Time's pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven year." On the other hand, time passes comfortably, almost unnoticed for "a priest that lacks Latin and a rich man that hath not the gout". (4*) Nevertheless, time makes its own objective demands on this "golden world". The progress of the play is to undercut the impulses towards pastoral escapism, and even within the apparently timeless forest,

83

questions of maturing, growth, old age, ripening and rotting, are pushed to the forefront of the play's concerns. Jacques represents man's life as a process of decay and rotting under the pressure of time; Adam displays the vigour and ripeness of which old age is capable. A real distinction that the play hints at is not between age and youth but between the old and the new man: time can be regarded merely as a sequential burden of misery, or as a series of opportunities for growth and positive change. Even within the pastoral world, the play suggests that while men may feel a pressing necessity to stand back from the flux of events, they must nevertheless reintegrate their contemplation of the world's follies with the struggle to create meaning from them. In fact, a recurring theme in many of these early romantic plays is the conflict between man's tendency to fantasy and the reality he is forced by time to accept. Time's relentless progress, frequently symbolised by the steady, neutral pattern of the seasons, forces man to take account of his inner nature, challenges him to leave fantasy for reality and create his own ordered meaning within time. Another variation on this theme is found in Love's Labour's Lost. It is the first of Shakespeare's plays to consider in any significant depth man's attempts to escape time's pressures into a world of fantasy, represented here in the self-enclosed world of the "little Academe" itself. One of the play's basic themes may be said to be time's uncovering of the lords' desires to escape the complexities of real life; it is not that "sooner or later love conquers all"(5*) as a recent editor of the play has claimed, but rather that sooner or later time, death, and the irresistible realities of life conquer all, even the apparent stasis achieved by study, holiday, or courtship. The King's opening speech echoes the commonplace Renaissance desire for temporal fame. The conventional images of time with his devouring scythe and fame dulling time's blade seem to reflect the conventionally abstract categories by means of which the immature King of Navarre and his lords wish to cocoon themselves. The King claims that all men "hunt after" fame, and he determines that in spite of time, fame will give them the permanence of immortal art: in their "brazen tombs" the obscurity that time and death bring will be suspended by the timeless condition of art. Now it is significant that not only does the Academe desire that the apparent permanence of art should overcome time after their deaths, but more specifically, that time should be overcome while they live, while they escape through their studies from the pressures of the flux of the world. They are aspiring to the condition of "living art". The development of the play shows that time cannot be halted in this way: if men are to experience their lives as meaningful, it cannot be done by trying to escape time, but only by seizing their opportunities within the passage of time. To remove themselves from the process of life is a kind of death. In their immaturity, Navarre and his lords betray their fear of the normal conditions of human responsibility, the "barren tasks" time imposes on them. Berowne partially realises - in theory, if not yet in his own experience - that time and impermanence can be overcome only by embracing the apparently transitory pleasures that seem so facile to the others. Life can be grasped only in the process of living, not by studying it in the

84

abstract. But he must prove this awareness upon his pulses, not merely assert it in trite aphorisms. The subplot underlines the folly of the lords. Escaping into illusion is taken to its extreme by Armado, the "child of fancy" who creates for himself a universe of chivalric phrases and postures. He is a "phantasime", treating seriously the heroic attitudes demanded by the Academe's rules. From another angle, Holofernes and Nathaniel represent an abstraction of life to pedantry. Their function in the play is to stress by parody how the members of the Academe are merely playing with life, toying with words, postures, vows, and ideals. The Princess and the ladies bring the challenge of change and responsibility to the gates of the inward-looking world of the Academe. Like posturing Petrarchisti playing at love, the lords besiege the ladies in a "civil war of wits", and their love-postures again stress their disinclination to accept the strains and responsibilities real experience may impose upon them - and does, as the play's action subsequently suggests. In the final scene, as the pageant of the Nine Worthies, which epitomises the Academe's own dreamworld of heroic gestures, nears its climax, reality breaks in harshly in the form of death, forcing the lords to take account both of the time they have wasted and their own mortality. Time and death can be ignored only in a world of makebelieve; as some of Shakespeare's sonnets suggest, artistic immortality - whether "living art" or "gilded monuments", is insufficient to overcome time's powers. It is Time that now forces decisions upon Navarre and his followers. And at last, too late it is realised that the pressure of time, not ideals or fame, is the real arbiter of human life: The extreme parts of time extremely forms All causes to the purpose of his speed; And often at his very loose decides That which long process could not arbitrate. (6*) The necessity of any sudden decision settles all man's struggles to escape responsibility for actually making the decision. The lords' labours are lost because they did not seize the time. Berowne admits too late that "For your fair sakes have we neglected time." For the time their repentance takes, they now learn, is "A time, methinks, too short / To make a world-without-end bargain in". For wasting their opportunities, the lords must suffer the consequences, the delaying of the fulfilling of their loves. They are forced back in the final gusts of ironic laughter into the flux of the world to learn to balance their abstract ideals with experience of the worst that time can do to man. Hence Our wooing doth not end like an old play: Jack hath not Jill. (7*) Shakespeare will take the theme up again in Twelfth Night, that life is not all "what you will". Here the lords' intention of achieving immortality in a self-enclosed world has been reduced to nonsense by the pressures of time, age, and death which the Academe had so naively tried to ignore. The attempt to construct living art has been swept away.

85 Seen in t e r m s of this analysis, the songs at the end of the play have the definite thematic function to ironically emphasise the neutral t e m poral background to man's life that cannot without loss be ignored. They take up the imagery of the r e c u r r i n g seasonal patterns f i r s t hinted at in the play's opening scene. Each season in nature and in man's life needs to be accepted and explored in death at its proper time: it is an "abortive birth" not to enjoy each stage of time in its due season. The final songs, built round the antithesis of "When . . . Then", celebrate l i f e ' s passage through the seasonal changes time brings. Love's Labour's Lost is typical of Shakespeare's comedies in that comedy is used to invite the audience to ponder fundamentally serious issues while being entertained. P a r t of this seriousness is the suggestion of the fragility of comedy itself. Even in the early comedies, r e minders of potential tragedy a r e frequent. Similarly, in Shakespeare's most interesting early tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, there is a s t r e s s on the fragile boundary between comedy and tragedy. The f i r s t two acts develop in a festive atmosphere of wit, bawdy, adolescent love and violence - but then Shakespeare chooses to exploit the tragic r a t h e r than the comic potential of the initial situation. As well, Romeo and Juliet s h a r e s underlying thematic interests with other early plays, not the least of which is a concern with time. The play thus anticipates the r i c h e r and more profound treatment of time in tragedy in Macbeth and King L e a r . As befits what unfolds as a s e r i e s of unpredictable events, the play's prologue presents the lovers' tragedy as produced by Fate. They a r e , by this view, "a pair of s t a r - c r o s s ' d lovers", victims of a force outside themselves, represented by "the s t a r s " . The F r i a r christianises this overhanging sense of Fate, describing the outcome of events as "this work of heaven" and claiming at the play's end that "a greater power than we can contradict / Hath thwarted our intents". (8*) Human events a r e , according to the Prologue, under the control of an i n s c r u table Providence, and a crucial critical question is how true such an interpretation is to the play's experience. In an anticipation of King Lear and The Winter's Tale p a r t of what this play suggests is that to relate the inexplicability of time to a force beyond the immediate such as Providence of Fate may be to abandon responsibility before the painful inexplicability of tragic events. The passing of time and the resultant urgency for the lovers is s t r e s s e d throughout the play. The increasing tempo, swift changes of pace, frequent r e f e r e n c e s to t i m e ' s passing, to Juliet's extreme youth - which Shakespeare emphasises by making her four y e a r s younger than in his source - all give the impression of t i m e ' s p r e s s u r e on the lovers. In a sense, it is time represented by their pasts that eventually destroys them. They are opposed by time in the shape of the social and family past, born into an ancient, petty feud not of their own making. The two family names r e p r e s e n t the f o r c e s of the past moulding the lovers. Juliet t r i e s to separate Romeo's person f r o m his name, while she herself has to fight to r e j e c t the conventions her past imposes on her, disobeying her parents to whom she had beforehand been c o m pletely obedient, and rejecting the settled future her father has planned.

86

But both Romeo and Juliet look forward, if fearfully, to a future stronger because of their difficulties in breaking from the past: . . . all these woes shall serve For sweet discourses in our times to come. (9*) Time threatens the lovers in another way. Repeatedly their youth and inexperience are stressed, and they are isolated by the gap between their own and their parent's generation - a difference measured by different senses of time's passing. It has been noted that "it is characteristic that, while the Nurse and Capulet look for the answers to such questions as the age of Juliet" - i.e. they are preoccupied with the past, the feud, and their children as babies - "Romeo and Juliet deal with a matter of minutes - whether it is night or dawn". (10*) Capulet reminisces on his lost youth: I have seen the day That I have worn a visor and could tell A whispering tale in a fair lady's ear, Such as would please. 'Tis gone, 'tis gone, 'tis gone!(11*) Q1 emphasises the point by adding "Oh, youth's a jolly thing!" The gaiety and passions of the older generation have withered into duty and nostalgia. For them time ambles, for their children time gallops while they are together, drags when they are apart. Even the Friar, the most sympathetic of the older generation, although helping to precipitate their marriage, counsels moderation and patience: Therefore love moderately: long love doth so; Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow. (12*) The Friar's platitudes cannot enter into the quality of the lovers' inner experience and serve only to isolate them further. Both lovers are aware of and yet also fear their haste. But their rashness is largely forced upon them by circumstances. Juliet is threatened by an immediate marriage to Paris, and they feel that they have no choice, but the F r i a r ' s advice that "they stumble that run fast" is beside the point under the pressure of events. What the lovers need desperately above all else is the normal, steady progress of time to allow their love to mature. The seasonal and garden imagery suggesting steady growth and maturity that occurs in the early scenes is significantly counterbalanced by images of cankered or destroyed flowers. Whatever the lovers assert, their love is not above time. Romeo can, perhaps truly, claim that: . . . come what sorrow can, It cannot countervail the exchange of joy That one short minute gives me in her sight. (13*) - but the terrible truth is that the "short minute" cannot last. It and the lovers themselves are destroyed.

87 The play makes no suggestion that the lovers are united beyond death. The reconciliation that occurs is in the world, between the feuding families. Their love, as Philip Edwards argues, "wins a victory in society", (14*) but this is largely irrelevant to the lovers themselves and so to the main burden of the tragic effect that the play achieves, based on our awareness that the feud has been ended at such cost, that the past should be transformed and society harmonised at the cost of two young lives. Time and death can, in spite of what men may hope, destroy their highest passions, and apparently nullify their dreams. It may be, as G. I. Duthie claims, that "death has no power to destroy the beauty or the power of the feelings of the lovers for each other", (15*) but it is so, ironically, only on the unsatisfactory level of art: . . . I will raise her statue in pure gold That whiles Verona by that name is known, There shall no figure at such rate be set As that of true and faithful Juliet. (16*) We are back with the unsatisfying permanence of the Academe's "living art". 4 Shakespeare, I would suggest, takes time and mutability as important themes in a number of his early plays. He is working with conventional literary motifs that were widespread among a host of contemporary writers, but nevertheless, Shakespeare's development was rapid, and in the sonnets, written probably during the middle or late 1590's, a maturity both of philosophical insight and imaginative vision is clearly evident. The pervasiveness of time's presence in so many of the sonnets has been widely recognised, notably by L . C. Knights. (17*) In the sonnets, man and time become adversaries in what is at once a universal and yet a highly personal context. "Universal" not in the sense that the problem comes to be, as I have suggested in dealing with Spenser, part of a wider philosophical question to which there are long-established answers, but rather in that the issues raised painfully affect all human beings; and highly personal in the sense that at their most profound, the sonnets fix on the intimate problems that time brings to bear on the individual's transient life and experience. It is, however, important to realise that they cannot be fitted easily together into any consistent abstract thesis, either about time or any other aspect of human experience. Shakespeare seems to deliberately avoid erecting his apprehension of time into a metaphysical system; time emerges from the sonnets primarily as an aspect of the complex and paradoxical fragility of the individual's apprehension of human experience within and around him. Thus to contrast Shakespeare with, say, Spenser on this issue is to mirror the basic tension in the age: the latter treats time as a problem which can be solved by setting it in the context of God's creation and universal purpose; Shakespeare sees it as a fundamental, even solely, inexplicable

88 human problem, rooted in the mysterious facts of subjective human experience, and demanding not explanation but acceptance. Throughout the sonnets, time is evoked as the impartial background to all human activities, not just as the pattern of continual change, but both as a sinister, impersonal determinism and also an unpredictable force bringing unforeseen chances, life's "million'd accidents": Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

(60)

Coupled with the sense of time's determinism is the appalling feature of its unforeseen chances: But reckoning Time, whose million'd accidents Creep in 'twixt vows and change decrees of kings, Tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp'st intents . . .

(115)

Sonnet 15 protests against Time's inevitably destroying its own creations, and expresses a sense of total helplessness before a malignant force greater than the individual consciousness which seeks to understand and so surmount it, but able to do so only to the extent of being appalled that every thing that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment.

(15)

Beneath their obvious common subject of the poet's relations with the fair youth, the first 126 sonnets are united by Shakespeare's concern with these painful facts of mutability, and his consequent war against Time's powers, born of the realisation that "nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence". Paradoxically, the beauty and courage of youth which are themselves the products of time, are continually undermined by youth's transitoriness: Those hours that with gentle work did frame The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell Will play the tyrants to the very same.

(5)

The present moment, continually slipping from man's grasp, is merely a moving and fragile boundary between a past that has disappeared and a future that is uncertain. Beauty, "Time's best jewel" (65), is at once the most valuable and most vulnerable product of time, ironically giving time meaning and yet causing pain when it is so easily and quickly destroyed. Beauty makes deep and intimate demands on the lover's belief in its value, but it also provokes an equally deep offensiveness at its decay by Time. Time therefore presents itself as a fundamentally de-

89

ceptive factor in human life: F o r n e v e r - r e s t i n g time leads s u m m e r on To hideous winter, and confounds him there. (5) Like the clock that m e a s u r e s its passing, it silently steals youth and beauty away: Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand, Steal f r o m his figure, and no pace perceiv'd. (104) But Shakespeare does not conceive of the destruction of youth and beauty as an abstract problem to be settled by setting it within a traditional metaphysical f r a m e w o r k . Although the F a i r Youth is described as the epitome or emblem of all earthly beauty, the issues raised by both the creation of the "flourish set on youth" (60) and its decay are seen as emotional or psychological problems that cannot be solved by being shifted on to a metaphysical plane. What is more specifically shocking is not just that life is transient in general but that love, beauty, and the poet's own a r t , the most valuable experiences within time, a r e irretrievably subject to time, a response recorded with pathetic and helpless simplicity, that eventually "Time will come and take my love away" (64). It is in the timbre of such s p a r s e , sad lines that the full sense of the loneliness and individuality of man's confrontation with time is brought home. As the sequence proceeds, the poet's realisation is shown to be deepened by f a c t o r s like his own ageing which c r e a t e s a b a r r i e r between himself and his beloved, his sense of approaching death, and by his knowledge that beauty and youth have in the past ages also been subject to decay and death. Although he a s s e r t s that the F a i r Youth's beauty epitomises and so brings to life again all the beauties of the past, he is aware that this is so only on the level of hyperbole, and that in reality the present in its turn is becoming p a r t of a discarded non-existent past. So strong has the effect of love been upon him that he f e e l s that beauty must, somehow, belong to an o r d e r beyond t i m e ' s powers, and yet all the evidence of past and present is to the contrary. Already f r o m this initial analysis, it can be seen how Shakespeare is aware of and is imaginatively transforming many of the most widespread concerns of his age: not merely by gathering together conventional motifs, but by responding to his own responses to what were some of the deepest psychological and moral p r e s s u r e s growing to a head at the end of the century. Particularly revealing is the context into which his treatment of time is put: it is set almost exclusively within the context of the inexplicability of individual mortality. What provides a m a j o r strand in the sequence is the exploration of the emotional implication of his abandonment of or at least agnosticism towards traditional t r a n s c e n dentalism by refusing to t r a n s f e r the problem on to another level of d i s course, or place it in the traditional ontological context. Certainly some sonnets do suggest that the h o r r o r of t i m e ' s powers may be so great that the poet is forced to exhort his friend to escape

90 them by sealing himself off from the processes of change in the world by, for instance, desperately asserting that the powers of procreation or art transcend time - Sonnet 12 for example, ends with the contradiction that: . . . nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence. The reversal that often occurs in the last couplet of many of the early sonnets as a defiance to the impression of time's destructiveness that is relentlessly built up in the first twelve lines obviously reflects a psychological conflict: the feeling that love or beauty or art must s o m e how even in spite of the evidence, resist time, and an accompanying inability to see how this can become possible. The various apparent escapes offered in the sonnets to time's hold over man - procreation, art, the supreme value of human love - have often been analysed by commentators; what is perhaps most important is digging beneath the surface commonplaces to two vitally dramatic philosophical conflicts within the sequence as a whole. First, there is the obvious conflict between the ways the poet attempts to resist time's powers - through procreation, art, and the powers of human love. Second, and more importantly, there is a tension that directly mirrors the increasingly disparate beliefs in Shakespeare's own age about the meaning of time, between, on the one hand, attempts to accept the passing of time as absolute and face and explore the full shock of this realisation on the individual sensibility; and on the other hand, an urge to escape the shock of such an awareness and to merge the problem of the human personality's confrontation with time into a submission to impersonal, abstract forces of the universe which seem to transcend time. The doctrine that urges procreation in order to defeat time involves a submergence of the individual in a larger cosmic process. To beget children merely to recall "the lovely April" of one's own prime is no solution to a personal awareness of mortality: the "golden time" the poet imagines the Fair Youth enjoying through his children will not be his own "golden Time" at all. The assertion that he has an obligation to Beauty or Nature is patently an inadequate solution as the s e l f defeating and frequently deliberately hollow tone of the last lines of these early sonnets tend to admit: This were to be new made when thou art old, And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold. (2)

In this first group of sonnets, Shakespeare is testing and then abandoning the emotional appropriateness of procreation as a means for resisting time. Increasingly through these first eighteen sonnets, Shakespeare's attitude, emerging through the dramatic tensions within the poems, is seen as growing more sceptical towards procreation as an adequate solution. The argument that man's individuality is subservient to the broad patterns of Nature is shown up as irrelevant to the real emotional

91 issues involved. Similar strains are evident in many of the poems declaring the poet's intention of immortalising his love for the Fair Youth through his verse. Side by side with the admission that "nothing stands but for his scythe to mow", there is the frequent assertion in the final couplet: And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand, Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

(60)

Here, in Sonnet 60, the most powerful imaginative force is directed to evoking the overwhelming mortality of all man's and Nature's c r e ations, while the claim in the concluding couplet for the power of verse has a ring of desperate assertion against overwhelming odds, as if art is being used as a desperate compensation for an inability to face the burden of time's irresistibility. Although the power of poetry is initially conceived as a more adequate means for the Fair Youth to resist time than procreation, what frequently comes through as more pressing is Shakespeare's concern with the ability of his own powers as a poet to withstand the "bloody tyrant Time" (16), and so in a sense conquer time through personal fame. The most convincing assertion that he makes for the power of his art is that if through his poetry both his own sense of creativity and the beauty he has perceived in the F a i r Youth have been even partially expressed, time has been given real meaning - not conquered, but transfigured. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (18)

But it is important to note that the serenity of these lines is not that of Chaucer's or Spenser's acceptance of earthly love as acquiring meaning only in relation to a transcendent eternity. It is rather an awareness that art, like love, is one of the precious, fragile values, that within time, makes time's passing meaningful. As well as the sonnets concerned with procreation and the powers of poetry, there are those asserting the power of the poet's love for the F a i r Youth to withstand time. A number claim that love alone is eternal in a world of change and illusion, an assertion stated not as a philosophical thesis but in terms of imaginative hyperbole as if the experience had proved so profound that only the most heightened terms sufficed to describe it - and even these are sometimes seen as inadequate: There lives more life in one of your fair eyes Than both your poets can in praise devise.

(83)

But the youth's beauty is not an "eternal summer" (18) in that it reflects God's eternal beauty; the love and beauty praised in the sonnets are

92

given their significance only by the poet's experience of them as part of the changing temporal world, and so love, because it is part of human experience, is inevitably bound up with mutability. The poet bewails the passing of past experiences and ideals, his own "dear time's waste" (30), but he is aware that his whole life has acquired newer and deeper significance through his love, so that he will see his own past as meaningful when he too reaches the "well-contented day" (32) of his own death. Then love will prove to have been the experience that, given a world where time inevitably involves change, ageing and eventually death, nevertheless redeems the passage of time from pointlessness. Seen in terms of this serene perspective love is "an ever-fixed mark" (106) in the face of change, absence, estrangement, rivalry, or the changing fashions of the public world, since a love bound to outward show is ruled by merely temporary fashions and favours: If my dear love were but the child of state, It might for Fortune's bastard be unfather'd, As subject to Time's love or to Time's hate.

(124)

Those whose love is decked out in the exterior show of the public world are the "fools of time" (124). In contrast, Shakespeare's love is intimate, subjective, and fragile, but because it is based on the acceptance of time as the sole realm of its expression, time can be seen as an area of responsibility and each moment can be taken not as an opportunity of exploitation but as a challenge to growth. Nor can love become static; its fullness depends on continual challenges and explorations, and by so, paradoxically, accepting time as the creative medium for its growth, love cannot become "Time's fool". It can survive external changes, the disappearance of "rosy lips and cheeks" (116). What it gives is an inner meaning to life, which cannot be revealed adequately in outward show, compliment, or even poetic tributes, since ultimately true love knows no art But mutual render, only me for thee.

(125)

Only therefore by welcoming time as the sole area of existence through which human experience can grow, can time be defied - a startlingly different conclusion from the medieval poet's warning that . . . fleschly lufe sal fare as dose the flowre in May, And last and be na mare than ane houre of a day; And sythen sygheful sare than lust, than pryde, than play, When they er casten in kare til thyne than lastes ay. (18*) The medieval religious poet here, like Spenser in the Mutability Cantos, could see time as petty in comparison with the eternal love of God. Shakespeare, writing with a no less religious tone but with an entirely

93

different perspective, can also see time as in some sense irrelevant, somehow unable to destroy the courage of lovers who dare to affirm the permanence of their experience. Hence the almost flippant tone of Sonnet 123 arises from an awareness that the devastation caused by time is now somehow unimportant. But in order for love's ultimate value to be asserted in this way, it is most important to see that the poet has had to admit the irresistibility of time and change. Hence Sonnet 126 provides the appropriate climax to the whole sequence's meditations on time. (19*) It recapitulates many of the themes raised in earlier sonnets. All creatures, especially man, and even the cosmic forces of Plenitude and Universal Beauty are subject to time. Although the Fair Youth is the epitome of all nature's essential beauty, a "minion of her pleasure", yet no subsuming of him into natural processes, it is now admitted, can defeat Time. Nature "may detain but not still keep her treasure". The sonnet ends firmly with the realistic awareness that the Youth's beauty is, in the end, still subject to time. Although beauty and love make time meaningful within man's individual experience, like the rest of the universe, man must come to terms with time. Even Nature herself is subject to time: Her audit, though delay'd, answer'd must be, And her quietus is to render thee. (126)

It is at this point that a contrast between the conceptual contexts into which Shakespeare and Spenser place their apprehensions of time is particularly relevant. Almost certainly writing in the same decade, for Spenser, Nature is God's minister, and transcends all the changes in time, and so judgement is eventually given against Mutability: I well consider all that ye have sayd, And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate And changed be; yet being rightly wayd They are not changed from their first estate; But by their change their being doe dilate: And turning to themselves at length againe, Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate: Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne; But they raigne over change, and doe their states maintaine. (20*) But in Shakespeare's sonnet, even Nature is subject to time, and the problem of man's mutability cannot be explained away by being put in a wider cosmic context. Time is the arbiter of all things, a fact, as the whole sequence records, that is borne in upon the individual personality with irresistible force. If then, Sonnet 126 is seen as the intellectual summation of Shakespeare's treatment of time in the Sonnets, it must be admitted that the later Sonnet 146, which has often been seen as a reaffirmation of an orthodox religious perspective, stands out uneasily. Richard Goldman, for instance, sees Sonnet 146 as the culmination of a search for per-

94 manence, a shift from the classical to the Christian view of time. (21*) But the combined weight of the final sonnets of the sequence written to the F a i r Youth is so great that there seems no point in straining the sonnets as a whole into a false unity. The importance of Sonnet 146 is that it is an isolated spiritual reflection in conventional Platonic terms, recording perhaps a momentary failure of courage, so obviously separated in spirit from those sonnets that are most seriously engaged with the problem of time. Again it must be stressed that the sonnets as a whole should not be forced into a consistent abstract thesis; each one attempts to crystallise particular moods or tensions of human experience, and the reader can only note recurring strains and conjecture a consistency of mood or preoccupation. The main line of the Sonnets' meditations on time seems to me to lead consistently to Sonnet 126 and it is dangerous to seek a false philosophical unity by seeing 146 as a concluding return to a religious perspective. Any revulsion from time in the first 126 sonnets is more often and more profoundly set against a strong affirmation of time as the area in which, in spite of its irresistibility, human life can be given meaning, and not as an imperfect realm from which men must flee to the eternity of God. Sonnet 146 stands apart, as a magnificent mysterious freak, seemingly arising from an inexplicable and disconnected mood. The main weight of the sonnets is upon an apprehension of time strictly in contrast with its sense of escape towards a transcendent Eternity.

4 To what extent can the vision of time so successfully incarnated in the sonnets be seen as evidence of a widening of intellectual perspective, perhaps even bringing a new conceptual strain, into Elizabethan nondramatic poetry ? Certainly it would be tempting to see the influence of Bruno behind some of Shakespeare's attitudes to time in the sonnets. Bruno, it will be recalled, wrote of all creation being "subject to Change" and yet being "unconquered by it". Men, he counselled, should be concerned to look not to a transcendent Eternity but towards the infinite within time, particularly through the raptures of a contemplation of virtue, knowledge and love, and "though the soul does not attain the end desired and is consumed in so much zeal, it is enough that it burns in so noble a fire". (22*) Evidence for any direct influence of Bruno upon Shakespeare as I suggested earlier is dubious; what can, however, be said is that Shakespeare is responding to the mystery of time with responses startlingly analogous to the way Bruno, or in certain of his early love lyrics, Donne, does. Again, the contrast with Spenser is revealing. Whereas Spenser may possibly be using Bruno's ideas in the Garden of Adonis and the Mutability Cantos, he does so only to r e ject them; but Shakespeare's apprehension of time as the necessary and sole medium for human maturation is strikingly close, in spirit, to Bruno's. The divergent attitudes and tones that I am suggesting can be seen between Shakespeare and Spenser may at this point be deepened by a brief comparison of their typical imagery to describe time and change.

95 Spenser characteristically depicts the passing of time with the eye of a painter, creating an emblematic rather than a fluid effect. In Daphnaida the mutability of the world is likened to . . . a Mill wheele, in midst of miserie, Driven with streames of wretchednesse and woe, That dying lives, and living still does dye. (23*) He treats temporal change as part of a universal pageant, tending to describe it in static pictorial imagery, emphasising the iconographic form of the image in order to contain the fact of temporal change within an ordered framework. Shakespeare, on the other hand, aiming to suggest both a more intimate, irresistible relation between time's passing and human life, uses more fluid, fleeting images to convey the impression of the eddying and merging of natural processes, of ceaseless and often paradoxical unrest and change: When I perceive that men as plants increase, Cheered and check'd even by the self-same sky, Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease, And wear their brave state out of memory.

(15)

Typically, the observer is in a quite extraordinary way almost deterministically involved in the movement of natural mutability Shakespeare is describing: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

(60)

Again, in Spenser's description of Autumn in The Shepheardes Calender the seasonal changes are pictured, visualized, and held in tension with the controlling form of the metaphorical structure and so distanced from the reader in an emblem of cosmic order; the beginning of Shakespeare's Sonnet 63, on the other hand, although starting with a few static, almost iconographic, images, shifts immediately into images of insubstantiality and transitoriness that cannot be merely visualized and therefore distanced: That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang. (73) Here there is a sense of temporal uncertainty, of time's latent powers destroying inevitably and at random, which reinforces the main line of thought that I have traced in the conceptual structure of the sonnets.

96 What is important and unique about Shakespeare's vision of time in his sonnets, therefore, is first, the huge range of human and natural experience that is shown to be inextricably bound up with man's apprehension of time; and second, the implied autonomy of time that is so central to Shakespeare's apprehension of the preciousness of love, beauty or poetry. Intellectual and emotional tensions that were lying latent beneath the surface of the late sixteenth century are here being brought out and analysed in terms of their impact on the individual's response to his own temporality. The sonnets vividly dramatize the sense of inexplicability that men of the late Renaissance seemed to feel before the mystery of time, and thus Shakespeare's crucial position in his age's most fundamental intellectual transition. NOTES (1*) Cf. Maurice Evans' remark, Elizabethan Poetry, 132, that '"Leave me, O Love, that leadeth but to dust', was, by 1590, no longer the academic protestation which it had been in the earlier miscellanies. " (2*) AYL, V.iv. 104; see Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York, 1965), 72-118. (3*) 2GV, m.i.243. (4*) AYL, in. ii. 290-311. (5*) John Arthos, introd. to Signet L L L (New York, 1965), xxiii. (6*) LLL, V.ii. 728-731. (7*) V. ii. 743, 777-778, 862-863. (8*) Rom, V. iii. 260, 153-154; cf. Prol., 1.6; I. iv. 107. (9*)in.v. 52-53. (10*) G. Thomas Tanselle, "Time in Romeo and Juliet", S§, XV (1964), 255. ( l l * ) I . i v . 19-22. (12*) II. vi. 14-15. (13*) n.vi. 3-5. (14*) Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (1968), 72. (15*) Introd. to Rom (Cambridge, 1955), xxxii. (16*) V. iii. 298-301. (17*) Explorations, 51-75. (18*) Richard Rolle, English Writings . . ., ed. H. E. Allen (Oxford, 1931), 45-46. (19*) J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (1956), 269. (20*) FQ, Vn.vii. 58. (21*) Goldman, 10-11. (22*) Bruno, Heroic Frenzies, I. iii. 117. (23*) Daphnaida, II.

vm "THE ROUGH TORRENT OF OCCASION" - MUTABILITY IN SHAKESPEARE'S POLITICAL WORLD

1 The educated Elizabethan was taught to read history as a storehouse of moral exempla, above all for the monarch, governor or public figure. Baldwin's dedication in the Mirror for Magistrates stresses the awesome responsibility of rulers to study history's lessons since "the goodnes or badnes of any realme lyeth in the goodnes or badnes of the rulers . . . I nede not go eyther to the Romans or Grekes for proofe hereof, neyther yet to the Jewes, or other nacions . . . Oure owne countrey stories (if we reade & marke them) will shewe us examples ynow. "(1*) But, it is important to note, the attitudes taken up towards these exempla need not have been stereotyped. There has been a widespread assumption among many modern scholars and critics that Shakespeare's plays were responding passively to what the Elizabethan establishment propagated as the orthodox interpretation of recent historical events and of order in the state. E. M. W. Tillyard's view, for instance, was that the histories expressed "a universally held and still comprehensible scheme of history . . . by which events evolve under a law of justice and under the ruling of God's Providence". (2*) Thus they were seen to uphold the traditional belief in the providential guidance of temporal events to a divinelyplanned conclusion. Such assumptions are no longer as prevalent in scholarly studies of Shakespeare's histories but nevertheless remain respectably current. Apart from the sloppy intellectual history such approaches are based on, they lend themselves to glibly abstract readings of Shakespeare's plays. Although working with his age's intellectual counters, Shakespeare was eminently capable of thinking for himself. Moreover, as I showed earlier, the nature and influence of Divine Providence was at the centre of one of the age's great intellectual controversies, and Shakespeare far from passively having to accept any one interpretation, however traditional or official, was quite capable of taking any of a variety of positions - from the secular pragmatism of William Thomas to the philosophical radicalism of Bruno. If l e s s e r minds, like Spenser, Donne and Ralegh, were aware of a growing diversity of intellectual tradition, why not Shakespeare? It seems obvious that he was at the very least capable of responding to the increasing variety of attitudes. To set Shakespeare's English history plays inside a rigid Elizabethan orthodoxy, I would suggest, is to distort the unique and restless quality of his intelligence. As Wilbur Sanders remarks, in dealing with the history plays, "Tudor political orthodoxy, simply conceived, is the kind of irrelevance that simply prevents us from seeing what is going

98

on. "(3*) It certainly prevents an adequate unravelling of Shakespeare's complex treatment of the m a t t e r s I am now intending to discuss: the confrontation of the public world and time, t i m e ' s ceaseless challenge to the values of the public figure, and the relationship between the public man's appeals to Providence and the actual working out of events. What one might t e r m "the Tillyard thesis" sees Shakespeare's history plays as embodying the same perspective on such issues as the unashamedly orthodox Respublica or Gorboduc. Both Tillyard and John Dover Wilson saw Shakespeare's later tetralogy in particular as upholding the divinity of kingship, s t r e s s i n g the sin of Bolingbroke's rebellion and God's punishment of the nation - thus accepting Richard II's own interpretation of his downfall. According to this thesis, Henry V, not inheriting his f a t h e r ' s guilt, is ultimately acclaimed as the ideal king, patriotic and pious - and the whole tetralogy rounded off on a note of triumph. (4*) One of the m a j o r strands of the English history plays is certainly an examination of the traditional Christian doctrine of time's p r o v i dential direction. Shakespeare's kings, in particular, make frequent appeals to divine guidance. But this fact in itself gives not the slightest evidence of Shakespeare's adherence to the orthodox view that, in Thomas Blundeville's words, "we may learne thereby to acknowledge the providence of God, whereby all things a r e governed and directed". It might just as easily suggest an allusion to a more s e c u l a r l y - o r i e n tated observation like Richard Morison's shrewd r e m a r k , echoing Machiavelli, that in political life "Goddis worde is potent, and to saye as I thynke, almost omnipotent, if it be well handeled. "(5*) It is of significance that in Shakespeare's histories, even in the immature Henry VI plays, political or military successes are inevitably i n t e r preted by the victors as evidence of God's providential hand. What m a t t e r s is, of course, the dramatic context: such attitudes a r e often either naive or alternatively calculated gestures to cover the realities of power politics. Richard III, for example, contains innumerable r e f e r e n c e s and appeals to God, Providence, the Saints and Heaven. Most a r e invocations f o r divine influence on events, but almost invariably they cover some purely political purpose. Although Richard is the most p e r s i s t e n t offender, it is important to notice that all the play's factions use the same technique, with various degrees of effectiveness, and this is why it is arguable that the end of Richard III r a t h e r than being "sadly contracted to the stature of Tudor Propoganda", (6*) can be read as reinforcing what might well be an audience's growing scepticism about the sincerity of all political invocations of the heavenly powers. Richmond's final pious apostrophe is, in itself, no more obviously sincere than that of any of the various factions. That Richmond became Henry VII is a matter of historical accident, and, it might be argued, not integral to Shakespeare's play p e r se; p r e sumably in Shakespeare's audience, there were a few independent minds capable, as now, of experiencing Richmond's speech within the pattern of the play and not just as an unambiguous reflection of what passed f o r historical fact. Similarly - and this is to c a r r y the argument to what would appear

99

to be the enemy's strongest and most-entrenched position - it is byno means certain that Shakespeare's attitude to Henry V is as unambiguous as upholders of the Tillyard thesis make out. While the Chorus, and on one level, the movement and tone of the play itself, reinforce the view of Henry as a model of the perfect king, Henry's motives and actions are often strangely equivocal. His reformation seems, even to his supporters, too slick to be sincere; he constantly shifts responsibility for his policy either on to his advisers - or God; the spirit of his Harfleur oration is somewhat undercut by the parody of it by Bardolph and Nym; the human qualities lying behind his martial piety are rendered rather dubious by the reports of Falstaff's death; while his concluding marriage is curiously politically functional. More importantly, though Henry seems confident in his monopoly of divine favours, it is noticeable that he consistently identifies the will of God with his own ambitions and policies, and his appeals to Providence can be read as political shiboleths rather than as expressions of any deep piety. In II Principe Machiavelli praised Ferdinand, King of Aragon, for characteristics strikingly similar to Henry's: making war under the pretext of religion with the aid of the Church finance, and having recourse "to a kind of religious cruelty" to gain his ends. Both lion and fox, Henry is acting in accord with Machiavelli's observation that "nor is there any thing more necessary" for the Prince then "to seeme to have" an appearance of piety. (7*) Henry's invocations of Providence are designed to make respectable the policies that he, as a practical man of affairs, has already decided to follow, and he sees the Church's function as that of quietening his conscience over his ambitions and accepting the moral responsibility for his severely practical intentions. It is notable that Henry's God is given responsibility for the carnage as well as the victory. (8*) The Divinity's function seems to be primarily to provide a blessing for his power politics. This brief glance at Henry V may be considered to be pushing the point a little. But, it seems to me, it can be plausibly argued that Shakespeare was quite capable of writing for the uncomplicated Elizabethan patriot at the same time as providing a more sceptical, discerning examination of the quality of successful power politics. Such an appeal to an elitist element in the audience is perhaps an unhealthy development in Shakespeare's art and may account for the rather unsatisfactory tone of the play. What Shakespeare's history plays do make clear, however, is that in general, the political world is one where policy, not Providence, reigns, and where success is gained by the strong, the effective, and the opportune. The effective politician gives his real allegiance not to any transcendent values but to "this world's eternity". (9*) The English history plays all have the same basic pattern: a struggle for the throne, with the victor committing as many crimes as the vanquished. The overwhelming effect is hardly that of the triumphant epic progression of England guided by Providence despite the inadequacies of her monarchs. Although the victors, especially Henry V and Richmond, surround their triumphs with the trappings of Tudor mythology, the overriding impression is of a naked secular struggle for power. Even read in historical sequence, the plays do not vindicate any divine purposes, but show the inevitable mutability of the political world.

100 In the world of these plays, the one consistent fact of life is mutability. Richard III, probably the most clear-sighted of Shakespeare's kings, e x p r e s s e s at the height of his achievements his awareness of this fact of their possible transience: But shall we wear these glories f o r a day; Or shall they last, and we rejoice in them?(10*) But Shakespeare's observation of the universal fact of change in political life is f a r f r o m commonplace. Typically, mutability is not something merely observed in the pageant of events, but emerges as a constant p r e s s u r e on the inner nature of the men caught up in the political world. The very nature of politics seems to force the public figure to experience the passing of time as a sense of necessity built into the fabric of events, forcing decisions and demands upon him, necessitating action not in t e r m s of any eternal principles but out of ruthless opportunism. The crucial question the political plays r a i s e is this - what values can the public world erect to withstand or make sense, in any meaningful human t e r m s , of t i m e ' s p a s s i n g ? There is obviously the possession and exercise of power itself; and there is also the value of personal honour, the virtil of Renaissance mythology. Honour may be seen, as Hotspur or Henry V see it, as the basis and goal of the public man's actions, but it is also seen as ephemeral, transitory, dominated by time: Glory is like a circle in the water, Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself Till by broad spreading it d i s p e r s e to nought. (11*) Typically, the expression of such moral commonplaces is in ironic contrast with the grasping, ruthless world of politics around them. The split in Ralegh's intellectual allegiances possessed, a s I suggested e a r l i e r , deep reverberations throughout the whole age. I would argue, then, that in Shakespeare's historical and political plays, f r o m the early Henry VI plays through the two p a r t s of Henry IV and Henry V and spilling over into plays with connecting interests, one of Shakespeare's main concerns is with the effects of time and m u t a bility on public figures and with their attempts to find permanent values, or at least some kind of stability, amid the "rough torrent of occasion". (12*) The two p a r t s of Henry IV a r e where this concern is most to the forefront, and I will proceed to a detailed analysis of them. 2

2 Henry IV has been seen as "clearly the beginning of the p r o g r e s s that culminates in King Lear and the great tragedies", in particular because of the intensity and dominance of its controlling themes of time and change. (13*) But even in the apparently intellectually light-weight r o mantic plays of the 1590's, Shakespeare is obviously keenly concerned with the nature and meaning of time; and in his early political plays,

101 too, there is more than a peripheral concern with the effects of time on the public world. Moreover, not just the second, but both p a r t s of Henry IV a r e deeply concerned with time: in both plays Shakespeare is exploring the effects of time on the public man, and in particular the emotional s t r a i n s involved when the p r e s s u r e of changing events f o r c e s the aspiring or successful public figure to accept that his achievements, of all things, a r e most subject to the c e a s e l e s s and unpredictable flux of time. The two plays a r e built around Hal's reformation and succession to the throne. A common view of him is as providing the desirable mean between the irresponsible extremes of Hotspur and Falstaff, virtuously rejecting both, taking over Hotspur's valour and F a l s t a f f ' s ripeness, but avoiding Hotspur's r e c k l e s s n e s s , and F a l s t a f f ' s indulgence. (14*) But to fit the play to such a neat morality pattern is to tread clumsily on its subtlety. Certainly Hal's r i s e is accompanied by his awareness of an irreconcilible opposition between the values and attitudes of P e r c y and Falstaff. But his is not the mean path. He sees clearly that his success is dependent on the necessity of choosing the values of one or the other, and his eventual rejection of Falstaff is a corollary of his successfully taking over the mantle of Hotspur, the "King of Honour". (15*) The whole p r o c e s s demonstrates his clear-sighted recognition of the necessities apparently imposed by the p r e s s u r e of time upon the aspiring public figure. The very nature of the troubled times of Henry IV demonstrates the strength of t i m e ' s hold over the public world. In spite of his doubtfully legal claim to the throne, Henry IV's acute political sense has enabled him to keep England uneasily under control, but the public world is never static. It is built upon changing circumstances and unstable achievements. The successful politician must therefore be c l e a r sighted and adaptable, but whereas in Richard II Bolingbroke seemed always to be moving steadily forward towards the throne, now as King, he seems subject to compulsive, r e s t r i c t e d , and purposeless movements. Events seem to f o r c e a sense of necessity upon him. He justifies his usurpation by this sense of necessity, which so bow'd the state That I and greatness were compell'd to k i s s . To ensure his r e g i m e ' s security his subjects, too, must be constrained "in mutual well-beseeming r a n k s " to "march all one way". On the other side, the rebels also interpret time as determining their actions: We see which way the s t r e a m of time doth run And a r e enforc'd f r o m our most quiet there By the rough torrent of occasion. Ironically, in spite of their protestations of the necessity of events, both sides have chosen their original commitments. It is in the nature of their choice that they find their actions constrained: time, chance, and change so dominate the public world that apparently unavoidable

102 demands seem made upon any successful public figure who thereby feels himself to be one of "time's subjects". (16*) This sense of necessity built into the passing of events is centred upon the recurring phrase "the times" - the state of the society at a particular time, and the values or actions that seem demanded of men by the immediate pressures of that society. Shakespeare connects these pressures with the public world's deep awareness of mutability. William Thomas, in his letter to Edward VI, exploited the same double meaning of "time" and "the time" when he wrote that nothing was more necessary for the Prince "than to vary with the time" and "let him not think to prosper in this world, that will not vary in his procedings according to the time". (17*) F o r Shakespeare's political figures, the pressure of "the time" arises from the apparent necessity of events, pressing in upon their position and aspirations, forcing them to accept the ruthlessly secular, pragmatic ethos of their society in order to succeed. "Necessity" is in a sense a scapegoat for their fatalistic acceptance of the absoluteness of the changing temporal world. Rarely in these plays is it suggested that in the world of political life time is other than destructive. When the King sadly bewails the unpredictability of time's sway over all men, it is noticeable that all his examples are taken from the political world. (18*) Again, his attitude is closely reminiscent of Ralegh's fatalistic acceptance of time as a procession of public miseries and disasters, culminating in "two narrow words, Hfc jacet". (19*) A recent editor of 2 Henry IV writes of "that stoical acceptance of destiny that constitutes . . . the essential ethic the play puts forward";(20*) but rather it seems to be the ethic forced upon the successful public figure in such a world, which demands that only by seizing and exploiting one opportunity after another in "the rough torrent of occasion"(21*) can precariously-won public powers and honours be maintained. Of all the figures that wrestle in the torrential public world of these plays the most successful is Hal. He has learnt from his father the importance of "Opinion, that did help me to the crown"(22*) so well and plots his own rise so thoroughly that his father can see him only as a judgement upon his own sins. But Hal's actions are clear-sighted and consistent: he aims at a secret and carefully planned build-up of his reputation culminating in public demonstration of his reformation. His success in overcoming Hotspur and gaining the world's good opinion is that of a man wholly attuned to accepting the demands of "the times" and the opportunities of time as he capitalises on each opportune moment to further his ambitions. There is nothing providential or even inherently virtuous about Hal's calculated rise; it is a triumph of a master tactician aware of and exploiting the autonomy of time. Time is the sole sphere and judge of his actions. Hal's consistent intention is to "redeem" time; the phrase, was, I have already shown, a favourite text in contemporary sermons. Its primary meaning is in the context of religious exhortations to make up for time misspent and to use future opportunities for repentance. The redemption of time for Hal is an unreservedly secular business, based on a concern not for eternal rewards and punishments, but solely with temporal reputation. He foresees his reformation not in terms of inner

103 spiritual change but as a public, politically advantageous, gesture: And, like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glitt'ring o ' e r my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. His intention is not that his life will become better, but indeed, at f i r s t even more apparently corrupt, in order that his eventual r e f ormation will appear the m o r e striking: I'll so offend to make offence a skill, Redeeming time when men think least I will. (23*) This theme keeps to the f o r e : the word " r e d e e m " r e c u r s throughout the two plays, and in this way Hal's single-minded acceptance of t e m poral ends is thus given a consistently ironic caste by repeated cont r a s t with the accepted religious sense of the p h r a s e . F o r Hal just as much as f o r Hotspur, life is made up of fleeting moments of "precious time"(24*) which a r e to be wasted in Eastcheap or Gad's Hill only if they can then be put to good advantage. Seeing temporal reputation as the criterion of human achievement, he is concerned with knowing "the perfectness of time" (25*) though not in the biblical sense of a God - given moment for repentance, but a s the seizing of the right occasion f o r temporal advantage. Hal is, in effect, carrying out another of William Thomas' politic admonitions, "altering as the occasion requireth", since "princes . . . a r e not reckoned wise, when they lose either time or a d vantage" and his f u r t h e r advice to "loose t h e r f o r e neither advantage nor time, the winning wherof is accouned the greatest m a t t e r among princes". (26*) It is therefore ironically t r u e that Hal is fulfilling the role demanded of the perfect prince by his advisers. But the advice he c a r r i e s out is not a s piously orthodox as the Tudor propoganda machine - or the Tillyard thesis - made out. The value to which the m e m b e r s of this time-bound world give deepest allegiance is "honour". Hotspur is f r o m the s t a r t represented as the "king of Honour". His life is based on the assumption that it is personal glory that makes the otherwise meaningless passing of time worthwhile, and it is his dominant reputation that Hal must s u r p a s s a s the m a j o r step towards his triumphant redemption of the p a s t . F r o m the start Hal is aware that a common allegiance to the absoluteness of personal glory m a r k s Hotspur and himself out for conflict. A more complete pragmatist than the rough, openhearted Hotspur, he sees his rival as providing the challenge he needs to redeem his reputation, and concentrates his purposes to this end: I will redeem all this on P e r c y ' s head . . . And that shall be the day, whene'er it lights, That this same child of honour and renown, This gallant Hotspur, this all-praised knight . . . . . . shall render every glory up, Yea, even the slightest worship of his time . . . (27*)

104 He attacks Hotspur at his most vulnerable and valuable point; and with no apparent reputation of his own at stake, unlike Percy, he can lose nothing if defeated. Cunning, calculated risk, and opportunism a r e the f o r c e s by which he triumphs. Hotspur's dying speech spells out the values on which not only his way of life but the values of the whole political world a r e built: to him honour has been more valuable even than life itself, and so his death is welcome as it will destroy any awareness of his humiliation. Hotspur, I suggest, r e p r e s e n t s one significant pole in the play's spectrum of attitudes towards time. His is a gallant but hopeless attempt to a s s e r t the permanence of values that a r e both transient and humanly d e s t r u c tive against t i m e ' s passing. His world, which is also Hal's world, is one where time is absolute, where man chooses to create o r d e r f r o m time only by the assertion of "honour" which, when expressed in action, may involve the desperate wrecking of lives and of an ordered society: O gentlemen, the time of life is s h o r t ! To spend that shortness basely were too long, If life did ride upon a dial's point, Still ending at the a r r i v a l of an hour. An if we live, we live to tread on kings; If die, brave death, when princes die with us ! (28*) Hotspur h e r e sums up the ethic of the political world: the absoluteness of time, the single-minded assertion of personal honour, and the r u t h l e s s means of gaining it. The essential difference between Hotspur and Hal is the l a t t e r ' s more calculated and eventually successful walking of the same tightrope. Hotspur, then, r e p r e s e n t s one pole of the play's intellectual structure. At the other extreme is Falstaff. In I Henry IV Falstaff functions to offer a challenge to the public world's attitude to the fulfilment of time, and, in some sense an alternative to it. When the play's scene moves f r o m the court to the tavern, it shifts f r o m a world dominated by the c e a s e l e s s change of public a f f a i r s to one of hedonism and apparent timewasting. F a l s t a f f ' s f i r s t lines s t r e s s his alienation f r o m the public World's apprehension of time; as Hal r e m a r k s , "What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the d a y ? " F a l s t a f f ' s view of t i m e ' s passing is, at the s t a r t at least, a real challenge to those who, like Hal, a r e so closely ruled by the "time of the day". His mode of life involves an escape f r o m the political responsibility, f r o m allegiance to abstractions like "honour" and the acceptance of a quality of spontaneous, if amoral, enjoyment. F o r Hal, time spent with Falstaff is ultimately to "profane the precious time". (29*) The strength of his commitment to the public world where t i m e ' s passing m a t t e r s so much excludes any awareness that in spite of F a l s t a f f ' s dishonesty and amorality, he embodies a spirit not subject to calculated advantage or political necessity. F a l s t a f f ' s attitude to time is one to which the public man d a r e not succumb: f o r Falstaff, time and personal decision a r e man's own, and the imposed constraints of place, law, and public duty a r e irrelevant. His dependence of the values the bustling world of the court holds as absolute poses an alternative to its total claim to men's allegiances. Power,

105 honour, war, and personal glory are irrelevant to his existence because such values seem to him to be destructive of the spontaneous enjoyment of time for which he lives. However selfish his own mode of life, Falstaff is aware that the public world is built on inhumane and abstract ideals which time and death reduce to nothing. In r e jecting "honour" he provides a telling counterbalance to the mutable abstraction for which the public man is prepared to risk both integrity and human life. Of course, Falstaff is not offering a consistent set of alternative values, either of greater social responsibility or social quietism. It is true that his own way of life is almost as humanly destructive as Hal's. It is both self-seeking and irresponsible - and as subject to time. But what is more important is that the inexhaustible joy in human experience Falstaff embodies - and which is valuable in itself - seems tragically irreconcilable with the values dominating the public world. I Henry IV, then, contrasts two opposed attitudes to time's passing and to the fulfilment or redemption of time. All the characters and their different modes of living are subject to time: in this sense, Falstaff too is one of Time's subjects; he is ruled and changed by time as are all men, all human experiences and natural processes. Beneath the comic scenes of the play, there is a growing note of melancholy, centered on Falstaff's fear of age and decay: "there lives not three good men unhang'd in England, and one of them is fat and grows old. " (30*) The mock-king scene, too, is superlative comedy, but it has tragic undertones, as Falstaff's unease becomes more and more prominent as Hal's intentions to break with Falstaff and his world become quite clear. In 2 Henry IV, Falstaff's fear of ageing and disease become more insistent. It is significant that his sense of his own transience - "Thou'lt forget me when I am gone" - is directly associated with his becoming socially more respectable, and so more subject to the assumptions and values of Hal's world. In his new place at court, Falstaff has adopted the Prince's attitude to time, with his fatalistic "Let time shape, and there an end. "(31*) In this new world of pragmatism he is unable to retain his hold on Hal. His function within the play becomes less to challenge the values of the public world and more to show the impotence of his earlier spirit when it is sucked into a world where human relationships are seen primarily in terms of political advantage. Falstaff feels time's passing more now not only because he is ageing but also because his new status forces him to accept the public world's valuation of time and opportunity. His merriment becomes embittered, his memory of youth shadowed by death. The decline and approaching deaths of the older generation of public figures, from the king to Falstaff, increasingly darken the second play while Hal, in spite of his denials, is impatient to launch a new era. Hal's consistent intention to redeem time culminates in the rejection of Falstaff. As Falstaff becomes more subject to the public world, the Prince has become more independent of Falstaff. Although "weary", he is steadily concerned with the end that will "try the man", and calculatingly prepares his final gesture of discarding his old friend. Falstaff has become increasingly gullible - a fatal degeneration given

106 the values of "the t i m e s " to which he has so much succumbed. He boasts confidently of his power over the future king, but his influence is significantly no longer conceived of as m e r r i m e n t or judicial laxity - "Shall there be gallows standing in England when thou a r t king?" but more in t e r m s of his privileges within the world Hal inhabits so much more successfully - "I am Fortune's steward . . . the laws of England are at my commandment. "(32*) Hal's rejection of Falstaff is an astutely prepared public demonstration of his acceptance of the world of "formal majesty". (33*) Falstaff has throughout represented to responsible m e m b e r s of society, like the Lord Chief Justice, much that contemporary m o r a l i s t s warned kings against;(34*) and yet Hal's successful repudiation of his past is both caused and severely limited by what his new role deems to be necessities of the public world. What was embodied in Falstaff as a gargantuan and spontaneous delight in pleasure has been assimilated by Hal into a superbly but narrowly functional flexibility in meeting the demands of public situations. Hence the element of self-rejection involved in F a l s t a f f ' s dismissal, a deliberate narrowing by Hal of his human responses. Essentially, what he r e j e c t s is the spirit represented, say, in the end of As You Like It, where youthful idealism is r e i n t e grated into the world of public responsibility and time past redeemed by making it contribute fully and positively to the p r e s e n t . Hal, on the other hand, has reduced Eastcheap, Falstaff, Hotspur and his father to m e r e stepping stones to future public glories. If Shakespeare c h a r a c t e r i s e s F a l s t a f f ' s spending of time as irresponsible, then the limitations of Hal's humanity and the values of his world are even more emphatically s t r e s s e d . 3 The two Henry IV plays, then, a r e deeply concerned with the effects of time on the public world and the individuals who wrestle within it. Mutability is accepted as one of the f a c t s of human experience that neither the world of the court nor the world of Eastcheap can ignore o r overcome. Neither party can invoke any eternal, providential j u s tification of its attitude; the bustling world of the plays is an u n r e s e r v e d ly secular one. In action, the necessities of "the t i m e s " seem to demand that a clear-sighted acceptance of the absolute autonomy of the t e m poral is a fundamental condition of political success. The bustling world, the "rough torrent of occasion"(35*) makes its own autonomous and total demands on the men who commit themselves whole-heartedly to it. NOTES (1*) (2*) (3*) (4*)

M i r r o r f o r Magistrates, ed. Campbell, 64. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (1944), 325. Sanders, 79. Tillyard, History Plays, 267; John Dover Wilson, introd. to R2

107

(Cambridge, 1968), xxxvii-xxxviii. (5*) T h o m a s Blundeville, The t r u e o r d e r and Methode of wryting and r e a d i n g H y s t o r i e s . . . (1574), s i g . F i i v ; {Richard Morison] A Remedy f o r Sedition, ed. E . M. Cox (1936), 43. (6*) S a n d e r s , 109. (7*) Machiavelli, 137, 180, 140. (8*) HS, IV. viii. 104-109. (9*) 2H6, H. iv. 90. (10*) R3, IV. ii. 5 - 6 . (11*) 1H6, I. ii. 133-135. (12*) 2H4, IV. i. 72. (13*) Knights, Some S h a k e s p e a r e a n T h e m e s , 45. (14*) Maynard Mack, introd. to 1H4 (New York, 1965), xxxiv; cf. A. R. H u m p h r e y s , introd. to 1H4 ( 1960), xlviii. (15*) 1H4, IV. i. 10. (16*) 2H4, III. i. 73-74, 1H4, I. i. 14-15, 2H4, IV. i. 70-72, I. iii. 110. (17*) T h o m a s , in Strype, 368, 371; cf. Machiavelli, 205. See 1H4, II. iii. 18, IV. i. 18, V. i. 41; 2H4, I. i. 9, I. iii. 70. (18*) 2H4, m . i. 4 5 - 7 9 . (19*) Ralegh, History, I. V. v i . 12, 776. (20*) N o r m a n N. Holland, introd. to 2H4 (New York, 1965), xxv. (21*) 2H4, IV. i. 72. (22*) 1H4, HI. ii. 42. (23*) 1H4, L ii. 209-210. (24*) 1H4, I. ii. 205-208, 220-221. (25*) 2H4, II. iv. 349, IV. iv. 74. (26*) T h o m a s , in Strype, 367, 369, 371. (27*) 1H4, IV. i. 10, III. ii. 132-151. (28*) 1H4, V. ii. 82-87. It should b e noticed how close H o t s p u r ' s attitudes to honour a r e to H a l ' s own when h e b e c o m e s Henry V: see H5, IV. iii. 18-67. (29*) 1H4, I. ii. 6, 2H4, II. iv. 349. (30*) 1H4, II. iv. 123-124. (31*) 2H4, H. iv. 267, HI. ii. 328. (32*) 2H4, H. ii. 1, 45, 1H4, I. i i . 57, 2H4, V. iii. 127, 136. (33*) 2H4, V. ii. 133. (34*) See C e r t a i n e S e r m o n s o r Homilies . . . (1640), 6 9 - 7 0 . (35*) 2H4, IV. i. 72.

EX "THINGS IN MOTION": THE TIME-WORLDS OF TROILUS AND CRESSEDA AND ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

1 P a r t of the greatness of Shakespeare's plays lies in the way the felt complexity of life is constantly forced upon the spectator - the way whole political or cosmic worlds seem to be deeply involved in the action. A playwright like Webster or Tourneur gains a peculiar effect by the degree of concentration in the play, by the very isolation of the action f r o m the real world. Shakespeare's technique is to constantly bring a wealth of r e f e r e n c e f r o m outside the immediate action to bear upon it and so widen its relevance. F o r this reason, it is very difficult to categorize many of his plays thematically or even generally. Othello is 'about' tragic love; it is also 'about' political wisdom. Measure for Measure is, technically, a comedy, but many of the play's issues are raised so intellectually and so insistently that it seems to b u r s t the bonds of any acceptable definition of comedy. Now, similarly, many of the problems of political life and theory that the English history plays r a i s e a r e given extensive treatment in other plays where politics and political issues a r e of m a j o r concern. P r o f e s s o r Knights' useful t e r m , the "political" plays, (1*) is one that is applicable to other than the plays dealing with English history. But this kind of labelling is more for convenience than accuracy. It would be distorting to define Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra - the plays now to be discussed - as 'political' plays, but nevertheless each has an important dimension of concern in common with, say, the two p a r t s of Henry IV. Both a r e plays deeply concerned with the conflict between the public world and the world of private motives and inner promptings, and both plays extend and deepen into tragedy Shakespeare's examination of time and mutability in the political world. An analysis of the two plays, therefore, follows on conveniently f r o m the last chapter, and will put in a deeper perspective the issues that were raised there. 2 More obviously than with most of Shakespeare's works, Troilus and Cressida grows out of contemporary intellectual preoccupations: almost uniquely in the Shakespeare canon, the play's ideas a r e thrust at the audience as if in an academic, though vitally dramatic, debate. The play seems to have been written out of the same fin de siècle scepticism that lies behind Donne's s a t i r e s , a revulsion both passionate and highly intellectualised f r o m what Donne called the "Age of rusty iron". (2*)

110 It demonstrates Shakespeare's keen awareness of the philosophical conflict that was becoming so pressing in the age - between the t r a ditional world-view in which temporal values were complemented and completed by eternity, and a new world of apparently autonomous, mutable experiences in which the possibility of the existence of a b solute values was at best ambiguous or doubtful. Ulysses' speech on degree seems - on the surface at least - to echo the idea of an ordered universal scheme to which all the c h a r a c t e r s pay lip-service, but it is dramatically in contrast with the empirical facts of the war, the anarchy of the military jungle in which the c h a r a c t e r s are forced to act. Principles, values, and morals have no military effectiveness and hence no relevance - in such a world. The progression of the play is concerned with what the separation of the two Cressidas makes explicit, the cleavage on all levels of the play between what theoretical systems and codes a s s e r t to be true and what is shown to be the case in action. The story of Troy's fall had, of course, been variously treated by authors before Shakespeare; his treatment seems unique for its r e jection of any metaphysical framework to give eternal perspective to the action. The noble Boethian concept of Providence that had provided the tragic atmosphere in Chaucer's poem has become meaningless in Shakespeare's play; any conception of a providential or even any m e t a physical framework of events is irrelevant. The ultimate reconciliation with Eternity with which Chaucer can balance the purely human tragedies s e e m s no longer possible for Shakespeare. F o r Chaucer, the h e a r t r e n d ing sense of the flux and futility of vows and ideals can be given some ultimate meaning outside the passing of time: O yonge, f r e s s h e folkes, he or she, In which that love up groweth with youre age, Repeyreth hom f r o worldly vanyte, And of youre herte up casteth the visage To thilke God that after his ymage Yow made, and thynketh al nys but a f a i r e This world, that passeth soone as floures f a i r e . (3*) Here it is God's eternal Providence and man's responding faith that dominates and brings meaning out of the apparent meaninglessness of time. All is ultimately for the best in the worst of all possible worlds. It has been sometimes argued that Ulysses' speech on degree p r o vides within Shakespeare's play the theoretical exposition of an ideal o r d e r which both the Greeks and Trojans disobey to their own confusion. Superficially the speech may appear to be a rich amalgam of "sound and serious Elizabethan philosophy", (4*) but it is not so orthodox as it appears. An orthodox treatment of the issues Ulysses r a i s e s , like Chaucer's or Boethius' Lady Philosophy's, would a s s e r t that surmounting and giving ultimate meaning to the temporal hierarchies lay a t r a n s c e n dental level of existence, and such an eternal context was the only proper framework in which to put the mutability of the world. But h e r e Ulysses is quite agnostic towards the existence of any ideal providential r e a l m giving meaning to the temporal world beneath. He evokes an hierarchical

Ill view merely of the observable world which seemingly r e f l e c t s Elizabethan orthodoxy; what is significant about the commonplaces he describes is that the highest level of the traditional hierarchies is omitted. Appetite, will, power and justice f o r m a hierarchy, f r o m which the highest rung, Love, is omitted; f r o m the top of the hierarchy linking the earth, the planets, the sun and Heaven, he omits God; the hierarchy of earth, water, a i r , f i r e lacks the quinta essentia. (5*) In other words, Ulysses' invocation of degree and o r d e r lacks any m e t a physical context to give eternal validity to the lower levels of the h i e r archy. The speech, like the play's action as a whole, takes place in a metaphysical vacuum. Theoretically, Ulysses does not reject the metaphysical basis of the hierarchical scheme: Shakespeare has him choose simply to ignore it. His metaphysical agnosticism is emphasised by his actions - he can diagnose the Greeks' e r r o r s apparently in t e r m s of high principle, but f o r a positive cure he falls back on policy: Two c u r s shall tame each other: pride alone Must t a r r e the mastiffs on, as 'twere their bone. (6*) Ulysses' pragmatism demonstrates in action his indifference to the existence of any metaphysical or providential framework to compensate men f o r temporal d i s o r d e r s and mischances. In this time-dominated world, what succeeds is strength without hindrance f r o m metaphysical principle. To act effectively in such an environment, as Achilles l e a r n s , men must become unrelenting, f i e r c e , and m e r c i l e s s animals preying on one another. The c h a r a c t e r s in the play live in two conflicting worlds where a p parently fixed standards of conduct a r e set up by men who are unaware that their subsequent action not only violates them, but calls their very meaningfulness into question. In the debate on Helen, f o r instance, Hector seems theoretically aware of the existence of some absolute law, yet chooses without apparent awareness of the contradiction to act as if it did not exist. Moreover while he argues f o r objective values so sincerely, Hector has already sent his challenge to the Greeks, and his apparent stand of moral idealism is cynically contradicted by his own actions. One of Ulysses' arguments following his enunciation of the apparent principle of universal hierarchy is that "Degree being vizarded, / Th'unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask. "(7*) But, as the c h a r a c t e r s ' actions demonstrate, degree is not just hidden: it is a meaningless concept, an empty platitude which has no relevance when any empirically purposeful action is considered. The ideals of o r d e r and degree a r e in a category analogous to that into which modern positivism places t r a ditional metaphysical statements: unverifiable, incapable of being proved either true or false, and therefore meaningless, with no effect on subsequent action. What dominates the world of Shakespeare's play is therefore not Eternity or any eternal principles but the autonomy of time and consequently the vital importance of seizing t i m e ' s opportunities:

112

What's past and what's to come is strew'd with husks And formless ruin of oblivion. In this world, Time is the sole arbiter of all men's ideals, aspirations, and actions: The end crowns all; And that old common arbitrator, Time, Will one day end it. (8*) There is no suggestion of any recompense for the temporal meaninglessness of man's existence, either within time or beyond. There is no hint in the play that either the warriors or the lovers have any recourse to an eternal or atemporal world of values. In a sense, of course, time and fortune also dominate Chaucer's lovers, but in his poem, men must bow to the inevitable and not question the ways of an inscrutable, but nevertheless real, Providence. In Shakespeare's play however, there is no hint of an all-embracing providential control or compensation. The lovers' separation and Cressida's subsequent faithlessness are merely the outcome of the chances and hazards of war - "Now good or bad, 'tis but the chance of war. " Characters may choose, like Cressida, to acquiese in the unpredictability of time, like Troilus, to oppose it, or like Ulysses, to attempt pragmatically to exploit each opportunity time presents them with. But oblivion eventually swallows all attempts to contain time's passing - passivity, passionate opposition or exploitation. All that apparently can be done to oppose time is to seize each particular opportunity, the "extant moment", (9*) and it is perhaps from the recurring seizing of each moment of possible love or glory, that the tragic quality which haunts the play without becoming fully realised in it, originates. No experience can survive time's ravages; human ideals survive, if at all, only by chance. And yet caught up in the time-dominated world of a war-society, men do nevertheless attempt to oppose time's demands. Just as Hotspur placed his public honour above his life, so the public figures in this play can find no other values to which to commit themselves in a world where it is certainly made bitterly clear that the "one touch of nature" making "the whole world kin" is that time destroys all things: For beauty, wit, High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service, Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating Time. Ulysses stirs Achilles into action by an appeal to his reputation - a wholly secular aim, acknowledging time's total dominance of life: Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, A great-siz'd monster of ingratitudes. Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour'd

113 As f a s t as they a r e made, forgot as soon As done. P e r s e v e r a n c e , dear my lord, Keeps honour bright. (10*) Whereas Ulysses previously had condemned the breaking of the univ e r s e ' s apparent hierarchies, he now persuades Achilles into action on the strictly anti-hierarchical grounds that "things in motion sooner catch the eye / Than what s t i r s not". Time is continually in motion and events stand still f o r no man. Effectively the only way even to keep up with its passing is by "emulation", a concept conceived as not just ambition but as the ruthless aim f o r prestige at the expense of whatever person or obstacle stands in the way. Emulation motivates Achilles' return to the fighting, Diomed's conquest of Cressida, and Hector's argument to continue the w a r . But emulation cannot defeat time; in spite of their assertions of personal virtu, because they a r e so closely bound to the machine of the war, none of these c h a r a c t e r s can give fulfilling meaning to, let alone escape the determinism of, t i m e ' s passing. None has the political versatility or even the apparent f r e e d o m of choice possessed by Prince Hal. He who gets to the front must of necessity trample on others - a principle demonstrated in action throughout Shakespeare's e a r l i e r considerations of the public world, but here given quite explicit expression: For emulation hath a thousand sons That one by one pursue; if you give way, Or hedge aside f r o m the direct forthright, Like to an ent'red tide they all rush by And leave you hindmost; Or, like a gallant horse fall'n in f i r s t rank, Lie there f o r pavement to the abject r e a r , O ' e r - r u n and trampled on. (11*) In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare's examination in the e a r l i e r English history plays of the public man's concern with honour and emulation is given g r e a t e r philosophical depth. Asked what gives meaning and purpose to life, the public world's absolute commitment to reputation is h e r e clearly connected with a radical uncertainty about the existence and nature of an atemporal eternity providing metaphysical o r d e r behind the temporal world. Emulation and honour do no more than bind men more firmly in the grip of time, yet tragically they a r e all the public world has to pit against time. The impact of the play is without respite. As if to s t r e s s the power of t i m e ' s destructiveness and determinism felt so o v e r whelmingly by his public and political figures, Shakespeare nowhere in Troilus and Cressida suggests the existence of any alternative, more humanly creative, attitude to time. The play has no Falstaff. Nowhere is it suggested that the personal, intimate world of the lovers is strong enough to withstand time; there is no suggestion that their love could be a temporal version of a divine comedy to fulfil time and give it meaning like the m a r r i a g e s of As You Like It, or even Romeo and Juliet. In a war-dominated world, love is seen only in t e r m s of appetite, exploi-

114 tation, disease or battle. Time gives the lovers just one night and even that is defiled by Pandarus' having procured Cressida like the goods of a commercial transaction. How can love withstand time and chance in such a world? It is true that Troilus feels love as an awesome confrontation with an absolute in a world of flux. His love is an aspiration to permanence like Faustus' desire for infinite knowledge. He depicts a temporal ambition in terms of a quest for infinity. It is as if he is determined that infinite values should somehow be realisable within time, yet within such a world he is unable to fully materialise this desire: This is the monstruosity in love, lady that the will is infinite, and the execution confin'd; that the desire is boundless, and the act a slave to limit. In trying to embody the infinite in something necessarily bound to time, Troilus is committing "idolatry", (12*) putting Cressida in the place God occupied in the traditional hierarchy, and expecting such idealism to stand the test of time. As for Cressida, beneath her protective shell of witty sophistication she may well love Troilus, but is afraid to commit herself to the absolute relationship his ideals demand. Her one experience of disillusioned love makes her realise that the world is too cruel and uncertain a place to attempt to be constant. As the warriors chose to oppose time by emulation, so she chooses to be swept along by time, living for each moment without any ideals or fixed standards. The progress of the play is to divide out the two Cressidas, the two parts of her nature, the "unkind self" that "will leave / To be another's fool"(13*) and the sensitive, creative woman existing potentially beneath the fickle surface. Troilus constructs a realm of timeless idealism in which Cressida cannot change, yet before his eyes, she alters, shown up to be as mutable as the rest of the world. So that however his outraged consciousness shrinks from something that he feels cannot be, the timeless world in which his ideal Cressida has existed has now been devastated. He has trusted in a conception of love where, in Donne's words: separation Falls not on such things as are infinite, Nor things which are but one, can disunite. (14*) His aspiration to embody an infinite ideal in an experience essentially time-bound is defeated. Time's domination is absolute over the lovers. It is equally so over the warriors. Like the Henry IV plays, the play presents a society at war as one dominated by an omnipresent sense of the necessity of the events, making men into helpless victims of time's relentless march: There is no help; The bitter disposition of the time Will have it so. (15*)

115

Most c h a r a c t e r s a r e aware that the war is pointless yet seem inevitably caught up in it. In this apparently deterministic world, Shakesp e a r e is focusing on public life at its most destructive and impersonal. In spite of their lip-service to degree or absolute value, both Greeks and Trojans are necessarily unprincipled in action, for the efficient conduct of the war requires above all the ruthless subjugation of human ideals and d e s i r e s to the seeming necessities imposed upon them by the march of events. In a morally indifferent world, cunning and proud defiance a r e the only values men feel safe to a s s e r t against t i m e ' s dominance of their lives. Characterised by a crudely functional attitude to all human relationships, the war gives values or integrity no chance to blossom. It c r e a t e s a society where individual d e s i r e s and decisions are subjected to the necessities of the collective, and the most successful c h a r a c t e r s a r e those who accept their subordination to the war-machine. Ulysses, like Henry IV and Henry V, argues for the inevitability and justice of the regimentation of individual experience to keep chaos at bay. He identifies the "providence" of events with the State's subjugation of the individual's d e s i r e s or principles. The efficient politician or soldier cannot afford to tolerate private integrity where it s e e m s to conflict with collective necessity. (16*) But the play does not simply suggest, "again and again", as one recent critic has put it in a p e r v e r s e misreading of the play "that reality is a public p r o c e s s " , (17*) determined by the values and demands of a particular society. Quite the contrary. Because in this world, social commitment seems inevitably to distort or destroy personal integrity, the play implies that the deepest authenticity must be found, if at all, outside the pivots of collective f o r c e s . On the level of the public world, in war and politics, t i m e ' s supremacy is never questioned. Yet although Troilus' attempts at subjective commitment fail, the very fact of his aspirations suggests the existence of values which haunt men, challenging them to live for a dimension of experience permanently valid in spite of time. It is a dimension experienced not as a transcendent realm, but as a quality of experience that even within time, may make time meaningful - something that the public world seems unable to do. If any alternative values exist to make sense of time - and their existence is perhaps hinted at in the subjective aspirations of Troilus or the appeal to withdrawal offered by Cassandra - it must involve inevitably the abandonment of honour, public prestige, even of empirically effective action. The parallels between Troilus and Cressida and modern events need no p r e s s i n g . The dichotomy glimpsed in Henry IV, between the two shifting spheres of men's allegiances, the intimate and subjective, and the social and collective, is given g r e a t e r concentration and depth in Troilus and Cressida. Society seems even more a projection of man's selfishness, conditioned responses and unprincipled manipulation of more intimate, and fragile, values. At the end of the play, the war lurches anarchically into the future, sweeping aside all temporary achievements. Nothing can redeem time here; history becomes an endless r e c u r r e n c e of "wars and lechery". (18*) Troilus and Cressida is therefore Shakespeare's deepest exposé of

116 the domination that a war-obsessed society imposes on its members. It is characterised by a pressing sense of the determinism of time, the inevitability of events, and the lack of creative opportunities to transform or give meaning to time. Seen in terms of the whole Shakespeare canon, Troilus and Cressida puts a one-sided, but nevertheless overwhelming, case. At the end of the play the fundamental question remains unanswered: what human experiences can oppose or transform time ? The problem, presented so forcefully in the context of society in the English history plays, has been deepened, but not answered. Troilus and Cressida suggests, perhaps, that within the terms laid down by the public world, there is no satisfactory answer. But the problem obviously remained to haunt Shakespeare: Macbeth and King Lear both have direct bearing on it, and some years later Shakespeare again took it up as part of the rich and complex fabric of Antony and Cleopatra. 3 The world of Antony and Cleopatra is one in continual motion, where no experience or values seem fixed, and where the mutability of human feelings and action rarely allows foreseeable patterns of events to form. Past occurrences press heavily on the present and throughout there is a sense of urgency as the ultimate confrontation of the protagonists approaches. It is a world dominated by a restless, unpredictable Fortune, a dangerous world except for the most singleminded and ruthless opportunist. Only Octavius possesses both the power and the realization of the need for the public man to seize every advantage in such a world and because he is unceasingly concerned to "possess" the time rather than "be a child o' th' time", (19*) there is a strong sense of his inevitable triumph. His actions are associated with a sense of continual forward movement and an awareness of the value of each moment as it occurs. In that part of the play's world dominated by Rome, it is felt that personal experience ought to be strictly subservient to public expediency, and consequently Antony's love affair is judged as a socially irresponsible deviation from the real business of life. Like Henry IV, Octavius excuses his ruthlessness by an appeal to the strict necessity of events in the public world: Be you not troubled with the time, which drives O'er your content these strong necessities, But let determin'd things to destiny Hold unbewail'd their way. (20*) Interpreting time as necessity is the public man's justification for his own inexorability. Octavius deposes Lepidus, thus making the struggle with Antony clear-cut. Like Prince Hal, he has the advantage of youth and a fixed goal; nor is he burdened by a decline from past greatness or by rival allegiances in the present. Antony's decline is that of a public figure having to come to terms with the fading of his past greatness in a world seemingly more subject

117 to mutability as he grows older. In many ways, Octavius is what Antony was as a young man, and so their struggle is in a sense one within Antony himself to come to terms with the loss of his youth. His anger with Cleopatra following his military defeat derives from his bitterness towards a younger rival, the "young man" who relentlessly harps on "what I am / Not what he knew I was". (21*) His frustration is that of a man knowing he is losing his grip on the present and therefore the future and having as a consequence to fall back on what all agree to be a remarkable past. Whereas Octavius is moving forward, using his present advantages as a means to securing the future, Antony is insistently harking back to his past reputation, and is bitterly aware of his present decline and the threat of future oblivion. Antony's problem is intensified by his affair with Cleopatra, which in Roman eyes, has weakened his reputation and distorted his commitment to the political world. He is caught between two spheres of human activity, which he gradually comes to see as two ways of meeting the threat of time's passing: Rome and Egypt, Caesar and Cleopatra, represent what the play's progress shows are increasingly irreconcilible attitudes to temporal fulfilment. Antony tries vainly to embrace both worlds. In this respect one of Octavius' speeches has been taken to symbolise Antony's dilemma. Antony, it is said, Like a vagabond flag upon the stream, Goes to and back, lackeying the varying tide, To rot itself with motion. (22*) Something we perceive of Antony is certainly imaged here, but it clearly misses the anguish of his predicament. Because his past has been so glorious it is difficult for him to admit the consequences for his public career of his relationship with Cleopatra. While he dallies in Egypt, events in the public world do not cease. If political honours are to be won or held, the public man cannot afford to let the mutable world move on without him, and Antony's recaptured awareness of this fact of life in the public world occasionally moves him sufficiently to make him assume the Roman outlook on the value of love and the importance of time. (23*) In such moods love becomes a fetter to him. His rationalization on his leaving Cleopatra reflects his temporary acceptance of the Roman attitude to time, as he exclaims: The strong necessity of time commands Our services awhile. (24*) Antony precipitates his political decline by his unwillingness to choose between the two worlds: one requiring a ruthless devotion to emulation and opportunism as primary and self-justifying; the other, one more fragile, but possibly more fulfilling, where 'eternity' is found within the intimacies of private human experiences and is not subject to the demands of the public world. Where Octavius relentlessly is using his present opportunities in order to 'possess' the time in his future glory, Antony and Cleopatra cannot see or live beyond the present and choose eventually to renounce the public world for private pleasure:

118 There's not a minute of our lives should stretch Without some pleasure now. (25*) But, at first, caught between his past glories and his present passion, Antony is unwilling to face the increasing necessity of choosing between the two. The quickly changing scenes in Acts III and IV suggest the hurrying of time, forcing his choice upon him; however he tries to avoid a decision, it is the onward rush of events cutting down his f r e e dom of choice and moving him towards an increasingly determined end that forces him to consider where his true commitments lie. His support declines and his military e r r o r s increase until he is finally defeated - which in the public world is to lose the meaning of life. But for Antony, it involves a purgation of his Roman self and an assertion of his independence of the values of the Roman world, a process finally symbolised by the etheral music as "the god Hercules, whom Antony lov'd, / Now leaves him". (26*) Antony's initial considered response to his final defeat is significantly not the Roman one of suicide, but consistent with the choice that is now being forced upon him, a wish to spend his future as "a private man". (27*) The tragic irony is that Antony, because of his past greatness in the public world, cannot be a mere "private man". The essence of his tragedy is both that he is defeated by a younger man, and also that he has realised too late that the honours for which they have wrestled together are ultimately valueless, and that his deepest human fulfilment is now bound up with his love experience. Because of the apparent necessities of his public situation, and because he has chosen so long to attempt a reconciliation between the two worlds in which he exists, his freedom of choice has gradually vanished and he has become the victim of time's relentless progress. It is on this issue that the play's kinship with Shakespeare's other political plays becomes clear. The insight that the fate of Antony demonstrates, as he turns at bay, is the one that has dominated Shakespeare's meditations on the public world from Henry VI onwards: that the deepest human fulfilment cannot apparently be achieved by a man who tries to commit himself wholeheartedly to the values of both the private and the public realms of experience. The dichotomy between the two is not a naive one. Nowhere does Shakespeare advise irresponsibility towards the public world as Marlowe seems to in Edward II - which might be described as the first 'drop-out' play in English - but what he does inexorably question is the extent to which men commit themselves to its values. Antony's tragedy is that when he finally admits this fully to himself, admits that "the star is fall'n", now when "time is at his period", (28*) he is no longer free to choose to live solely as "a private man". The report of Cleopatra's apparent death brings Antony a new kind of determination. The struggle with Octavius is ended, and although his desire to live privately with her is now pointless, for the first time he sees honour unambiguously in terms of love, not in terms of political repute, or public acclaim. His final determination to kill himself is emphatically not to save his public reputation but to join Cleopatra, to be "A bridegroom in my death, and run into't / As to a lover's bed". But ironically because he is now "no more a soldier", he

119 bungles the attempt and eventually dies in Cleopatra's arms - like Lear, purged of all unnecessary externals and public attributes, with only his passion left as his ultimate human commitment. Only as he faces death has Antony admitted that his true allegiance implies the worthlessness of public honours. His dying words are simple and sincere, a recognition that human fulness must be rooted in more than the flux of events and the ever-changing wills that fasten on them, and that however he has tried to reconcile them, in the last resort being "the greatest prince o' th' world" is incompatible with being "the noblest", in what for him is a newly-discovered sense of nobility. Antony has grasped what Octavius, like Henry IV and Henry V before him, cannot - that 'eternity' in human experience is to be found within time only within the qualitative realm of I - Thou experiences. For Octavius, 'eternity' is like Henry V's or Richard Ill's appeals to God, conveniently identified with the continuation of his own fundamentally ephemeral political ambitions and triumphs. (29*) Cleopatra's typically virtuoso performance in escaping Caesar in her triumphant suicide climaxes the lovers' acceptance of the newly realised significance of their relationship. Death becomes for Cleopatra the only possible imaginative and emotional completion of her love for Antony, and it is significant that for the first time she now sees their relationship in terms of marriage. Her death is therefore not an empty gesture. As the culmination of her faith in the absoluteness of Antony and Cleopatra's love, death paradoxically becomes the final fruition of their life together. In this play, time and death certainly overcome the lovers as much as the warriors. But because Antony and Cleopatra have subjectively affirmed the unlimited importance of their moments together, they can welcome death as the culmination of time and so Cleopatra's suicide, like Antony's, becomes an affirmation of the meaningfulness of the life to which they have together committed themselves. The lovers do not overcome time: "Age cannot wither her"(30*) is untrue in the sense that Cleopatra, like Antony, is as subject to time as any other human being. But it is true as an expression of her commitment to her vitality of life and her love - the characteristics that make her so memorable. The important question their life and death raises, one which divides the characters' allegiances - and the play suggests, ultimately the allegiances of all men - is what men should make of time and in what area of life the deepest human authenticity is achieved? A future without Antony is meaningless to Cleopatra since her greatest fulfilment lies in their commitment to their love. What each reader makes of the end of the play, as a recent editor has put it, probably depends on what he makes of life in which there are no dogmatic answers, and "those who would have it otherwise . . . should turn to other authors than Shakespeare, and should have been born into some other world than this". The ambiguities of motive and allegiance, the constantly changing perspective of the play's spectators are forced to bring to it, help make up a vastly complex analysis of recurring dilemmas of human nature. Finally for L. C. Knights, the tragedy is "sombre in its realism, so little comforting to the r o mantic imagination"; for W. K. Wimsatt, "what is celebrated . . . is the passionate surrender of an illicit love, the victory of this love over

120 practical, political and moral concerns, and the final superiority of the suicide lovers over circumstance". (31*) Both these critical attitudes are in a sense reflections of attitudes within the play towards the significance of the central action. Octavius regards Antony's love affair as a political weakness, disastrous for Antony's career, and advantageous for his own. The lovers' view of their own tempestuous relationship is never static, but is at the end at one: genuinely, if too late, it is seen to embody their most valuable human experiences, making their deaths somehow irrelevant. The celebratory language of their last scenes - which looks forward to that of the late plays tends to reinforce this view. The point of Shakespeare's treatment of the action is that both, on different levels, are right. Within the public world - the world that, in other plays Hal and his father, Ulysses and Achilles, inhabit with various degrees of success Octavius is triumphant out of his singleminded disregard for values and experiences irrelevant to political advantage and public triumph. On a more intangible, personal level, the lovers are justified: they have asserted that it is the quality of experience to which they have committed themselves that has made their time ultimately fulfilling. Time triumphs over all men. What differentiates them is their attitude towards its passing, whether they see it as a series of opportunities for exploitation o r responsibility in the public world, for private lust or mutual love in the private. And in the complexities of human experience, all these attitudes may be ambiguously or perversely intermingled. The end of the play therefore juxtaposes these two attitudes to human fulfilment and to time. In a world where there is no sense of any transcendence of time by an atemporal eternity or providential order, what matters ultimately is man's attitude to his own temporality. Life is lived always under the shadow of death, with the knowledge that time will conquer all. By the end of their lives, Antony and Cleopatra have committed their deepest individual loyalties to the essentially private world of their love-relationship. Shakespeare, in this play, shows the conflict of two areas of human experience through which time can be fulfilled. The play's end, it seems to me, stresses that the deepest reality is possible, even when the power and responsibilities involved in the public world are admitted, only within the ambiguous but limitless world of human relationships lived and explored for their own sake. It is a conclusion consistent with his whole intellectual development, and yet because it involves the ultimate rejection of so many of the demands made on men by the public world, a tragic one, needing courage perhaps possessed by only a few. NOTES (1*) (2*) (3*) (4*)

Shakespeare: the Histories, 16. "Satyre V", Poems, I, 169. Troilus and Criseyde, V, Works, 479. Robert Kimbrough, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and its

121 Setting (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 167; cf. Tillyard, History Plays, 18. (5*) Cf. the analogous expositions in Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, I. iii. 2, Works, I, 256-258, I. vii. 1-6, 274-279; and Homilies, 69. (6*) I. iii. 391-392. (7*) I. iii. 83-84. (8*)IV. v. 166-167, 224-226. (9*) Prol. 1. 31, IV. v. 168. (10*) III. iii. 171-175, 145-151. (11*) HI. iii. 183-184, 156-163. (12*) HI. ii. 78-80, II. ii. 56. (13*) m . ii. 145-146. (14*) "An Epithalamion . . . on the Lady Elizabeth . . . ", Poems, I, 128-129. (15*) IV. i. 49-51. (16*) III. iii. 196; cf. Machiavelli, 139. (17*) Terence Eagleton, Shakespeare and Society (1967), 14. (18*) V. ii. 193. (19*) Ant, n. vii. 98-99. (20*) ni. vi. 82-85. (21*) III. xi. 62, III. xiii. 142-143; cf. III. xi. 35-40. (22*) I. iv. 45-47. See e . g . G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (1951), 274. (23*) E . g . I. ii. 42-43, 106-108. (24*) I. iii. 42-43. (25*) I. i. 46-47. (26*) IV. iii. 15-16. (27*) in. xii. 15. (28*) IV. xiv. 106-107. (29*) IV. xiv. 100-101, IV. xiv. 42, IV. xv. 54-55, VI. 65-66. (30*) II. ii. 239. (31*) Maynard Mack, introd. to Ant (Baltimore, 1960), 23; Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes, 144, 149; W. K. Wimsatt, "The Morality of Antony and Cleopatra", in Shakespeare's Tragedies, ed. Laurence Lerner (Harmondsworth, 1963), 241.

X "TIME WILL VENOM BREED": TIME AND TRAGEDY IN MACBETH AND HAMLET

1 As Macbeth meditates on his intended murder of Duncan, the whole of the surrounding universe seems unwillingly poised before hurtling towards the deed which will distort all Macbeth's future values and relationships. Then the bell sounds and Macbeth is faced with the almost physical presence of the immanent event. Suddenly, time seems to gather momentum, bearing him down a deterministic path towards the murder and its consequences: I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell. (1*) As Northrop Frye acutely observes, at the root of the tragic vision is m a n ' s "being in time, the sense of the one-directional quality of life, where everything happens once and for all, where every act brings unavoidable and fateful consequences, and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past, but into nothingness, annihilation". (2*) The sense at crucial moments in the tragic experience of how time s e e m s to become an insistent burden of shifting, threatening realities beyond m a n ' s control, pressing the protagonist into a s e e m ingly determined role of victim or scapegoat is s t r e s s e d in many Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies. In Arden of Feversham, there is a frequent reference to the p r e s e n t minute that will determine the whole nature of the future: The lazy minutes linger on their time, Loth to give due audit to the hour, Till in the watch our purpose be complete And Arden sent to everlasting night. In Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, as Frankfort pauses before uncovering his wife's unfaithfulness, he c r i e s in anguish at the irreversibility of time and his inability to recall and change the past: O God, O God, that it were possible To undo things done, to call back yesterday, That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass, To untell the days, and to redeem these hours . . . (3*)

124

In Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Faustus' sense of time slipping him closer to hell is associated with the insecure intellectual emancipation of late Elizabethan scepticism, and his final soliloquy is perhaps the p e r i o d ' s most powerful expression of the isolation of the tragic p r o tagonist in his awareness of the inexorable destructive powers of time. As the clock moves him closer to death, like Macbeth, Faustus has come to see his past as futility. His desperate appeals to time to slow or stay still and his attempts to evade responsibility for his abuse of time a r e self-defeating against a pitiless universe. As the clock s t r i k e s twelve, the whole of the past f r o m his engendering to his death is revealed as waste. Faustus' inner agony, expressed through some of the most powerful poetry of the age outside Shakesp e a r e ' s , is created f r o m his despair before the sheer inexorability of t i m e ' s inevitable p r o g r e s s towards the inevitable end. An integral aspect of both Hamlet and Macbeth is a similar concern with the tragic intensity of the human will struggling with t i m e ' s d e structive and seemingly inevitable progression. They a r e useful to consider together if only to demonstrate the difficulty of generalizing about Shakespeare's tragedies and in particular about the thematic importance of time and mutability in tragedy. In general t e r m s , both can be related to the age's concern with t i m e ' s inexorable and d e s t r u c tive powers, and in particular, both explore the shifting boundary between the individual's sense of time and objective clock or seasonal time outside the subjectivity of the individual. In different ways, they face the question of how time can be given meaning when its p r o g r e s s s e e m s inevitably to lead to dissolution, decay, and death. 2 Obviously, to discuss Hamlet in t e r m s of Hamlet's awareness of time is to ignore much of the play, but his sense of purposeless mutability is an important strand of its meaning. Hamlet is a man isolated by a scrupulous sensitivity to what he believes to be the mystery of human experience, but what the r e s t of the world, more concerned with p r a c tical day-to-day realities, s e e m s so successfully to brush aside as irrelevant. One of these a r e a s of mystery is the seemingly meaningl e s s mutability of life - the awareness that vows, ideals, and life i t self a r e continually wearing away without relation to any purpose or goal. This thematic strain is crystallized in one of the passages that fill the play with curious and ambiguous reverberations, when Claudius addresses Laertes: Not that I think you did not love your father; But that I know love is begun by time, And that I see, in passages of proof, Time qualifies the spark and f i r e of it. (4*) T i m e ' s incessant dissolving of intentions or relationships underlies Hamlet's unusual sensitivity and explains much of his sense of delay in fulfilling the ghost's demands. What is more important than whether

125

Hamlet delays - a question that has bedevilled so many c r i t i c s - is that Hamlet himself should feel that he is delaying, and that what lies behind his sense of isolated f r u s t r a t i o n is partially an inability to a c count for time's dissolving of his intentions and opportunities. Hamlet d i f f e r s f r o m the r e s t of the court by his insistence on u n d e r standing life as involving complicated and crucial metaphysical issues, which f o r the sake of his own integrity he f e e l s must be faced and not dismissed by pragmatic assertions that they a r e irrelevant to e v e r y day life. For Claudius and his courtiers . . . to expostulate What majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time, Were nothing, but to waste night, day, and time. (5*) For Hamlet, however, the nature of majesty, duty, and time are issues which he feels forced to decide upon before any consequent action b e comes possible; they are not abstract time-wasting m a t t e r s , but crucial questions raising the meaning of his whole existence. Claudius, s e e m ingly unruffled in a world where there a r e difficulties but no doubts, disposes of the inconvenient fact of death with masterly reasonableness, calling with confidence on the precedents of nature and the judgements of reason and Heaven to show that death is precisely and merely, in the Queen's words, a "passing through nature to eternity". F o r Hamlet, this is an aphorism that bets too many questions to be so lightly glossed over. Claudius speaks as if the philosophical issues that perplex Hamlet a r e under his personal, sensible, businesslike control. Just as death is appropriately set aside, time also appears to be at his disposal: Take thy f a i r hour, L a e r t e s ; time be thine, And thy best g r a c e s spend it at thy will!(6*) Equally for Polonius, time is something m e a s u r a b l e and tameable, not to be meditated upon as a metaphysical problem or experienced as a mysterious aspect of human nature: that "were nothing, but to waste . . . time". But f o r Hamlet, time is a mysterious force within the world and his own inner being - melting, dissolving, decaying. Time is not something f i r m l y objective, flowing smoothly f r o m one public decision to the next; like "the times", time is "out of joint", made threatening and meaningless by his own inner turmoil. (7*) Time r a i s e s questions that must be answered. Like Troilus, Hamlet exists in two contradictory worlds. One is characterised by c l e a r metaphysical and moral values which a r e defined positively by the external o r d e r of the court, and negatively by the corruption that is progressively revealed to exist behind its surface. The other world is one Hamlet alone is aware of within his own being: it is dominated by an overwhelming sense of flux, mutability, an a m biguity of standards and values, and calls in question the possibility of any in-built meaning to the universe. Hamlet's initial unease, his growing puzzled inability to understand his own malaise, his preoccupation with t i m e ' s wearing away his own

126 m o t h e r ' s loyalties and affections - all a r e given impetus by the a p pearance of the ghost. The ghost not only gives him more specific grounds f o r his suspicions of Claudius, but also r e p r e s e n t s his own inner abyss of contradiction and ambiguity. Spectators of Hamlet a r e inevitably struck by the s e n t r i e s ' nervousness and the foreboding of the atmosphere in the opening scene, and especially noteworthy is the nervously p r e c i s e , even over-certain, tone of the responses Marcellus, Bernardo, and Horatio give to one another and to the ghost. It is as if their responses to their inner f e a r s a r e to challenge, a s s e r t , or c o m mand, in this way demonstrating their f e a r of the unknown by holding onto the definite, the objective, the temporally r e a l in the face of mystery. Hamlet is also concerned to establish precisely f r o m his f r i e n d s the ghost's identity, but once he is confronted by the ghost i t self, his response is different: he proceeds f i r s t by questioning and then by a horrified, even hysterical, realization of the demands it has made upon both his actions and his innermost nature. Unlike the others, he cannot take refuge in assertion. The typical mode of his being is the interrogative. The perplexities of Hamlet's initial situation a r e reflected in the ambiguity of the ghost. Although obviously in a quasi-Catholic purgatory and therefore presumably appearing f r o m a r e a l m outside time, it nevertheless p r e s e n t s this r e a l m of a world outside time as a " p r i s o n house" rather than as something like Dante's courteous, love-enveloped mountain f r o m which souls emerge "pure and prepared to leap up to the s t a r s " . (8*) Moreover, unlike Dante's penitents' advice to the poet to embrace humility, repentance, and contrition, the ghost in Hamlet demands revenge. King Hamlet's murder has been "foul and most unnatural", and yet Hamlet is counselled to avenge him, presumably by m u r d e r - although the ghost never states this explicitly. The task Hamlet feels to be imposed upon him s e e m s like the ghost itself, made up of puzzling, contradictory elements. Not only a r e there the external difficulties of killing Claudius so that justice might be shown to be done, of ensuring the safety of Gertrude and keeping his own integrity untarnished, but there a r e the internal contradictions revealed in Hamlet's response: Haste me to know't, that I, with wings as swift As meditation or the thoughts of love, May sweep to my revenge. Here the metaphors of contemplation and love, the antithesis of the attitude required f o r revenge, undermine the logic of Hamlet's vow. The ghost's nature and commands, in effect, a r e objectifications of Hamlet's own initially perplexed nature, and it is not overimportant at this point whether the ghost is to be trusted or whether his commands a r e morally right. At the time Hamlet has no doubts. In the heat of the moment he f e e l s the ghost's demands as binding, and it is only when inevitably he r e f l e c t s upon them that he becomes explicitly aware of the nature of the task. Hamlet's madness, partly real, partly assumed, is the consequence of his realization that the ghost, f a r f r o m easing his mind, has put the time even f u r t h e r "out of joint". He becomes in Claudius' words,

127 . . . like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin, And both neglect. (9*) It is interesting again to observe that Claudius more than once expresses feelings that in a sense belong to Hamlet. Hamlet, then, is called by compelling but ambiguous reasons to a course of action which he finds difficult to c a r r y out. Claudius faces a problem superficially similar: he has the difficulty of not wishing to harm the Queen or his own reputation while needing to probe and then act upon Hamlet's discontent. But, significantly, Hamlet rarely takes the initiative in their struggle. Right to the end, the initiative in precipitating action remains almost entirely with Claudius. He tests various theories concerning Hamlet's madness and makes the better use of the crucial revelations following the play. Hamlet remains largely on the defensive, more concerned with parrying Claudius' probes than creating opportunities for revenge. When he wastes his one apparent triumph, the King's reaction to the play, in hysterical exaltation and self-congratulation, the King strategically retreats and then despatches him to England with the justification of a possible threat of violence. It is significant that throughout the play Hamlet dwells less on the difficulties of his task than on the metaphysical issues it raises. At a crucial point, while the King is busily testing theories and setting traps for Hamlet, Shakespeare lengthens the play's focus and Hamlet is seen typically moving from particularities to a meditation on the universality of his basic dilemma: "To be, or not to be - that is the question. " His perplexity is bound up with the awful possibility that both life and death may lack any ultimate meaning. It seems that death and eternity are so bewildering as to make unambiguous resolve and action impossible. Hamlet simply does not know whether life and death ultimately have any given meaning, and so his profound desire to escape time's burdens through death is balanced by a fear that his consciousness would still survive. Hamlet, therefore, continues to suffer "the whips and scorns of time". (10*) That he insists on raising such questions is a measure of his depth and integrity, but it has resulted in his experiencing life as an uncontrollable sequence of responses to the initiatives of others. Hamlet has a tendency to escape behind himself from the world in which he is called to act: in madness, with the players, or later, in his trust in "a divinity that shapes our ends". He can thus simulate action while being disengaged from its real demands. After the selftorture of hearing the player's tale of Pyrrhus, for example, he berates his own inactivity, but the only externalization he is capable of is self-dramatization, not any direct action. Even after his apparent success with the play, he deludes himself that he has forced a direct confrontation with Claudius, while actually allowing the initiative to pass back to his adversary. Where Claudius is aware of the pressing nature of time and the consequences of delay, Hamlet is aware only that he has "laps'd in time and passion". He exemplifies Montaigne's observation that "irresolution is the most apparent and common vice of our nature . . . what we even now purposed, we alter by and by

128

. . . all is but changing, motion, and inconstancy". He is aware that he has "cause, and will, and strength, and means, / To do't" and yet f e e l s his actions a r e inexplicably unequal to all his promptings. (11*) Fortinbras' soldiers present him with an example of direct action, without even adequate motivation or understanding, and yet even when thus exhorted, it is still the idea and not the act of revenge that p r e s s e s upon him. Hamlet cannot see that what undermines his ability to act is his own self-consciousness and his insistence on searching f o r a metaphysical context for his dilemmas. Quite able to be brutal and callous in s e l f defence or on impulse, too often his resolution is overcome by speculation. His immediate impulse to kill Claudius at p r a y e r is overcome by his pausing and so having time to find a sound reason for forbearing; on the other hand, pent up violence and sudden discovery of an e a v e s dropper leaves him no opportunity to delay in stabbing Polonius, and in direct self-preservation, he has no compunction in having Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sent to their deaths. But even such actions a r e still reactions to others' initiatives. Hamlet is, however, not just a play about the dislocation between a sensitive student of philosophy and a pragmatic society. It is very much a tragedy of frustration and waste. In this connection, the changes in Hamlet on his return to Denmark a r e crucial to the play's meaning. E a r l i e r in the play he has confronted death with puzzlement but a c e r tain awe before its, and therefore l i f e ' s , mystery. Now with the g r a v e diggers he is preoccupied not so much with the metaphysical status of death, but with its sheer physical reality. Death is no longer a mystery, but a commonplace and sordid fact of existence. The ambiguities, the problems of consciousness a f t e r death, and his desperate wrestling to base belief or action on any certain grounds, have been replaced by a new mood. What has been forced upon Hamlet is the realization that death is seemingly just decomposition and dust. No longer does he have q u e r i e s about salvation; no longer does he r e f e r to the ghost or dwell on the a f t e r - l i f e . The medieval contemptus mundi, which set the hour and inevitability of death within the context of eternal judgement and final spiritual joy, is here reduced to an almost passionless p r e o c c u pation with the f a c t s of physical decay and oblivion as absolute in t h e m selves. In his classic expression of the Christian contemptus mundi, Innocent III described m a n ' s life as "but a living death", but he saw earthly m i s e r i e s as compensated f o r by the fact that death is "unto to u s alwayes the f i r s t day to lyfe". (12*) There is no such sense of spiritual continuance a f t e r death in Hamlet's meditations, and with death rendered meaningless, so, it seems, is life. Similarly Hamlet's much discussed changed attitude on his r e t u r n to the court is not, as so many critics have claimed, the stoic-Christian resignation to Providence. (13*) Certainly, he echoes a biblical text which was commonly used to demonstrate God's providential oversight, and again, equally common in exhortatory literature was the advice to be always in readiness to seize one's opportunities, to redeem the time. But there is an essential difference in tone between such traditional religious exhortations and Hamlet's resigned and weary "the readiness is all", while his p r a i s e of r a s h n e s s , indiscretion, and murder c o m -

129 mitted under the compulsion of events is hardly the prayerful r e s i g nation of man's will to God's purpose. Hamlet's assertion that " T h e r e ' s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will" does not, as some c r i t i c s would have it, show Hamlet's acceptance of a providential force transcending and directing his actions. Hamlet's r e s t l e s s searching for the metaphysical has been replaced by a s e l f justifying fatalism towards what had once been issues struggling f o r expression in his inner being, but now can be callously spoken of as dispassionate necessities of public revenge. His inability to live a f firmatively in the face of the ambiguities the universe s e e m s to impose upon him has finally become resolved in a resigned f a t a l i s m . The divinity Hamlet is now allowing to shape his ends is not watchful Providence, but blind Fortune. And his metaphysical questing has been burnt out of him: where he had e a r l i e r agonizingly debated whether to suffer "the slings and a r r o w s of outrageous fortune", (14*) now he accepts them, his spiritual wrestling collapsed into indifference and fatalism. Again, it is the King who initiates the crucial action, and it is only through an accident, an exchange of foils, and with his own death immanent, that Hamlet r e a l i s e s that time is running out, and so kills the King. Then it is that he is simultaneously aware of the inexorability of the time he has wasted and of its inevitable end. He dies as he lived, neither scourge nor minister, by the tosses of chance, a great mind overthrown by circumstance, thrown into a situation with which he was temperamentally incapable of coping. In a world where events moved too f a s t f o r him to consider adequately the issues involved, his resolution has been finally reduced to an acceptance of the determinism of time and the absolute neutrality of death. Time, therefore, is important in Hamlet in two interconnected s e n s e s . The mutability of things is p a r t of the mysterious burden Hamlet must wrestle with f r o m the play's beginning. Again it is Claudius' key speech to Laertes that epitomises this important strand of Hamlet: That we would do, We should do when we would; f o r this "would" changes, And hath abatements and delays as many As there a r e tongues, a r e hands, a r e accidents; And then this "should" is like a spendthrift's sigh, That hurts by easing. (15*) But underlying Hamlet's awareness of the mutability of life is a more fundamental metaphysical question. The possibility of t i m e ' s meaningl e s s n e s s in relation to Eternity is what lies behind his inability to s a t i s fy his doubts and indecisions - except, as the play's end shows, when these very c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s that constitute his nobility and integrity a r e burnt out of him. In one sense, Hamlet is a tragedy of waste; in another wider sense, it is a tragedy based on the metaphysical ambiguity of time.

130 3

If Hamlet's sense of l i f e ' s mutability and consequent possible meaningl e s s n e s s is an important aspect of the play's total pattern, in Macbeth, time becomes an even more fundamental and m a j o r theme within the play's tragic experience. In Macbeth, Shakespeare dwells on man's d e s i r e for power and honour and the consequent struggles in a noble and morally aware consciousness. The play is concentrated into a rapid succession of events, reactions, questionings, and conflicts. The chronological compression f r o m the sources is extreme: seventeen y e a r s in Holinshed a r e seemingly crammed into about ten weeks. Time is important structurally in other ways. There a r e continual r e f e r e n c e s to exact chronological time to s t r e s s the rapid succession of events, and more importantly, to two contradictory apprehensions of time. On the one hand, Duncan's reign has grown out of the ceremonious h a r mony of a legitimate succession and a s king he is associated with the seasons and unforced natural growth. Macbeth, on the other hand, progressively c r e a t e s a mental private world dominated by a different sense of time, defined by those around him in t e r m s of disordered or disjointed growth and unnatural events, and f r o m within his own mind, a s the p r e s s u r e of the objective passing of time upon his divided consciousness. Time f i r s t p r e s e n t s itself to him as an enticing dimension of future possibilities, then as a succession of separate occasions of crucial moral choices, and finally as a r e a l m of internal chaos which he t r i e s to force upon the world outside his disordered mind by the f i e r c e and violent imposition of his will. It is because Macbeth cannot suppress his awareness that he has violated a social and political o r d e r sanctified and defined by the harmonious succession of temporal events, that his attempts to know and thus control the future and to r a z e the memory of the past turn time ultimately f o r him into a vision of future unending h o r r o r . F r o m the f i r s t scenes the mysterious nature of time and Macbeth's responses to it a r e to the forefront of the play's imaginative s t r u c t u r e . With the witches, the main focus of the play is on Macbeth's reaction to their prophecies. Whereas Banquo is astonished and concerned, petitioning the witches to look f u r t h e r into "the seeds of time", (16*) Macbeth's reaction is already self-obsessive. He wishes not merely to know the future in general t e r m s , but p r e s s e s f o r more details, begging f o r supernatural justification f o r the ambitions already half-formed, half-admitted, in his mind. Macbeth's ambition e x p r e s s e s itself not just as a concern with the future, but as a monomaniac obsession with the future as if it could be determined by him. At this point, his mind is still flexible enough to recognise that the future is subject to chance, and on the evidence presented to him by his new title of Thane of Cawdor, he s u r m i s e s that he may follow a smooth, if mysterious, passage to the crown. But he cannot r e s t in this knowledge and await the passage of time towards such a vaguely promised f u t u r e . Instead, with the e n couragement of both his own inner turmoil and his wife's single-minded ambition, he f e e l s he must "catch the n e a r e s t way". Once he believes he has certain knowledge of the future, he seems pathologically unable to await what therefore must be inevitable; instead he t r i e s to c r e a t e

131

the future while simultaneously and contradictorily considering it as predetermined. Consequently his sense of t i m e ' s objective reality and the demands it makes on his inner responses become increasingly confused as the play proceeds: to control the future, he f e e l s he must manipulate the present, and after the m u r d e r annihilate the past. He wants the murder "done", completed in its own present, so that it will have no consequences except within the future he is himself trying to will into existence. The fantasy time-world Macbeth already halfbelieves in is still in conflict with the real world of objective time where consequences other than what he can foresee do occur, where "we still have judgment h e r e " . (17*) Progressively, however, he sinks into a world of fantasy and r e f u s e s to face the objective demands time continues to make on him. Macbeth's inner c r i s i s is aggravated by an inability to believe in any absolute or transcendental justification for a more virtuous course. He knows that the social relationships by which the King and his thanes a r e held together a r e honoured by time and sanctioned by Eternity; but just as time has become a confusion of reality and fantasy f o r Macbeth, so he f e e l s Eternity not as an harmonious but a threatening f o r c e . Human life exists most powerfully f o r Macbeth merely as "this bank and shoal of time"(18*) a brief space surrounded by the void of metaphysical a m biguity. Because Macbeth has no certain, easily graspable, faith in a transcendent r e a l m of values, he seizes upon what seems most concrete, potent, and alluring - his apparent opportunity to mould t i m e ' s passing to his own u s e . If he can control time, then he feels he can conquer any threats of eternity. Time is a category of existence Macbeth feels he can manipulate; eternity necessitates a state of indecision, doubt, and t r u s t . Macbeth not only mistakes enticements and prophecies for fact, but confuses what appears to be knowledge of the future with control over the future. An important aspect of the contemporary debate on the nature of Providence was concerned with the relationship between God's knowledge of time and his providential control over it. Augustine maintained that God's fore-knowledge of events did not imply his control of them or deny man's f r e e choice of action, for while no future event was hidden f r o m God, yet his fore-knowledge of itself did not predetermine m e n ' s actions. Calvin, depicting God's direct control over the universe in more rigid t e r m s , held that men do nothing unless God "do by his s e c r e t e direction stablishe that which he hath before determined" by his " s e c r e t e commaundement". Asked, under a system of predestination, how men could be blamed f o r their sins, Calvin's disciple John Veron indignantly rejected the question as an impious calling in question of God's whole divine scheme of justice. (19*) Although obscured by the abstract and heavy-handed dogmatism, behind such old-age questions about man's possible knowledge or control of the future there is a genuinely felt human problem, an acute puzzlement over an inexplicable a r e a of life. Shakespeare goes behind such abstractions and seizes on the experiential roots lying behind the theological problem. Indeed, Shakespeare's typical procedure throughout his c a r e e r is to grapple with abstract problems as they a r e experienced. T i m e ' s nature and meaning, the problems of human and natural mutability a r e central to his plays not because they a r e convenient thematic pegs on which to hang a story, but because they a r e

132 felt problems, experienced and explored on the very pulses of living. Macbeth's agony is, for instance, related to traditional questions of justice in the universe, the end and purpose of time. But they are experienced by him not as philosophical problems but as irresistible pressures upon his consciousness - and in turn Shakespeare's audience apprehends them as experiences that are far from abstract. Macbeth, then, becomes subject to an insistently deterministic sense of time as a realm of inescapable reverberating mental horror. The illusory time-world he has constructed for himself turns increasingly into a nightmare from which he tries in vain to escape: first, by willing the consequences of the murder to end with the death itself, and then, when this proves impossible, by a retreat into his fantasy world, by r e fusing to feel or even remember any moral responsibility for his past actions, and stifling his conscience - the presentness of past moral choices - by increasingly desperate violence in order to forestall an unwelcome future. Before the projected assassination comes to dominate his mind, Macbeth has regarded the past as satisfying and the future, with its honours and vague promise of kingship, as desirable; after the murder, however, he enters into a new time-world, and through the conventional surface of his lament for Duncan's death breaks through his own appalled awareness of the change: Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had liv'd a blessed time; for, from this instant, There's nothing serious in mortality. Now, his achievements built upon his obsession with his apparently certain knowledge of the future, and yet contradictorily still trying to will that future into existence, Macbeth is increasingly living in a p r i vate fantasy world in which he alone seems to control time. Increasingly, he has to choose which of the two time-worlds to regard as real. Wanting to live securely in a present unaffected by his past deeds, and control a future undetermined by them, he must eradicate anything that challenges the inviolability of his private world, and recalling the witches' prophecies, in particular the existence of Banquo and his children. Banquo presents an alarming challenge to Macbeth's control of the future - "every minute of his being thrusts / Against my near'st of life". Macbeth cannot rid himself of the fear that another future, a time-world outside his control, may arise to challenge him: The time has been That when the brains were out the man would die, And there an end; but now they rise again . . . Real time, the time-world Macbeth wants to reject, appears to him like a venomous organism, breeding new horrors as fast as they are stamped out: There the grown serpent lies; the worm that's fled Hath nature that in time will venom breed . . . (20*)

133 The only way Macbeth feels he can effectively resist the encroachment of an alien time-world on his own is through the fierce application of will and violence. He feels his psychological security to be bound up with his own brute force: any action is preferable, since however violent, it allows him more security than the calm contemplation of the time-sequence that has brought about his present and which is, in spite of him, creating a new and frightening future. Macbeth has Banquo killed; and the murder of Macduff's family is, again, a desperate attempt to control events through violence, as if anticipating the hostile machinations of time: Time, thou anticipat'st my dread exploits. The flighty purpose never is o'ertook Unless the deed go with it. From this moment The very firstlings from my heart shall be The firstlings of my hand. (21*) Macbeth's fear leads him to seek further knowledge from the witches. The apparitions he is shown by them objectify his own cravings to command the future. The apparently impossible conditions of what they predict as his eventual fall reflect his own feverish desire for any invasion of his fantasy world to be impossible, while the witches' r e s i s t ance to his commands to reveal more represents what Macbeth fears most, the element of unstable freedom in the future that he cannot control. Again his refusal to see whether the apparitions of the kings will "stretch out to th' crack of doom" is evidence of his fevered determination not to believe any evidence that could shake his inner world. It is significant that in the final battle he subsequently clings to the witches' promise of the apparent impossibility of his overthrow, and ignores the other, more sinister, ambiguous revelations. Macbeth's behaviour shows how his inner time-world can become immune to any invasion from objective time only at the cost of cutting him off from any sense of reality, and when, in spite of all he can do, the world of real time breaks through into his consciousness, it is rendered totally meaningless. He has no hope of either salvation or damnation, for both states lie in a problematical future state the existence of which he dare not accept and yet which seems to exert a moral sanction upon him. His mind can therefore only drift back and forth from the meaninglessness of the past to the meaninglessness of any conceivable future. He now becomes aware of the fruitlessness of his desire to know and control the future. Macbeth might have lived in an independent time-world of different possibilities, the real world of time's passing, had it not been for his violent attempts to control time to his own end: She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. "Hereafter" contains the sense of both "after the battle" and also of an entirely different time-world from that which Macbeth inhabits where any future now seems determined meaninglessness:

134 To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time. (22*) Now Macbeth has achieved his original desire to know and determine the future: all his tomorrows have opened out as total, unending horror, just as his yesterdays present themselves as waste and destruction. Instead of seeing life as an illumination, it is a brief flickering candle, a strutting player, a conglomeration of garbled nonsense. Macbeth's last soliloquy here expresses his sense of the hideous succession of the clock he has tried to ignore or manipulate, just as earlier he r e fused to watch the slow procession of the visionary kings which indicated the failure of his line. The wearied insistence of "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow" also recalls the procession of one figure after another which had earlier sunk him deeper into his world of illusion and despair. As Macbeth nears his final confrontation with the invaders - and, it might be said, with reality - his conscience, always the vehicle of occasional reminders of the existence of a real world external to his mind, reasserts itself. His clearsightedness returns in an awareness that as death approaches, nowhere has he achieved honour, but only infamy; he has become not time's master but its victim: I have liv'd long enough. My way of life Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf; And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have . . . The camouflage of his enemies fulfils the conditions he had considered impossible, and represents the final breaking in of the real world into his fantasies, the shattering of the bondage into which he has tried to force time's passage so that with Malcolm's accession, "the time is free". The ordered harmonious life, resting on traditional social and individual integrity - "measure, time, and place" is reasserted. The images of temporal growth and natural order that have throughout counterpointed the images of distorted or confused time, recur strongly in the final scene. "The seeds of time" have been reaped in blood and confusion by Macbeth; Malcolm now reasserts the integrity of individual loyalty and social independence, "planted newly with the time". (23*) Tillyard sees in Macbeth's tragedy, a vain conflict with an overruling Providence, but as Wilbur Sanders has shown in some detail, such a description accords with neither the imaginative effect of the play nor its intellectual profundity. The sense in which time is providentially directed in Macbeth is, to adapt some phrases of Dr. Sanders', a sense not "above nature, a quality ultimately superhuman in origin and not answerable to the phenomenal world, but . . . in-nature, an immanent principle . . . which makes no direct appeal to the supra-natural". (24*) Apart from the fact that no character in the play can unambiguously be read as the divinely appointed instrument of retributive reaction to Macbeth's crimes, there is an insistent suggestion that Macbeth's de-

135 position is the inevitable product of the self-destructiveness of an evil fantasy world recoiling on itself, a process not conceived of as exemplifying a theological principle, but as an observable fact of human experience. When the only future Macbeth can see is one of continued violence, inevitably such destruction becomes self-directed. By destroying others' trust in him, he destroys his own capacity f o r trusting both others and himself, and so destroys any possible basis for social or individual stability. There is no suggestion that the hand of Providence is intervening; the religious associations surrounding Malcolm and the English court, where they are not solely compliments to King James, function to define specific human characteristics that Macbeth has ignored or distorted such as: The king-becoming graces, As justice, verity, temp'rance, stableness, Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude . . . Nor at the end of the play is there any sense that God's judgements are vindicated but rather a sober dedication to righting the social relationships destroyed. The play's positives are embodied in human terms. Macbeth's attempt to force his own destructive time-fantasy on the world is defeated and the harmonious relationship between objective time and men's subjective responses to it is restored. "The time is f r e e . "(25*)

NOTES (1+) Mac, II. i. 62-64. (2*) Fools of Time (Toronto, 1967), 3. (3*) Arden of Feversham, III. ii. 6-9; A Woman Killed with Kindness, scene xiii, 52-55. (4*) Ham, IV. vii. 110-113. (5*) H. ii. 86-89. (6*) I. ii. 62-63, 73. (7*) n . ii. 89, I. v. 189. (8*) I. v. 14; Dante, Purgatory, XXXtll, 145. (9*) I. v. 25, 29-31, 189; ni. iii. 41-43. (10*) m . i. 56, 70. (11*) V. ii. 10, III. iv. 107. Cf. Montaigne, Essa.yes, II, 7, 9. (12*) Mirror of Mans lyfe, sigs. D V r , Diiii v . (13*) E . g . Irving Ribner, Patterns in Shakespearian Tragedy (1960), 66; Tom F . Driver, The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama (New York, 1960), 118. (14*) V. ii. 213, 6-8, in. i. 58. (15*) IV. vii. 118-123. Here I correct Alexander's "spendthirft". (16*) Mac, I. iii. 58. (17*) I. v. 15, I. v i i . 1, 8. (18*) I. v i i . 6. (19*) Augustine, City of God, XIV. xxvii, p. 530; Calvin, Institutes,

136 I. xviii. 1, f o l . 6 8 r ; Veron, f o l s . 4 0 r - 4 3 r . (20*) n. iii. 89-91, III. i. 116-117, III. iv. 78-80, 29-30. (21*) IV. i. 144-148. (22*) IV. i. 117, V. v. 17-21. (23*) V. iii. 22-26, V. viii. 55, 65, 73, I. iii. 58. (24*) S a n d e r s , 265. (25*) IV. iii. 91-94, V. v i i i . 55.

XI "THE GREAT GODS" - TIME, TRAGEDY, AND PROVIDENCE IN KING LEAR

1 The importance of the themes of time and change in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy is, as I have already indicated, susceptible to generalization only at the risk of blurring the impact of the individual work. Hamlet and Macbeth are both - though in different ways - deeply concerned with the tension between the individual's sense of time's passing and the objective, impersonal time of the world outside subjective consciousness. Equally, an important strand of King Lear is an exploration of an aspect of man's sense of time's mystery. But there is an important difference. King Lear is more closely aligned than either Hamlet or Macbeth with the specific philosophical and theological issues which were of pressing contemporary concern. It provides Shakespeare's deepest and most explicit treatment in his drama of the traditional r e ligious doctrine that Time was complemented by Eternity, and that injustice and evil in time were to be set in the context of a beneficent Providence. These concerns, touched on in a number of his earlier plays, are here tested within the context of his darkest tragedy. King Lear is at once a great drama and a great work of philosophical art - and part of its greatness is the way the philosophy emerges through the drama and is not merely superimposed upon it. Throughout King Lear, "the gods", representing an eternal providential world, and standing for universal justice and order, are questioned, threatened, petitioned, and denied, and the play provides a profound exploration of how men, either through optimism or under enormous stress, relate events in time to an atemporal realm of existence in order to see some ultimate pattern in what otherwise seems meaningless. In King Lear the deepest questions in contemporary philosophy become explicit not as abstract problems but with dramatic urgency and deeply personal relevance. I shall therefore examine in this chapter the nature of the relationship between King Lear and the whole contemporary debate about Time and Providence, and contrast Shakespeare's treatment with other contemporary expressions of the issue, in both contemporary theologians and literature. 2 Elizabethan theorists generally saw tragedy as designed to exhibit God's providential purposes in the world and His just punishment of evil. For Sidney, tragedy "teacheth the uncertaintie of this world, and uppon how weak foundations guilden roofes are builded". In similar vein Thomas

138

Heywood saw tragedy as a moral teacher, showing the "fatall and abortive ends of such as commit notorious m u r d e r s . . . to t e r r i f i e men f r o m the like abhorred p r a c t i s e s " . Certainly some plays, like The Atheist's Tragedy, met such requirements, displaying the hand of God intervening in events, either directly or indirectly, and so reflecting the concept of Providence held by orthodox, particularly Calvinist theologians as the power of God to conduct "all things in this world by second causes and subalterne meanes, yea the verie motion, will, and workes of men, f o r the execution of his ordinance and p u r p o s e " . (1*) Such theories of tragedy undoubtedly reflect the impact of theological controversy on the age's l i t e r a t u r e . The view of tragedy as exhibiting God's revenging hand is an undoubted echo of the contemporary debate over the nature and influence of Providence in human a f f a i r s , and in particular, what George Gifford acknowledged to be "one of the most difficult points in Religion, and one of the greatest depths of the Providence of God", (2*) the problem of accepting and explaining evil as God's will. In orthodox Reformed exposition of the doctrine, one of the inevitable questions arising f r o m the belief in the close providential direction of time was that of reconciling evil and injustice with an o m nipotent God. Universal justice was held to require that "goodmen should be mainteined and cherished, but contrariwise, wicked p e r s o n s r e p r e s s e d and punished f o r their leud a c t s " . (3*) F o r orthodox Christians, all evils and injustices were the outcome of sin and were, in the words of Philippe de Mornay, to be accepted as "Medicines and Salves". (4*) They were, said Gifford, designed by God to "chastise his People, and do them good". (5*) The world, in the title of Thomas B e a r d ' s influential compendium of God's t e r r o r i z i n g was "The Theater of God's Judgements", in which individual tragedies were played out according to divine laws, and the whole of time directed to preordained ends. History, "the record and r e g i s t e r of Time", he argued, provided examples of God's justice "manifested in the world, upon sinners and reprobates, to the end that the drousie consciences of Gods children might bee awakened, and the desperate h e a r t s of the wicked confounded". The c a r e e r of Tamburlaine the Great is f o r Beard an example of how God "plagueth one Tyran by another, and all f o r the comfort of his chosen". The well-known story of Arden of F e v e r s h a m similarly is held by Beard to show how m u r d e r e r s have "their deserved dues in this life, and what they endured in the life to come . . . is easie to judge". (6*) A play quite in conformity with such theologically orthodox solutions to the problem of reconciling evil and divine justice is The Atheist's Tragedy (1611). (7*) The play's atmosphere is obviously heavily coloured by Calvinism, with a theologically orthodox ending, and thunder and lightning as evidence of God's watchfulness. "Doth not every thunderclap", asks Beard, "constraine you to tremble at the blast of his v o i c e ? " D'Amville is a text-book atheist, one of those who, as Beard puts it, deny "the providence of God, beleeve not the immortalitie of the soule, thinke there is no such thing as life to come, and consequently impugne all divinitie, living in this world like brute b e a s t s " . (8*) He has the c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s of the stock Atheists of contemporary Calvinist t r a c t s : lust, mocking of religion, combined with desperate f e a r of death, and

139 a blind t r u s t in Fortune r a t h e r than Providence. (9*) Disregarding the Christian belief in a transcendent Eternity, he predictably is obsessed with the absoluteness of time, thus exemplifying Fulke Greville's observation that those idolators who worship Fame "make Men their god, Fortune and Time their worth". (10*) F o r D'Amville, having no belief in Eternity, it is the absoluteness of time that makes the question of t i m e ' s use paramount: And if our time runnes home unto the length Of Nature, how improvident it were To spend our substance on a minutes pleasure, And after live an age in m i s e r i e ? Time is not to be redeemed, but spent. He finds his eternity not in a providential r e a l m transcending time but in his own fame and progeny: T h e r e ' s my eternitie. My life in them; And their succession shall f o r ever live. And in my reason dwels the providence To adde to life as much of happinesse. (11*) Similarly, the defences of religious orthodoxy in the play a r e commonplace. John Dove's Confutation of Atheisme (1605) includes arguments f o r God's existence drawn f r o m the order of nature, man's reason, m i r a c l e s , and the divine punishment of atheists, all of which a r e r e f e r r e d to in the play. (12*) Castiza's rejection of D'Amville's lust is reminiscent of P a m e l a ' s rebuke of Cecropia's advances in Sidney's Arcadia - both draw on a commonplace tradition of the rejection of naturalistic theories of licence as man's response to Nature's allowing: a gen'rail libertie Of generation to all c r e a t u r e s e l s e . (13*) Like Pamela, Charlemont displays patience in great adversity and in spite of the loss of both wife and lands, accepts punishment as the just due of his sins, heeding the advice of his f a t h e r ' s ghost - interestingly, so unlike Hamlet's f a t h e r ' s - to Attend with patience the successe of things; But leave revenge unto the King of kings. F o r , argues Dove relevantly, although "the long suffring of God, which doth not presently punish Atheists", seems to indicate divine indifference, yet "it hath seemed good to the providence of God to p r e p a r e in an other world joyes f o r the righteous, whereof the unrighteous shall not be p a r t a k e r s , and punishments f o r the wicked which the godlye shall not f e e l e " . (14*) On the other hand, God's delay may be his providential waiting f o r the right opportunity. For "though it may seeme f o r a time that God sleepeth, & regardeth not the wrongs and oppressions of his servants, yet hee never faileth to c a r r i e a watchfull eye upon them, and in his fittest time

140

to revenge himselfe upon their enemies". Hence D'Amville is finally forced to admit in despair that: There is a power Above . . . that hath overthrowne the pride Of all my p r o j e c t s and posteritie. (15*) Dove writes that the atheist, like D'Amville, has more f e a r s of sickness, poverty, imprisonment and "would give a great summe of money yet to prolonge his paine upon e a r t h " . (16*) So when it s e e m s that man's justice will m i s c a r r y , D'Amville is struck down by his own hand through the direct intervention of Providence. The axe he r a i s e s is guided by: The power of that eternall providence Which overthrew his p r o j e c t s in their p r i d e . (17*) D'Amville's death is strikingly like the death of Christopher Marlowe a s told by Beard, demonstrating divine justice in that God "compelled his owne hand which had written those blasphemies to be the instrument to punish him, & that in his braine, which had devised the s a m e " . D'Amville's end shows how, as Dove puts it, "although God doth worke in time, yet he cannot be apprehended by time", and is an example of how "when the justice of man is either too blind, that it cannot s e a r c h out the truth, or too blunt, that it doth not strike with severitie the man appointed unto death, then the justice of God riseth up, and with his owne a r m e he discovereth and punisheth" the offender. The retributive justice of Providence has rewarded Charlemont's faith, and demonstrated that "Patience is the honest m a n ' s revenge". (18*) D'Amville's death also r e f l e c t s an important tendency in Reformation theology to abandon belief in the medieval conception of natural law. In Calvin's theology, events no longer follow f r o m a recognizable pattern of justice inherent in the universe, as in Aquinas or in Hooker's "second law eternal", but direct f r o m the only law ruling the universe, the will of God, "who is", Calvin puts it, "a law unto himself". (19*) D'Amville s t r i k e s out his brains not as an act inevitably following f r o m his c h a r a c t e r and previous actions, but as an illustration of divine intervention, seemingly a r b i t r a r y to mankind, but preceding directly f r o m God's mysterious Providence. In my reading of King Lear I want to suggest that Shakespeare too is responding to a changing theological situation. On the one hand, he is not, as is commonly argued by John F . Danby and others, uncritically reinforcing the traditional natural law theory, but instead coming to grips with a widespread mood of his time, the slackening of belief in natural law. On the other hand, my analysis of King Lear hopes to show he is not taking refuge in the Calvinist a l t e r n a tive to natural law, but is in fact questioning the idea of Providence i t self. 3 The Atheist's Tragedy is particularly interesting in this discussion b e -

141 cause it is closely contemporary with King Lear, where, within a tragic structure, similar intellectual concerns are treated - however different the kind of treatment may be. King Lear is a highly intellectual drama, with certain concerns in common with even an explicit drame à thèse like The Atheist's Tragedy. The formal, often ritual, presentation, and the deliberate concentration on underlying significance emerging through character and situation, point to a vast and consistently organised range of experience beyond, but suggested through the stage action. The play demands the spectators' deepest attention to questions about the nature of man, his place in the universe, the possibility of cosmic justice and behind these issues, to the influence of an eternal providential order upon the element of tragedy in man's lives. As Wilbur Sanders remarks, for the whole Christian tradition - and in particular for Reformed theology with its doctrines of a tight providential control of temporal events - there is a sense in which the problem of evil is ultimately a pseudo-problem. (20*) Most Elizabethan theologians followed Calvin and Zwingli's argument that all evil in the universe is ultimately a proof of God's Providence, as it occurs with his good will to bring about his holy purposes, and so God's judgements are always "just, right, and equall". (21*) I am suggesting that Shakespeare's exploration of the issue in King Lear is in a sense more profound than, say, Calvin's because he suggests that the human situations the theological doctrines exist to explain away admit of no clear-cut abstract solution. In the less abstract world of King Lear, men feel the greatest injustices as undeserved, arbitrary, and purposeless, "the gods" as mocking, malevolent, unheeding or non-existent. The problem of evil is not worked into the play in order to be fitted to a neat abstract answer, but arises as an inexplicable pressure the burden of experiencing overwhelming grief or suffering imposes upon the various characters. Hence apparent injustices like L e a r ' s degradation or Cordelia's death are experienced through the perplexity and agony of the protagonists' reactions, and are not explained away by being given neatly tied philosophical solutions. L e a r ' s stripping from a respected King, father, and sage, to a poor naked, suffering wretch seems a disproportionate outcome of a mere "trice of time" and not at all "just, right and equall". (22*) Nor is the nakedness of death in King Lear eased by such a nobility as surrounds, say Hamlet's. Gloucester's death is a desperate relief after unendurable pain; the death of Cordelia is shattering and obscene. Death in King Lear is not a welcome escape from sorrow to repose and eternal joy, as t r a ditional Christian consolation advised. (23*) It comes fortuitously and without relevance to desert. Men's expectations and optimism are treated with inexplicable grotesque malevolence, their prayers for succour or revenge cancel one another out, and all are mocked by the working out of events. I want, in my reading, to suggest the play's total effect is to call in question any sense of universal providential judgement, and any possibility of giving a systematic rational answer to the play's fundamental question: "Is man no more than this?"(24*) Lear starts the play as the authoritative embodiment of Kingship and universal justice, confident in his dependence upon higher powers:

142 . . . by the sacred radiance of the sun, The mysteries of Hecat and the night; By all the operation of the orbs From whom we do exist and cease to be . . . . As King, father, and venerable sage, he embodies the whole principle of Providential justice in the world. The contemporary encyclopaedist P i e r r e de la Primaudaye wrote that Everie house must be ruled by the eldest, as by a King . . . he that begetteth, commandeth by love, and by the prerogative of age. . . The father is the truie image of the great & sovereign God, the universal father of al things. In banishing Cordelia, Lear speaks with an authority apparently derived from heavenly powers, whom he calls on to ratify his judgement. (25*) Throughout the play "the gods" are diversely invoked: from Kent's prayer, "The gods to their dear shelter take thee, maid" to Gloucester's As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods They kill us for their sport. The gods, of course, never appear. They seem to exist only as projections of human benevolence or despair; as Wilson Knight puts it, "one feels them to be figments of the human mind rather than omnipotent ruling powers". (26*) That they are repeatedly invoked demonstrates not their existence or that of any atemporal realm, but rather exhibits men's yearning cries at crucial or agonizing moments for some justification or compensation beyond their limited temporal vision. Like "Nature", another key term in the play, "the gods" is itself a neutral term into which the characters project their heartfelt wishes or responses to their insoluble temporal problems. William R. Elton has shown in detail how the major characters' attitudes to "the gods" accurately draw on various strains in Renaissance religious thought including those to which I have referred earlier: Edmund, Goneril, and Regan representing pagan atheism, and Gloucester pagan superstition, for example. (27*) It is, further to his analysis, clear that what the play brings into debate is whether man can validly invoke divine Providence as compensation for or justification of any earthly tragedy. The play tests the validity of Cordelia's indignant, heartfelt claim at the play's start; it asks whether: Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides, Who covers faults, at last with shame derides - or whether, because it is unrelated to any eternal laws or justice, time is meaningless in itself and men can only endure "their going hence, even as their coming hither. "(28*) The universe the characters are foundering in is a projection into dramatic terms of issues that were disturbing many Renaissance thinkers.

143

Edmund's attitude to the gods - and less explicitly, Goneril's and Regan's - is one of indifference and scepticism to any providential meaning to time's passing, and of faith only in the power of personal will to impose a meaning upon the process of events. Edmund rejects his father's superstitions as the "excellent foppery of the world", and ridicules any suggestion of supernatural intervention in events, any "divine thrusting on". (29*) The sisters never mention the gods; their concern is with the practical and opportune, with forcing their wills upon time. Unlike Cordelia or Albany, they do not regard justice as the inevitable outcome of time. For them, as well as Edmund, "the gods" stands as a neutral term into which men are responsible for imposing their own meaning. Now Lear, too, comes painfully to learn that the meaning of events is not something given from "the gods" or from any transcendent realm of existence, but must be created by the quality of the life that exists through time - but Lear's eventual r e alization is of a markedly different quality from theirs. The same contrast that Shakespeare dwelt upon so much in his political plays is again the forefront in King Lear: is time to be a realm of responsibility or of exploitation? Gloucester regards the gods, along with other mysterious omens, with ignorant credulity, and like so many of Shakespeare's contemporaries, sees in eclipses, quarrels, discords, and treasons the impending decay of the world. (30*) Both his credulity and fumbling generosity leave him susceptible to Edmund's clear-sighted exploitation. Gloucester's sympathy with Lear is rewarded not by his seeing "the winged vengeance overtake such children", (31*) but by having his eyes stamped out in a scene the horror of which emphasises the arbitrariness of the injustices he suffers and the futility of his calling on the gods for help. The morally neutral universe and the progression of events that almost destroy Lear with their indifference to human suffering are underlined by Gloucester's unanswered prayers to the gods. His cries are indeed answered - first, by one of his servants and later by Edgar. Such responses proceed not from any eternal or supernatural revenger but from compassionate, well-meaning, if clumsy fellow human beings. But Gloucester does not immediately grasp the moral indifference of the universe. At first his suffering modifies his superstition only by turning the gods, in his vow, into malicious, torturing demons: As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods They kill us for their sport. (32*) Gloucester's bitter expostulation here no more describes the true relationship of men to "the gods" than any other in the play: but it reveals much about Gloucester. "The gods" functions as the projection of his despairing cry of helplessness in a universe that seems strange and hostile. His outburst is like L e a r ' s petition for justice, an appeal that is not answered by the deities to which it is addressed, but only by the hate, love or indifference of the other human beings that surround him. If "the gods" seem to mock Gloucester's despair by their absence, so equally they seem to mock all expression of optimism, even Albany's

144

indignant and heartfelt outburst: If that the heavens do not their visible spirits Send quickly down to tame these vile offences, It will come Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep. (33*) Some human equivalent to Albany's "visible spirits" certainly does emerge - though not to "tame", with its legalistic implications - so much as to reconcile, through the loving compassion of Cordelia and the clumsy but good intentions of Edgar. But the very human qualities they display do not identify them as instruments of the gods but rather as embodiments of the positive values that humanity itself can produce as well as the destructive qualities of an Edmund or a Goneril. Albany's pious approval of Cornwall's death is shown up as crudely misplaced when set against Gloucester's loss of his eyes: Albany:

This shows you are above, You justicers, that these our nether crimes So speedily can venge! But, O poor Gloucester! Lost he his other eye ? Messenger: Both, both, my lord.

The order both Gloucester and his tormentors offend against has no explicit connection with any gods. And if, as Albany asserts, the deaths of Goneril and Regan are "this judgment of the heavens", then so equally is the action described after another of Albany's pious petitions: "The gods defend her! . . . " - which must be set against the stagedirection following: Enter LEAR, with CORDELIA dead in his arms. (34*) The moral inadequacy of either optimism or pessimism in the face of such an appalling spectacle is obvious. Undoubtedly, commonplace Elizabethan piety could reconcile any degree of evil with an allbenevolent deity. For Calvin, even an accident like a fatal fall from a tree is caused directly by God; indeed, for George Gifford, the governing of the deeds of wicked men is the masterpiece of God's Providence. (35*) But a scheme of moral justice that can tolerate the greatest outrages humans suffer by the abstract assertion of some universal meaning makes a mockery of any tolerable meaning of morality. Certainly, if only because he imaginatively involves himself and his audience in the torments of Lear, Shakespeare shows himself more profoundly aware than most theologians of the inexplicable mixture of pain and joy in the human situation. The questions the play raises about the nature of the gods, the possibility of divine justice and the providential control of events are all focused most fully in Lear himself. Like other characters, Lear invokes the gods as the objectification of his own desires or anguish. As

145

his internal tempest grows, he turns in resentful and self-pitying d e nunciation upon the gods who seem to side with the destruction around and within him. Still assuming his kingly role as the agent of divine vengeance, he calls down the wrath of the heavens upon his enemies. But gradually, through the extremities of his suffering, Lear is driven back f r o m the empty, mocking heavens to the human bonds and relationships he has broken. What can, in a sense be termed a conversion, a deepening and redirection of his nature, is achieved not through r e c onciliation with any gods but through the acceptance, forgiveness and love of purely human agents. At f i r s t , Lear turns only spasmodically to the "poor naked wretches", changing violently f r o m spontaneous sympathy f o r the poor and destitute to agonized remembrance of his own mistreatment and an inability to comprehend any kind of human misfortune except filial ingratitude. Gradually he r e a l i s e s that "unaccomodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou a r t " , that the common bonds of kinship a r e not given to man by eternal agents, but a r e created by him out of the temporal flux of opportunity and event - and as such a r e fragile, easily distorted, and i r r e p a r a b l e once destroyed, since "nothing can be made out of nothing". Hence the vision Lear achieves in the s t o r m is however necessary a self-abnegation, essentially a negative one, bound by judicial concepts of law, d e s e r t , revenge and justice. But more than justice is required to t r a n s f o r m Lear, since for him the supreme embodiment of justice had been his own royal authority, derived f r o m the gods themselves and now the gods a r e silent. When Lear asks "What is the cause of thunder?", (36*) unlike D'Amville, he gets no reply. The two complementary strands of the play merge in the meeting of Gloucester and Lear, and thenceforth the audience's awareness of the action's underlying meaning exists on a significantly deeper level f r o m that of either c h a r a c t e r . Edgar can persuade Gloucester that his s e e m ingly miraculous salvation is divinely directed: It was some fiend; therefore, thou happy father, Think that the c l e a r e s t gods, who make them honours Of m e n ' s impossibilities, have p r e s e r v e d thee. The "fiend" now exorcised is really Gloucester's own despair and the agent is not the gods but a combination of his growing stoicism before the inexorability of events and E d g a r ' s encouragement. Eventually Gloucester comes to the acceptance of his own responsibility and involvement in m e n ' s "going hence, even as their coming hither". (37*) For Lear g r e a t e r joy and grief a r e r e s e r v e d . The extent of his p u r gation has been to reveal the inadequacy of his seemingly divinelysanctioned authority. "None does offend, none - I say none", he exclaims, but it is still a negative judgement: positively all he has achieved is patience. His f u r t h e r realization that there a r e values that transcend all authority or justice is achieved only through his acceptance by the person to whom he himself has been most unjust. Just as Edgar p e r suades Gloucester to see his salvation as a "miracle", so Lear discovers the quality of m i r a c l e within human experience, how something may, in

146 a sense, come of nothing. Time does "unfold what plighted cunning hides". (38*) There is a genuine sense in which time brings change and emotional progress to both Lear and Cordelia. The play undeniably stresses that through the passage of time, this process, beneficent and in some sense fulfilling, has occurred. Cordelia has brought to Lear a paradoxical quality of love and forgiveness, inexplicable in terms of the law and justice that he has previously invoked, and transforming his agonizing past - but not in the sense of putting it in a transcendent perspective through which all the pain Lear has suffered is seen as partial good. The past evils and their effects remain, but for the moment they are made irrelevant as life takes on an additional dimension. L e a r ' s redemption - if one chooses to call it that - does not involve learning to praise the gods. The deities to whom Cordelia prays for her father's recovery are effectively incarnated in her own determination to give time meaning through love and service. What is especially significant in the reconciliation scene is not only Cordelia's forgiveness of Lear but her first asking of his blessing, and her confessing her own involvement in his degradation. L e a r ' s response is haltingly, with amazed shame, to confess his own senility, foolishness, and ignorance, recognising and accepting the daughter he has banished: I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less; And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind . . . Do not laugh at me; For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia. By all the requirements of cosmic law and justice Lear has previously invoked, ridiculed, rejected, and yet been unable to find an alternative to, he condemns himself. Cordelia's forgiveness - "No cause, no cause"(39*) is communicated not in obedience to divine justice or even as an expression of filial obligation, but as a spontaneous, outgoing love for another suffering human creature. Henceforth, for the audience, if not the protagonists, this radically new experience of love which Lear has encountered cannot be annihilated - even though Cordelia and Lear can be. F o r what intensifies the terror of the play's end is that such e x periences of compassion and love can be subsequently annihilated. If the play has shown that "time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides", (40*) then also, emphatically, it shows the moral neutrality of its passing, that time can also bring about the destruction of that fragile revelation. For although Shakespeare's audience experiences all that goes before the final scene, especially the reconciliation of Lear and Cordelia, and brings this experience to bear on an involvement in the play's end, nevertheless what Lear himself feels in the arbitrariness of Cordelia's death is the sudden renewed meaninglessness of life. It is L e a r ' s inner agony that all around him, including the audience, see his despair and yet are powerless to comfort him, because ultimately

147

all are outside the process of mingled terror and joy he has been through. It is the tragic helplessness of Lear and our inability to enter his inner chaos that does indeed make us "men of stones". (41*) Any exaltation of the nobility of human love that an audience makes, or Shakespeare himself intends, must be made almost desperately, in spite of what Lear undergoes at the end. That Cordelia's death is perfectly explicable by the ordinary cause and effect of life, by chances like Edmund's tardy repentance, is i r relevant to Lear's absolute inability to conceive any proportion of justice in such an outcome. To say with Kent that: He hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer. (42*) - or as many readers do, that Lear has reached in his reconciliation with Cordelia an absolute in human experience regardless of any upshot, (43*) is at this point irrelevant to Lear. For him, Cordelia is dead, the world and his little world of man are in total chaos. 4 Robert Ornstein, like all spectators of King Lear, struggling to come to terms with the play's end, acutely comments of many modern readers of the play that "living in the shadow of an apocalypse which threatens the continuance of life on the earth, we would like to believe that the greatest of all tragedians looked steadily into the anarchy of life and saw the immutable fact of universal law". (44*) Even more than that, sensitive readers or spectators may react to Lear's last minutes, more terrible because of the ecstacy that has gone before, by desperately asserting, like so many characters in the play, that somewhere, s o m e how, something like "the gods" must revenge or compensate for such suffering. In this way, the play may be distorted into a kind of divine comedy: in the view of one recent editor, "the ascent of the King as he climbs the Mountain of Purgatory and is fulfilled". (45*) Lear reaches a new degree of fulfilment certainly - but Cordelia is killed, and Lear dies mad. These two opposing aspects of the play's final vision should never be separated, even though all the questions the play seems to have solved are raised again even more agonizingly. What, it is not trivial, indeed essential, to note, is what both reconciliation and death occur within, and what they are separated by - the passing of time. Time, the play suggests, may bring love and harmony but it can also bring terror and death. To call the play's ending providential, "a wise guyding of things to their end", and the outcome "just, right, and equall", is to render Justice and Providence meaningless. God, claimed St. Augustine, whose theological emphases lay behind so much Reformed theology, "rewards the good and punishes the bad . . . no one is punished unjustly . . . since we believe everything is ruled by God's providence . . . This life . . . is under the rule of Divine Providence, which puts every-

148

thing in its p r o p e r place and assigns to everyone his due. " In a s i m i l a r vein, one of Luther's l e t t e r s , which were popular as sources of spiritual counsel among sixteenth-century Protestants, o f f e r s consolation on the death of an only son. Luther concedes that the evil is a grievous one but "it is not something new and it is not something that has happened to you alone . . . the tragic image of death should be pleasant because we have a God who consoles us . . . Why he p e r m i t s this or that evil to befall us should not trouble us at all. "(46*) Shakespeare's vision of temporal evil and injustice goes f a r beyond such platitudes. The theological inadequacy or sincerity of such consolation is not at issue; what is p r i m a r i l y important is that Shakesp e a r e ' s treatment of the problem exists on an entirely different level of human sensitivity. His presentation involves the facing of human suffering without any attempt to escape its full shock by subsuming it under another issue like the abstract omnipotence of God or the universality, and therefore "commonness"(47*) of death. The supreme achievement of King Lear is to bring together both the intensely joyful and the intensely unendurable aspects of real human experience f o r in life parents and children a r e reconciled, daughters are killed inexplicably, old men do go mad with grief - within the boundaries of d r a m a , and without settling for an easy intellectual conclusion. Just a s in his sonnets dealing with time Shakespeare chose to isolate man's sense of mutability in a purely human context without any metaphysical deus ex machina, so King Lear p r e s e n t s an unwavering examination of the full force of the shock of human temporality, and the h o r r o r of destruction and death that time may bring. Any positives that emerge through the h o r r o r of the play's end do so in spite of that h o r r o r . Hence the play's crucial relevance to a discussion of Shakespeare's - and the whole a g e ' s - preoccupation with time. Two interrelated issues have so f a r emerged during the p r e s e n t study of Shakespeare's works: his concern with the problem of finding experiences within time to make the otherwise destructive passing of time meaningful, and his awareness of and contribution to one of his age's great metaphysical debates, on whether time acquired any given meaning f r o m the supernatural control of a divine Providence. King Lear contributes a new dimension to both these concerns. The basic questions it r a i s e s emerge f r o m an extreme situation of human tragedy: what can we know of man? has he any p e r manent capacity to feel other than his immediate needs and d e s i r e s ? What values, if any, can redeem the apparently random insensitivity, selfishness, and violence of so much human l i f e ? The play does not p r e s e n t tidy philosophical a n s w e r s . It observes that even where men a r e pushed to the extremities of their endurance, compassion and devotion still exist, however temporarily: but the deaths of Cordelia and Lear must be set against their joy. Human love does not have total power to change all evil into good, to finally r e s i s t death, or even to f o r e s e e the most agonizing accidents. In this sense, tragedy displays what Schopenhauer found, "the unspeakable pain, the wail of humanity, the triumph of evil, the scornful mastery of chance, and the i r r e t r i e v a b l e fall of the just and innocent". (48*) Yet at the same time, the play suggests that a time-bound experience

149 such as love can comfort, inspire, and transform, and so make time's passing meaningful, even if it cannot direct time's progress to a desired end, as men desperately and vainly petition the gods to do. In a world where the gods are silent or seem, at their most tangible, malicious cosmic projections of men's own fantasies or desires, human love is all humanity has to give time some permanent meaning. Again, it will be recalled that emerging from Shakespeare's sonnets is the assertion that while love, beauty, and youth cannot resist time's progress, yet they can transform it as it passes; similarly, many of the political plays, it was seen, depict the dilemma of men caught in a world where they are forced to choose to either exploit or transform the opportunities time presents them; in King Lear, similar concerns are to the fore. Even within the most harrowing tragedy, it can be shown that injustice, arbitrary suffering, and death are not all that can be said about humanity's aspirations to give time human meaning. NOTES (1*) The Defence of Poesie, Works, III, 23 ; An Apology for Actors (1612), sig. F3V ; Holland, Plutarch, 229. The view that tragedy, as the most elevated form of art, should conform to contemporary orthodoxies is not, of course, limited to Shakespeare's contemporaries. See e . g . John Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701), sig. A6V. (2*) Providence, 19. (3*) Holland, Plutarch, 538. (4*) Christian Religion, 193. (5*) Providence, 7. (6*) The Theater of Gods Judgements (1612), sigs. Av*\ Aiiir, 41, 294; see my "The Popularization of Calvinism: Thomas Beard's The Theater of Gods Judgements", Theology, LVII (1972), 75-83. (7*) It might even have pleased Beard, had he not been so sure that plays "have no other use in the world but to deprave and corrupt": The Theater of Gods Judgements, 436. (8*) The Theater of Gods Judgements, 142, 141. (9*) Cyril Tourneur, The Atheist's Tragedy, Works, IV. iii. 139-146, 233; I. II. 55, 180; H. ii. 35, 197. Cf. Beard, 150, 143; Dove, 97. (10*) Poems and Dramas, II, 99; cf. Whetstone, English Myrror, 245. (11*) I. i. 29-32, 139-142, 176, 179. (12*) Dove, 17-34; Atheist's Tragedy, V. ii. 183-284, 254, IV. iii. 154-157, 133, V. ii. 260 f. 254, V. ii. 296-300, 255. (13*) Atheist's Tragedy, IV. iii. 143-144, p. 233. For a development of the point, see D. P . Walker, "Ways of dealing with Atheists: A Background to Pamela's Refutation of Cecropia", Bibliothèque d' Humanisme et Renaissance, XVII (1955), 252-277. (14*) n . vi. 26 -27, p. 210; cf. Dove, 9, 13. (15*) Beard, 67; Atheist's Tragedy, V. ii. 283-285, p. 254. (16*) Dove, 97; cf. Atheist's Tragedy, I. ii. 55, p. 180.

150

(17*) V. ii. 296-297, p. 255. (18*) Beard, 150; Dove, 67; Beard, 305; Atheist's Tragedy, V. ii. 303, 255. (19*) Cf. Hooker, Eccl. P o l . , I. iii. 1, 2, 6; Calvin, Institutes, III. ii. 3; William Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience (Cambridge, 1597), 80. (20*) Sanders, 313. (21*) A. Mitchell Hunter, The Teaching of Calvin (1950), 142; Beard, sig. AviiV; cf. W. Perkins, Works (1603), 874, Gifford, Providence, 23. (22*) I. i. 216; cf. Beard, sig. Avii v . (23*) See e . g . Luther, L e t t e r s of Spiritual Counsel, ed. Theodore G. Tappert (1955), 32. (24*) n i . iv. 101. (25*) I. i. 108-111, 160-161; cf. La Primaudaye, 494, 501, 507. At I. i. 108 I have altered Alexander's " s c a r e d " to " s a c r e d " . (26*) I. i. 182, IV. i. 37-38; G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of F i r e (1949), 187. (27*) Elton, King Lear and the Gods, 75-263. (28*) I. i. 280-281, V. ii. 10. (29*) I. ii. 116, 121. (30*) I. ii. 98-114; cf. Mexia, 22. (31*) HI. vii. 65. (32*) IV. i. 37-38. (33*) IV. ii. 46-50. (34*) IV. ii. 78-81, V. iii. 231, V. ii. 256f. (35*) Institutes, I. xvi. 6, fol. 5 9 r ; Gifford, Providence, 23. (36*) III. ii. 49-51, III. iv. 28, 107-108, I. iv. 132, III. iv. 151. (37*) IV. vi. 72-74, V. ii. 10. (38*) IV. vi. 168, 55, I. i. 280. (39*) IV. vii. 60-70, 72-75. (40*) I. i. 280. (41*) V. iii. 259. (42*) V. iii. 313-315. (43*) e. g. Knights, Shakespearean Themes, 117-119. (44*) The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy (Madison, 1960), 273-274. (45*) Russell F r a s e r , introd. to KL (New York, 1963), xxii. (46*) Mornay, Christian Religion, 174; Beard, sig. Avii v ; Augustine, The Problem of F r e e Choice, t r a n s . Dom Mark Pontifex (1955), I, 35, II. 135; Luther: Letters, 22, 68-69. (47*) Ham, I. ii. 72. (48*) Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J . Kemp (1883), I, 326.

XII "BOTH JOY AND TERROR" - TIME AND PROVIDENCE IN THE WINTER'S TALE AND THE TEMPEST

1 Most modern c r i t i c i s m of Shakespeare's late romantic comedies has emphasised their collectively providing a triumphant conclusion to his dramatic c a r e e r , and concentrated on their shared themes and dramatic techniques. Focussing on their interconnections may, however, easily obscure the individual m e r i t s of each of the plays, and especially their tentative, experimental quality. What we often describe, somewhat apocalyptically, as Shakespeare's "last" plays, may be seen with more truth as representing a continuing experimentation, a struggle to d i s cover the appropriate embodiment of a developing vision. The "last" plays in many ways mark new beginnings, a s e r i e s of f r e s h raids on the inarticulate. In his romantic comedies of the 1590's, Shakespeare had evolved a dramatic f o r m which, culminating in Twelfth Night and As You Like It, had extended the boundaries of comedy by exploiting an often strong tension between elements of 'reality' and romance'. Love's Labour's Lost is, I suggested, one especially relevant example. By about 1607 Shakespeare turned to a much more radical exploration of the p o s s i bilities of adapting the romance mode to d r a m a , and in doing so moved into a new phase of his continuing preoccupation with time. The t e r m "romance" may still appear to be an unfortunate one to use to describe these plays; for the last two hundred y e a r s or more, 'romance' has been predominantly a t e r m of critical abuse, signifying works generally regarded as beneath serious attention. Because of a gap between the apparently fantastic or improbable world of romance and ' r e a l - l i f e ' , 'romance' came to stand for a naive and archaic literary mode d i s tinguished by improbable action and shallow characterisation. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century critics of Shakespeare's late comedies frequently regretted their improbabilities of plot and c h a r a c t e r , and f o r many puzzled a d m i r e r s , the only satisfactory solution was to read the plays a s allegories. But f a r f r o m being an unfortunate e r r o r by Shakespeare, his use of the romance mode was, as critics have increasingly realised, necessary and integral to these plays. What however has r a r e l y been attempted is any detailed examination of the peculiar means by which the romance acts upon its audience, in o r d e r , specifically, to c o m municate the often highly intellectual patterns that have called the work into existence. As Philip Edwards r e m a r k s , "to criticise the last plays in t e r m s of the formal requirements of romance and the emotional response of the audience seems to me a very strenuous task . . . But it is probably the only way of not falsifying those moments in these

152 fantastic plays when . . . we know perfectly well that something important is being said. "(1*) P a r t of the aim of the present chapter is to attempt such criticism - to analyse first the peculiar demands dramatic romance makes on its audience, and then, second the precisely intellectual pattern that emerges through these demands. Romance allows for a specially heuristic concentration on the inner significance of the events the characters are led through. Sidney, who provides the most eloquent Elizabethan critical justification of romance - as a literary mode, if not as applied to drama - sees the poet as the creator of an imaginative golden world, embodying the ideal forms behind nature in his own work of creation into which the reader may enter as though into a child's world of magic and there be taught through his delight at his surroundings. The poet's "golden world" is conceived of as superior and transcendent to the brazen world of nature. The emotional tone of the romance is not that of the investigation or remorseless probing of action and motive so integral to the histories or tragedies; it is rather that of celebration, rejoicing, and even e x hortation. It is the dimension of romance within each of these last plays that allows this aim first to fitfully transform the crude material behind Pericles, then gather momentum with Cymbeline, and reach full fruition in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest - and, after, to spill over into what may have been collaborative efforts, Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen. The romance mode does not aim primarily at the verisimilitude of the naturalistic, at causal sequence or psychologically explicable motives, but rather at involving the spectator through his own fears and delights in a vision or dream. By the suspension or manipulation of the laws of verisimilitude, romance can demonstrate the possible fulfilment of the deepest human needs, desires, and aspirations - and can ignore that in everyday experience they are only fitfully fulfilled. (2*) But not only does romance celebrate the possibilities of life; it may also aim to inspire men to seek to fulfil them. Hence the basic plot form is often a questing for perfection or reconciliation, with a greater or lesser concentration on the difficulties or contradictions on the way. The difficulty, even inappropriateness, of adapting romance conventions to the drama was a well-acknowledged one in Renaissance critical theory. Nevertheless accompanying the extraordinary popularity of prose romance between about 1570 and 1610 were constant attempts to write romance dramas. The earnest abuse of many Puritan pamphleteers and such references to the familiarity of romances like the Palmerin stories in The Knight of the Burning Pestle are evidence of the popularity of stage versions of prose romances like Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, and Mucedorus, as well as the romance dramas like Shakespeare's As You Like It which radically transformed an original prose romance. In his final plays, Shakespeare tackles the basic problems of subordinating the episodic plot structure to the tighter demands of drama and of relating the visionary qualities of the romance mode to the complexities of everyday reality; his e x perimentation through these four plays provides the age's most triumphant solution to a perplexing technical problem, and also gave Shakes-

153

peare himself a dramatic f o r m through which he could extend the range of his own creative genius. The kind of world the romance rfiode aims to involve its audience in can best be described as the closest literary analogue, both in structure and inner significance, to d r e a m s . According to Carl Jung, the events in d r e a m s may be causally disconnected but linked by significant urgent ideas and preoccupations. D r e a m s , he argues, a r e a subjective expression of profound inner life "outside the control of the will . . . they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and . . . give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too f a r f r o m its foundations". (3*) The relationship between dream-events is not a causal one; they exist in a world of temporal elasticity and a r e connected not primarily by cause and effect but by meaning, by what Jung t e r m s a "synchronistic" relationship. He defined synchronicity as "a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning". (4*) Analogously, the literary romance typically c r e a t e s a world where chance or coincidence become the material of meaningful thematic c r o s s connections. As in a d r e a m , c h a r a c t e r s exist in a world parallel to but distanced f r o m the everyday world, where time can be suspended or extended to evoke the inner significance of events. Characters and events in the romance stand primarily f o r p a r t s of a central, unifying experience, and appeal to and embody aspects of the spectator's own involvement in the work. Coleridge, writing on The Tempest, has a relevant r e m a r k that "purely romantic d r a m a " is the "birth of the imagination . . . a species of d r a m a which gives no allegiance to time or space, and in which, therefore, e r r o r s of chronology and geography . . . count for nothing. It a d d r e s s e s itself entirely to the imaginative faculty. "(5*) It is the appeal to the "imaginative faculty" or I would suggest the analogy between roamcne and dream, that is the basis of the answer to P r o f e s s o r Edwards' question: "what kind of emotional response were the Romances designed to arouse?"(6*) But the romance mode, and more especially Shakespeare's romance d r a m a s , a r e not d r e a m s , however useful the analogy may be for u n d e r standing an important aspect of their nature and appeal. The strength of a profound work like the Arcadia or The Winter's Tale lies in the tension maintained between the world of pure romance - which might be termed a world of profound wishfulfilment - and the world of e v e r y day life in which Shakespeare's audience lives, with its confusion of motives and d e s i r e s , its ambiguous and often irreparably tragic events, and its pressing sense of temporality. Within each of the plays there is an ironic or near tragic counterbalance to the romance world that finds just as valid a response in the audience's lives as the joy and delight the vision of pure romance o f f e r s , and which s e r v e s to anchor the a t traction of l i f e ' s boundless possibilities offered by romance firmly to the limitations of actual existence. The moral uprightness of P e r i c l e s is shaken by incest; the virtue of Marina is attacked by the c o a r s e n e s s of the brothel; Imogen's chastity and faithfulness is countermanded by h e r f a t h e r ' s anger, Cloten's lust, Iachimo's cynicism, and the f a i t h l e s s n e s s and apparent death of Posthumus; the consequences of Leontes'

154 jealousy can be only partially, and tardily repaired; and even P r o s p e r o cannot compel Antonio and Alonso to accept his forgiveness. It is a sign of Shakespeare's strength in his handling of the romance mode - and an indication of the essential difference between his early and late comedies - that he chooses to s t r e s s so heavily the potentially tragic loss and wastage of life. As P e r i c l e s exclaims: O you gods! Why do you make us love your goodly gifts, And snatch them straight away?(7*) In p a r t i c u l a r , a vital dimension of the potentially tragic side of life that is s t r e s s e d so strongly in all four romances - though most explicitly in The Winter's Tale - is the destructiveness of time that echoes so powerfully through the sonnets and many of the tragedies. It has frequently been pointed out how time becomes the dimension of creative restoration in the late plays, but having written King Lear, Shakespeare could not have been naive about the tragic potential of t i m e ' s chances. The fundamental consistency of his preoccupation with time is shown in his s t r e s s in the romances upon t i m e ' s posing man a challenge, not presenting him with a gift: . . . T i m e ' s the king of men; He's both their parent, and he is their grave, And gives them what he will, not what they crave. (8*) It must be recalled, of course, that in s t r e s s i n g t i m e ' s treachery as well a s its beneficence within the framework of the romance mode, Shakespeare was firmly within Renaissance tradition. The motif, popular in classical eclogues, that death is p r e s e n t even in Arcadia - Et in Arcadia Ego(9*) - becomes in the best sixteenth-century romances a genuine shudder at time. Even in the golden world of pastoral, there is the presence, often deeply felt, of destructive mutability. In Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F . J . (1573), the story of P e r g o ' s wasted youth is a solemn and unheeded lesson of how time c r e a t e s opportunities f o r fulfilment which, lost by thoughtlessness, p a s s quickly and i r r e t r i e v ably. One of the most influential pastoral romances of the age, Montemayor's Diana, is permeated by a melancholy awareness of "the mutabilitie and course of t i m e s " . In the Diana, mutability is not merely r e f e r r e d to as a stock commonplace, but contributes a deeper element as a counterpoint to the lightness of the pastoral. There is a repeated emphasis on the connection between mutable human affections and the changes of the y e a r ; even the transcendent value of love, it is s t r e s s e d , is subject to time. (10*) By the time he wrote The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare seems to have uniquely sensed the possibilities of romance f o r exploring man's responses to the demands of time upon human life, in particular through its ease of including and juxtaposing a wide spectrum of inner experience. What is striking about these plays is how Shakespeare's concern with time is not only a 'thematic' part of the intellectual fabric, but also how with g r e a t

155

variety and complexity, time underlies the very f o r m of the plays. In a profound sense, the plays' structural principles interact with their meanings to display crucial human experiences involved with constant temporal change. The basic structural principle seen most clearly in The Winter's Tale is the seasonal movement in both nature and man. The movement of the seasons is not merely a background but a f o r m a tive and challenging p r e s s u r e by means of which men's futures become open to all possibilities, destructive as easily as creative. Change is built into the very nature of the values that most make time seem worthwhile to men. The inevitable end of youth's d e s i r e s , however noble or idealistic, is seen in Imogen's apparent death and in the note of m e l ancholy resignation to the passing of time and its absoluteness so deeply felt in the princes' dirge: Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. (11*) Implied h e r e is the finality of time as the a r b i t e r of human life, and the implication that the problem of giving time meaning must be met within time. It is a theme that r e c u r s variously throughout these plays, posing the fundamental question: if change is built into love, beauty, ambition - the very experiences or values that may make t i m e ' s passing meaningful - what can r e s i s t time ? The Winter's Tale takes up this question, at once so commonplace to the age and yet integral to Shakesp e a r e ' s deepest concerns in e a r l i e r works. As I have shown, one c r u cial strand of the sonnets, f o r instance, is the poet's war with t i m e ' s control over his powers and his love, born of the realization that "nothing 'gainst T i m e ' s scythe can make defence" (Sonnet 12). King Lear dramatizes a situation where any given meaning of t i m e ' s passing is called into question, and where all m e n ' s appeals to the transcendent - "the gods" - a r e mocked or go unheeded. In such ways, the question of t i m e ' s nature and meaning, so p r e s s i n g to late Renaissance man, is surfacing in Shakespeare's plays. So f a r in my analysis of Shakespeare's plays I have shown how t i m e ' s fundamental hostility to man echoes powerfully through his works - but in the romances, he seems to turn to showing how the passing of time may work towards a mysterious and apparently miraculous triumph of the most extreme human optimism and idealism. This structural pattern inherent to the romance mode is very clearly seen in the clumsy but apparently popular play, The Comedy of Mucedorus, which was revived by Shakespeare's company in 1610. In the induction, Envy threatens to disrupt the promised happy ending by bringing about a tragic outcome: Turning thy mirth into a deadly dole, Whirling thy m e a s u r e s with a peel of death, And drench thy m e t r e s in a sea of blood, Comedy however r e t o r t s that out of apparent tragedy, she will bring happiness:

156 I'll grace it so, thyself shall it confess, From tragic stuff to be a pleasant comedy. (12*) The inclusiveness of romance, its embodying of both tragic and comic elements, is here put crudely, although it would be hard to imagine a more radical structural juxtaposition than that expressed in The Winter's Tale by the shepherd: "thou met'st with things dying, I with things newborn". (13*) The elements so clumsily put together in Mucedorus become in each of Shakespeare's romances exquisite variations on the basically similar pattern of reconciliation growing out of tragedy and each play demonstrates Shakespeare as an experimenting dramatist working at the peak of his powers. In terms of his concern with time, then, the two later romances in particular provide the culmination of Shakespeare's mature vision. Not only does the widespread commonplace of time as both destroyer and creator receive the fullest and most penetrating treatment of the age in The Winter's Tale, but also the relationship between time and Providence, a dominant intellectual preoccupation in so many of his earlier plays, is given a further dimension in both The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. King Lear had dramatised the agonizing situation where all men's appeals to a transcendent providential realm went unheeded; the world of romance is one, on the contrary, where the gods seem to preside and even influence the mysterious working of events. Each of Shakespeare's romances has a theophany, where the gods personify the forces within the action that make for reconciliation. But, it is important to note, the gods of Shakespeare's romances are not the gods of any religious orthodoxy; they are strictly the product of what I have termed the profound wish-fulfilment world of romance, a world where man's deepest wishes and desires are projected into an imaginative universe and are so, as it were, made true. (14*) Shakespeare is thus not contradicting the agnosticism towards Providence manifest in his earlier plays but rather, through the power of art, creating a golden world to celebrate the glorious possibilities of life and project some of man's deepest longings for permanence into miracles, theophanies, \and divine visitations. They are images of a reality Shakespeare senses to exist in man's own nature, and part of an exhortation to live inI terms of a vision in which time's disasters may be redeemed. Beauty, youth, and love are human values that can suggest to men that reality may be viewed, however fitfully, as romance, and which may exhort them to incarnate in their own lives the qualities imaged in the beneficent gods. Shakespeare's humanism obviously has its origins in the strains of optimistic Renaissance thought represented by Pico della Mirandola and, as I will argue, has distinct affinities with the radicalism of Bruno, but it is a humanism that transcends his age. Not only does Shakespeare dwell on the contingency of human life that is so emphasised by some modern existentialists, but the paradoxical combination of the absoluteness of the limitations time imposes on man with the sense of man's freedom to be, as it were, the creator of his own Providence, is an attitude common to Heidegger as well as to Shakespeare's Prospero.

157 But most specifically, Shakespeare's affinities with Bruno's habitual mode of thought is evident. Bruno's conception in the Expulsion of Providence unfolding within time, his insistence that men should aspire beyond themselves to the most glorious possibilities of existence, are attitudes that are echoed here in Shakespeare's romances. Shakespeare, of course, is not writing philosophy, but his plays undoubtedly enunciate a philosophy of life. Through the romance, Shakespeare celebrates the creative chances of time bringing life out of apparent death; they entice us with the possibility that beauty and youth may triumph over age and cynicism, that the losses of the past may be redeemed, if not - and it is an important qualification, showing how Shakespeare anchors his romance vision in our world - the loss of time itself. 2 To move now from the general to the specific: The Winter's Tale is a work at once mature and yet uniquely experimental in its manipulation of romance conventions. The action moves daringly between the poles of "romance" and "reality"; the play's action is temporally disjointed, concentrating on a few months at each end of a sixteen year period; the pattern of reconciliation emerging from disaster is complicated to show the elaborate yet inevitable processes of time bearing in upon both the naiVete of childhood and the maturity and cynicism of age and yet bringing about reconciliation. Events range from the near-naturalistic, such as the manifestation of Leontes' jealousy, to the frankly coincidental and improbable, like Mamilius' death or Hermione's r e s urrection. The subtle tension between these diverse elements serves to allow a pattern of significant meaning to emerge. The play's progress is to demonstrate how time may bring together lost lovers, heal friends quarrels, reunite families, and yet nevertheless bring losses, such as the deaths of Mamilius and Antigonus, as well as such gains. The sixteen years needed to bring Florizel and Perdita to maturity and love are the same years that are wasted for Leontes and Hermione. Time is structurally important to the play in a number of senses: the figure of Father Time divides it into two phases separated by sixteen years; time as the recurrent pattern of seasonal change underlies the whole action, and time is presented as the medium of both human growth and freedom, and human misery and death. Robert Greene's prose romance Pandosto, the play's major source, is subtitled The Triumph of Time and is prefixed by the conventional motto Temporis filia Veritas, while the title page explains "although by the meanes of sinister fortune Truth may be concealed yet by Time in spite of fortune it is most manifestly revealed". Greene uses the convention skilfully, aiming to show "how fortune is plumed with time's feathers, and how she can minister strange causes to breed strange effects". (15*) Shakespeare, however, deepens the paradoxes involved in time's working out of apparent tragedy into a new regenerate world. At the end of the play, there is a deep sense of the mysterious possibilities of the seeds of time, as an apparently miraculous renewal occurs and a new society is reborn from the husk of the old. In Greene's tale,

158 Bellaria dies, but Shakespeare stresses the seeming miracle of Hermione's reappearance by giving no hint she is alive until she steps down from the pedestal. Underlying the play's action is a view of both nature and man dominated by seasonal change. But the seasonal pattern is not the simple winter to spring movement of As You Like It. Although the pastoral scene (IV. iv) takes the form of a sheepshearing feast which, as the Arden editor notes, should take place in late June, (16*) nevertheless so strong and complex are the temporal suggestions of the scene, that the impression is that all seasons and all hours of the day come to bear upon the action. The effect is of a paradoxical world both timel e s s and yet deeply affected by time, with reminders of high summer, autumn, winter, and the spring of the lovers themselves. The final act appears to take place in autumn, the time of harvest, and so the seasonal movement of the second half of the play is from winter to autumn. The play's end does not suggest an idyllic eternal springtime but rather that human life is a manifestation of a ceaseless progression, involving continual challenge and response as time passes through its neutral, insistent pattern. The change in men's lives, from one season to another and from youth to age, points to one of the play's most fundamental problems, that of how men can fruitfully accept their own mortality, and yet experience their lives as significant in themselves, as a meaningful whole and not just in certain moments. Both Polixenes and Leontes find the burdens of growing old difficult to accept. Joseph Conrad noted how "the very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection. " (17*) Leontes and Polixenes cannot bear to leave this timeless world of childhood and face their own ageing. In his nostalgic reminiscences of his lost youth, Polixenes dwells on how little of his childhood innocence has survived, seeing the growth of sexual desires and the r e sponsibilities of maturity as somehow being in league with time to destroy the seemingly immortal world of youth, and forcing him reluctantly to come to terms with the complex duties and necessities of maturity. Hermione, the fruitful vehicle of the next generation, is aware that the complications of maturity have brought blessings, that children's friendship is wholly delightful and appropriate for children, but that the fulfilment of the adult depends on accepting the facts of change. Friendship may fulfil the timeless sense of youth; love and marriage can transform time through a lifetime. Leontes, however, cannot bear to lose his grip on his own youth and face the unexpected changes of time. Just as Polixenes harks back to their unfallen innocence, so Leontes' growing jealousy is bound up with a preoccupation with time's destructiveness and a fear of ageing. "Jealousy", it has been remarked, is "not primarily a sexual emotion, although the sexual urge makes it more virulent. It is the archetypal fear of weaning, of chaos returned. "(18*) Beneath Leontes' distorted rationalization of Polixenes' behaviour are complex psychological confusions: the resentment of an adolescent towards his wife's bringing

159 him out of his childhood world, an equally adolescent sense of sexual rivalry towards Polixenes, and the realization of his own ageing as he gazes at Mamilius. When eventually the Oracle sternly reprimands his actions, it reasserts the truth in terms of the harmonious passing of time and the openness of the future that Leontes has tried to deny. The future contains both threat and promise - something Leontes has been, and is now, unable to accept. The death of Mamilius and apparent death of Hermione are needed to shock him back to reality - but the time for repentance has passed, and his future can, it seems, be only shame, misery, and remorse until he dies. Shakespeare's deliberate extension almost to breaking point of the romance conventions is stressed by the play's first half being a complete action in itself, ending with the deaths of Hermione, Mamilius, and Antigonus. By HI. iii. 58, death and broken relationships seem dominant and final - and then, with virtuoso daring, Shakespeare welds a new world of pastoral romance onto tragedy, with a radical break of tone but an immediate continuity of theme: I would there were no age between ten and three and twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest . . . (19*) Once the audience is introduced to a delightful but distinctly timebound Arcadia, where love is troublesome, youth irresponsible, and yet where fortunate chance abounds, the key figure of the play steps forward. Father Time's speech does more than gather up a number of Elizabethan commonplaces. It provides both a structural and thematic justification of the play's intentions and meaning. Sixteen years can be jumped "since it is in my pow'r / To o'erthrow law" - a comment that c a r r i e s both structural and thematic implications. Time is established as the medium of all human growth and fulfilment, and the play itself is now seen as the report of events by Father Time himself. He has brought past events to the present stage - "I mention'd a son o' th' King's, which Florizel / I now name to you" - and now he directs the spectator's attention to what he will unfold in the future: What of he ensues I list not prophesy; but let Time's news Be known when 'tis brought forth. A shepherd's daughter, And what to her adheres, which follows after, Is th'argument of Time. (20*) At this crucial point in the play, there is no suggestion of any intervention by a providential or other atemporal force. The pattern that is emerging in the events has developed autonomously from time's passing, out of what Bruno terms "the changes and chances of life". Father Time suggests that the whole action of the play is in a sense controlled by and dependent on him. An obvious analogy with his controlling actions is the traditional Christian view of God's providential control of events - and that Shakespeare should identify Providence

160 with the chances of time makes explicit what has emerged more indirectly in e a r l i e r plays: t i m e ' s passing must be grasped by men as the very force that challenges them to create meaning out of l i f e ' s mutability. In suggesting that the whole action of the play is in a sense thematically as well as structurally controlled by Time, it is implied that men can forge meaning out of t i m e ' s passing only by grasping its opportunities as they p a s s . Both T i m e ' s neutrality and its continual challenging of men is s t r e s s e d : I, that please some, try all, both joy and t e r r o r Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds e r r o r . . . (21*) On this level, the function of Time has obvious relevance for Shakesp e a r e ' s philosophy. T i m e ' s action is analogous to the traditional conception of Providence: Time t r i e s all men, it pleases some; it brings past events towards their conclusion, and unfolds to men the c o n s e quences of their own actions. In King Lear, the absence of a t r a n s c e n dental Providence is s t r e s s e d ; here, Providence becomes identified with the chances Time brings to man and the reactions it provokes in him. Again, Bruno's concept of Providence is strikingly analogous to Shakespeare's vision. Sixteen y e a r s a r e skipped in o r d e r that time may be shown as the medium of reconciliation and fulfilment. But the play's movement towards harmony is a complex one: the pastoral world of Bohemia, like Sidney's Arcadia or the F o r e s t of Arden in As You Like It, is one of the complicated emotions, inconveniences and apparent tragedy as well as of happy coincidences, new life, beauty, and love. Similarly, P e r d i t a ' s role is not simply that of youthful innocence recompensing f o r the distorted passions of the older generation, but certainly where Leontes and Polixenes wanted to r e s i s t t i m e ' s passage, and look n o s talgically to their lost past, F l o r i z e l ' s and P e r d i t a ' s yearning f o r the future does at least serve to inculcate a welcoming of t i m e ' s passing. F l o r i z e l ' s idealization of his love and d e s i r e to have P e r d i t a ' s beauty incarnated in all experience is expressed through t e r m s implying a continual and r e s t l e s s temporal movement and a constant change of activity: What you do Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, I'd have you do it e v e r . When you sing, I'd have you buy and sell so; so give alms; P r a y so; and, f o r the o r d ' r i n g your a f f a i r s , To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you A wave o' th' sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that; move still, still so, And own no other function. (22*) And yet it is poignant that Florizel can express his d e s i r e for p e r m a nence only in t e r m s provoking a g r e a t e r sense of transience, in that

161

he wants to resist any change in Perdita's beauty: "When you speak, sweet, / I'd have do it ever . . . ever do / Nothing but that. " It is as if his own life has been so changed by Perdita's present youth and beauty that he cannot entirely feel certain that their relationship can grow out of the first onset of mutual desire through time's passing into a greater maturity of relationship. The play moves therefore in a complex, often ironical, manner towards the profound wish-fulfilment world of its conclusion. Leontes' renewed happiness is based on an inner change of life, and it is a process that has both needed and wasted sixteen years. Paulina, seemingly embodying the secret purposes of the gods, has been responsible for guiding Leontes' repentance; it is she who is ready to reveal the statue of Hermione to him. The final reconciliation of the two Kings, with each other and their children, is to the beholders "so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion". (23*) The romance quality of life as an astounding miracle is incarnate in the action. When even more coincidentally, Hermione herself steps down from the statue's pedestal, not as a fairytale princess waking from a magic sleep as fair as when she was enchanted, but wrinkled and aged by the sixteen years Leontes has wasted, again, the joy of the reconciliation seems like a romance. Given the play's stress on both the autonomy of time and the mysterious possibilities in its passing, the images of "the gods" and "their secret purposes", and the atmosphere of miracle and regeneration that envelops the final scenes do not serve to establish the existence of any transcendental cosmological powers guiding the action. Rather, by means of the romance's element of profound wish-fulfilment, Shakespeare can stress that it is only through this "wide gap of time" that reconciliation and renewal can be effected. And so it is Time and Chance which become the play's equivalent of beneficent Providence. The agents of the final reconciliation have not been divine but human and natural - Leontes' repentance, Paulina's devotion, Hermione's honour, Florizel and Perdita's faith and love. Within the play no metaphysics or art can bring about the harmony of such an outcome, only the return in the flesh to Leontes of the wife and daughter he himself rejected. In this play, the symbol of this apparently miraculous but purely human fulfilment is the family, the means by which human life can transcend its own temporal limitations. Within the timebound yet timeless unity of the family, age and youth, maturity and innocence, past, present, and future can be reconciled in a complex organic pattern that makes for the transformation of time's passing without escaping time's demands. The Winter's Tale, therefore, marks an extension and deepening of Shakespeare's concern with the two fundamental problems of time that have haunted him throughout his works: the problem of finding meaning in mutability, which is so central to the sonnets and that of reinterpreting the idea of the providential movement of time in purely natural or human terms, a major theme of King Lear. Providence, "the gods", and their "secret purposes" are terms used by Shakespeare to describe a mysterious dimension of human experience, not executed upon men

162 from outside but a determining pressure acting from within the very conditions of being human. The Winter's Tale, like King Lear, suggests that there is no 'given' meaning of time, and that, however uncertain and hostile, time must be accepted as the sole area of man's responsibility in his continual struggle to create meaning from life. Shakespeare is simultaneously a realist, accepting the limitations and power of time, and yet also an idealist, affirming the openness of the individual to accept and transform the opportunities time presents him. Man cannot rely on any inbuilt teleological structure in the progress of time: each moment becomes a challenge to give life meaning in itself. Shakespeare's attitude to time and its relations with what was traditionally termed Providence is a startlingly more fragile and potentially tragic solution than that accepted by, say, Chaucer or Spenser. In Shakespeare's world, the loss of Mamilius and Antigonus are part of the seemingly inevitable wastage of time; they may perhaps be surmounted but not reversed. In Chaucer's Troilus and Crise.yde, the poet turns at the poem's conclusion to exhort men to trust not temporal vanity but to put their faith in a transcendent Providence; Shakespeare also exhorts his audience to have faith, but in their own aspirations towards purely human goodness. Human life is meaningless unless the human capacity for r e generation and reconciliation, for creatively taking time's chances and opportunities, is recreated and reenacted by each generation. The total effect of The Winter's Tale is this profoundly, never naively, optimistic exhortation. 3 Although following closely upon The Winter's Tale, The Tempest i s very different in atmosphere. Both plays exploit the inclusiveness of the romance world, but stress very different possibilities offered by romance. Whereas The Winter's Tale concentrates on the contrast between the seemingly miraculous and coincidental and the world of ordinary motive and event, in The Tempest, magic, miracle, and coincidence are seen as an integral if amazing part of the seemingly natural world of its setting. Prospero's island is a realm both in and out of the world: paradoxically the play's strict unities of place and time have the effect of making the island appear to be outside the demands of time and space but mysteriously related to them, an impression enhanced by the violent juxtaposition of realistic storm in the first scene with Prospero's leisurely explanation in the second. The island, as it emerges, is a place seemingly isolated from "the dark backward and abysm of time", (24*) and yet emphasizing the temporal nature of men's lives, demanding growth, maturity, and self-knowledge from those who are cast ashore on it. Central to the intellectual structure of the play is an intensification of The Winter's Tale's concern with Time and Providence. Some of Shakespeare's probable sources gave him ample hints to challenge" him to examine afresh in the play the human content of the traditional doctrines. Jourdain's A Discovery of the Barmudas (1610),

163

for instance, exclaims that "it pleased GOD out of his most gracious and mercifull providence, so to direct and guide our ship (being left to the m e r c y of the sea) for h e r most advantage". (25*) P r o s p e r o , according to some c r i t i c s , embodies the traditional Christian view of Providence saving the voyagers, and finally bringing good out of evil. This view, echoing the pious note of Shakespeare's sources, is certainly maintained in the play by Gonzalo, but it is obvious that P r o s p e r o cannot embody providential power in any way related to the traditional Christian sense. His limitations and hesitations are s t r e s s e d throughout. An isolated and occasionally bitter figure, his powers a r e limited: he appears genuinely, if momentarily, concerned by Caliban's insurrection; he cannot compel Ferdinand to love Miranda or Caliban to become civilised; nor can he force repentance upon Antonio and Sebastian. In fact, the universe of The Tempest is, despite its romance form, strikingly like that of King L e a r . The relationship between P r o s p e r o and Caliban reveals that we a r e in a world where the notion of an inherent, given justice is no longer effective. We may sympathise with P r o s p e r o ' s attitude to Caliban, but Caliban's r e f u s a l to accept P r o s p e r o ' s civilisation is at least understandable. The island might have been uncivilised and a d e s e r t , but no doubt it suited Caliban. The given law of a universe where events were ordered by a beneficent Providence has been replaced by a world where power is law. Strip man of his power, as Lear found, then his word is no longer law. In The Tempest, we a r e no longer in the world of Tillyard's Elizabethan World Picture. P r o s p e r o , with vastly superior powers, has won in a power struggle and controls the island - though not without some anxieties. There is something of an internal debate over his own motives and actions towards the voyagers, and it is noticeable how his original intention of revenge is not finally r e v e r s e d until, f o r the f i r s t time, he enters into a genuine dialogue with another c h a r a c t e r . P r o s p e r o , like the other c h a r a c t e r s , is also moving towards an imaginative awakening through a s e r i e s of challenges to his preconceived notions. There can even be, as Anne Righter has argued, valid speculation whether there a r e suggestions of potential d i s a s t e r on the voyage home after P r o s p e r o has renounced his magic. (26*) But, as it will be evident, despite his limitations there is a case for using the t e r m "Providence" in a special sense to describe P r o s p e r o ' s actions. Within the t e r m s of romance, he is the supreme magician who has conquered most limitations of knowledge, and in human t e r m s , he stands f o r m a n ' s clearsighted awareness of his own nature, and the possibilities of knowledge, power, and opportunity. He has arrived at this self-conquest only a f t e r a seemingly miraculous escape, but what he d e s c r i b e s as the providential nature of his exile is something he has grasped only by hindsight to be made up of a number of human and natural chances - Gonzalo's charity, the existence of the island, the presence of Miranda and of his books. Time and its opportunities a r e crucial to P r o s p e r o ' s s u c c e s s . The action P r o s p e r o is directing occurs in a crucial four hours that "must . . . be spent most preciously". In this time the nature of the future and the meaningfulness of his past

164 exile will be established. F o r P r o s p e r o , as for Miranda, "The h o u r ' s now come; / The very minute bids thee ope thine e a r . " P r o s p e r o knows that he cannot direct time, but he must spend it carefully and retain A r i e l ' s powers as long as necessary, not releasing him "before the time be out". (27*) It is as if the crucial nature of the time at his disposal has set a limit on his powers, and his relief as his control s e e m s secure involves an awareness that time has not been wasted. The magical island, isolated in time, is nevertheless one where the importance of time is strongly realised. Looking back to e a r l i e r plays, most especially to King Lear and The Winter's Tale, we see how Shakespeare's view of Providence is one closely bound up with the acceptance of t i m e ' s passing and t i m e ' s opportunities. As with The Winter's Tale, The Tempest suggests that man must create his own meaning in time f r o m the raw material that time affords him; what can be in human a f f a i r s may, through chance, determination, and, to use Bruno's t e r m , prudence, overcome what is; for Calvin, and the whole traditional view of God's providential control over time, what is is only what can be. The Providence r e p resented by P r o s p e r o is not an additional factor to human life, but a quality of experience that recognises the temporal limitations of human life and yet drives man on to a f f i r m the curative possibilities of the present and the future in spite of the threat of meaninglessness and despair. The image of the family, which in the last scenes of The Winter's Tale came to symbolise the fragile but genuine adaption of humanity to t i m e ' s passing, r e c u r s , though l e s s strongly, in The Tempest. Miranda is led by h e r father to an awareness of both the "brave new world" of the possibilities of love and relationships and the more c o m plicated demands of society and human emotions. The t r i a l s Ferdinand undergoes to win Miranda a r e merely sketches of a battle that was fought in g r e a t e r complexity by Florizel and Perdita, and Shakespeare here concentrates on the natural and cosmic implications of their b e trothal. P r o s p e r o ' s masque p r e s e n t s human m a r r i a g e and generation a s p a r t of a ritualistic transformation of time, a p r o c e s s depicted not a s looking outside time f o r fulfilment but viewing human love as a quality ennobling the whole of life f r o m birth to death. But the resolution in the concluding scenes of The Tempest should not be seen as a sentimental return to harmony. The r a t h e r sour tone of the final forgiveness is perhaps partially designed to prompt doubts about P r o s p e r o ' s ability to control his enemies on his return to Milan; (28*) and his renunciation of his a r t includes an acceptance of mortality and death. But in the context of the romances, death is no longer m a n ' s enemy; r a t h e r it is clearly delineated reality that acts as a framework f o r life. P r o s p e r o ' s pardoning his enemies involves his entering into their world of relative judgements and partial knowledge, as he renounces his magic, his charismatic power. His rough magic abjured, his c h a r m s overthrown, he r e t u r n s to the complexity and uncertainty of the nonmagical \vorld of Milan - an image of a whole cultural movement that Shakespeare senses is occurring in his age and, uniquely serene in his responses, f a c e s and welcomes. As if to underline the significance of

165 his actions outside the world of the play, increasingly in the last two acts, Prospero turns as much towards the audience in his exhortations as to the voyagers on the island. His final plea to the audience for acceptance and forgiveness have, in the context of Shakespeare's vision of time, a special significance. His actions in stepping beyond the play break down the barrier between the stage and the audience, between art and life. The reality of life beyond the island and the theatre becomes equated with the reality of the romance drama, so that the vision the play affords does not cease when the play is over, but should become incarnate in the spectators' lives. Like The Winter's Tale, The Tempest ends on a note of celebratory exhortation to men to aspire to a quality of life based on the power of purely human values to transform time. For Shakespeare, the world is not the theatre of God's judgements, as Thomas Beard saw it, but rather the theatre of human possibilities. The romances, as the philosophical culmination of Shakespeare's exploration of man's time-bound nature, reveal the artist's function as being to seize upon men's deepest desires for permanence, and in spite of misery, the sapping of age, and death, to inspire men to search for the "paradise that cannot be established but only looked for, envisaged, and trued for a moment, to be lost and looked for again". Art becomes the revelation of life's mysteries and possibilities; as Conrad writes in a suggestive discussion of his art, "the world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is, - marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state". (29*)

4 It remains to evaluate the contribution of Shakespeare's exploitation of the romance mode in these plays to his concern with time - especially with the questions of time and mutability, and time and Providence. As I have suggested, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest represent a climax of Shakespeare's maturing view of time. Through the possibilities offered him by the romance mode, they suggest that time is uniquely bound up with both man's losses and his creative achievements; and further that the responsibility for meaning in time is found not in r e lating events to a non-temporal, transcendent eternal Providence, but rather in celebrating the possibilities in human responses to time's opportunities. Time does not have its meaning imposed on it from outside; it provides men with challenges and opportunities to give it genuinely human meaning. In terms of the philosophical movements of his age, Shakespeare's vision of man and his struggle with mutability is a crucial one. It lies alongside that of Bruno and the tradition of philosophers from Pico onwards who stress that man is in some sense divine, a kind of God. Man, according to Bruno, can return to the One, the Supreme God not by escaping from the world but by embracing the divinity within the imagination. Bruno's view of man-as-magus, which starts to hit Elizabethan thought and literature from the 1580's, is in Shakespeare's

166

The Tempest transformed into vitally dramatic t e r m s . And what is strikingly alike about Bruno's philosophical view of man and Shakesp e a r e ' s poetic vision is m a n ' s autonomy, the possibilities of t r a n s formation. Man-as-magus r e a l i s e s an inborn divinity, he is engaged on a quest f o r the infinite within the finite. The romances a r e therefore crucial works in the development of Shakespeare's a r t and his creation of what Aldous Huxley termed "a way of living in time without being completely swallowed up in time". (30*) As Northrop Frye r e m a r k s , "in the greatest moments of . . . Shakespeare, in, say The Tempest . . . we have a feeling of converging significance, the feeling that here we a r e close to seeing what our whole l i t e r a r y experience has been about, the feeling that we have moved into the still centre of the o r d e r of words". (31*) P r o s p e r o ' s breaking of his staff is a prophetic image of Shakespeare's unique response to the p r e s s u r e s of living in the early seventeenth century, the renouncing of a charismatic power of a mysterious all-powerful eternal Providence, and a turning to the powers and r i s k s inherent in being man and the assumption of human responsibility to give life human meaning. NOTES (1*) Philip Edwards, "Shakespeare's Romances: 1900-1957", SS, XI (1958), 18. (2*) Cf. Frank Kermode, introd. to The Tempest (1954), liv-lvi. (3*) Civilisation in Transition, Works, t r a n s . R. F . Hull, X (1964), 149. (4*) The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Works, VIII (1960), 441. (5*) Complete Works, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (1871), IV, 74. (6*) Edwards, "Shakespeare's Romances", 17. (7*) P e r , III. i. 22-24. (8*) P e r , H. iii. 45-47. (9*) See Erwin Panofsky, "Et in Arcadia Ego", in Philosophy and History: E s s a y s Presented to E r n s t C a s s i r e r (Oxford, 1936), 223-254, esp. 229-234. (10*) Yong's Translation of Diana and . . . Enamoured Diana, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Oxford, 1968), 11, 57. (11*) Cym, IV. ii. 263-264. (12*) Revised and ed. Karl Warnke and Ludgwig Proescholdt (Halle, 1878), Induction, 23. (13*) WT, HI. iii. 108. (14*) Cf. Pelz, 110-111. (15*) Ed. P . G. Thomas (1907), title page, 42. (16*) The Winter's Tale, ed. J . H. P . Pafford (1963), 83, n . 3 7 . (17*) The Shadow-Line (1921), 1. (18*) Pelz, 125. (19*) EI. iii. 59-60. (20*) IV. i. 7-8, 22-23, 25-29. (21*) IV. i. 1 - 2 .

167

(22*) IV. i. 135-143. (23*) V. ii. 28. (24*) Tmp, I. ii. 50. (25*) Sylvester Jourdain, A Discovery of the Barmudas . . . (1610), sig. B l r . (26*) Anne Righter, introd. to The Tempest (Harmondsworth, 1968), 42-43, 39-40. (27*) I. ii. 241, 36-37, 246. (28*) Righter, 39-40. (29*) Pelz, 111; Conrad, The Shadow-Line, ix-x. (30*) "Shakespeare and Religion", The Cornhill Magazine, CLXXIV (1964-5), 84. (31*) Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), 117.

CONCLUSION

My protracted analysis of Shakespeare's concern with time from his early plays through to his late romances has, I hope, brought into focus a point that emerged from the earlier discussion of the age's intellectual history - the intense concern with the nature and meaning of time among Elizabethan and Jacobean poets. It should also have highlighted an important difference between Shakespeare and most of his contemporaries. In comparing Shakespeare and Donne, for instance, it can be seen that while Donne's sermons make fascinating reading, and many of his religious poems display his early vigour and sensitivity, nevertheless his religious vision too often contains a shrillness of tone, a narrowing of human concern, and a growing revulsion from the fullness and variety that permeates the best of his early work. Given Donne's personal situation, temperament, and era, his intellectual development was almost predictable. Not only does it reveal much about the strengths and limitations of his imaginative and intellectual development, it also highlights the uniqueness of Shakespeare's mature vision. The destructive, wearing aspects of time that Donne came to react against so violently are, in such works as King Lear and The Winter's Tale, admitted in full, but with a realisation that temporality is the necessary characteristic of being human, and that it is man's responsibility not to fear time's passing but to forge meaning from it. It is not a question of Spenser's or Donne's traditional Christianity being wrong, or what might be termed Shakespeare's reverent humanism right - it is rather that Donne's later writings, like Ralegh's view of history, shuts out so much that is genuinely and creatively human. Neither Ralegh nor the later Donne envisage that time can be redeemed from within. In Shakespeare's romances, the family stands for a temporal institution that from within time makes time's passing meaningful. Even in Donne's early poems, however, a love-relationship, although intense and illuminating, is essentially an isolated world. Children, the fruitful tension between generations, the joy of parentage, convey no deep sense of fulfilment for Donne as they do for Shakespeare. (1*) Donne's references to children and family matters, however dutiful or concerned, never convey the sense of genuine fulfilment that Shakespeare evokes so deeply. (2*) The comparison between Shakespeare and his contemporaries has also proved useful in emphasizing how intellectual or cultural changes of the kind I have been analysing do not occur instantaneously: there is no crucial turning-point in the history of man's interpretation of time. What I think I have demonstrated is something less tidy - much strong, sometimes hysterical, reassertion of traditional views; some enthusiastic radicalism; various expressions of confusion or compromise.

170

Among the age's eddying intellectual c u r r e n t s and the l e s s easily d e finable c u r r e n t s of feeling that underlie them, the attitudes of time displayed by Shakespeare, Ralegh, Spenser and Donne overlap, diverge and contradict. The very fact of connecting preoccupations shared by widely differing w r i t e r s and different modes of literary discourse highlights the growing self-consciousness of one of the most fundamental transitions in Western intellectual history. Shakespeare and his contemporaries inhabit a metaphysical a r e a caught between an age of almost total belief in a transcendent r e a l m of being guiding and giving meaning to the mutable r e a l m of time and the passing of minutes, hours, days and y e a r s , and an age of intellectual pluralism where such belief is, depending on the point of view, unfashionable, doubtful, or impossible. If our age is that of the "death of God", then it is so b e cause of an historical p r o c e s s that seems to have been gathering i m petus in the age of Shakespeare and one of its corollaries has been a gradual and fundamental change in m a n ' s interpretations of the nature and meaning of time. Whereas in the period of this study, the growing sense of transition is just becoming evident, later in the seventeenth century time is increasingly considered l e s s as a f i e r c e , malicious entity with an autonomous metaphysical status dominating m e n ' s lives. The Belgian mystic J . B. van Helmont epitomised this development in seventeenth-century thought when he wrote that "the heathen saying that time consumes or devours us is . . . b a r b a r i a n and absurd because there is no action or passion of time against us or by u s . Nor by the fault of time do we perish, nor is death made more by time than by God. "(3*) In other a r e a s of later seventeenth-century thought, time is considered more as an abstract scientific concept and l e s s a s the medium of God's providential action. Newtonian physics needed a concept of time as an abstract mathematical unit of time in scientific discourse, which eventually becomes the abstract t_of modern physics, which "of itself, and f r o m its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external. "(4*) W. von Leyden sums up such developments usefully when he writes of the growing belief that "the most probable reason why . . . time itself was regarded a s a cause, provoking admiration or h o r r o r according as the r e s u l t s of its alleged agency were beneficial or harmful, was that knowledge of the r e a l cause of events was often lacking". (5*) As the empirical study of secondary causes, "the r e a l cause of events", p r o g r e s s e d , time ceased to be a fearful, problematical f o r c e governing men's lives. It became infinite yet measurable; its passing inevitable yet explicable. Obviously, this is not to say that t i m e ' s passing ceases to preoccupy men in their lives and l i t e r a t u r e . But f o r many w r i t e r s , it s e e m s to become much l e s s pressing, the philosophical contexts in which it is discussed l e s s ambiguous and problematical. Perhaps even the fruitful ambiguity of the word "time" that has been so crucial throughout this study - that of time as both the changing r e a l m as opposed to Eternity, and time as mutability, the passing of events - c e a s e s to be so i m p o r t ant. But such a matter and the continuation into the later seventeenth century of the p r o c e s s I have been concerned with would provide material f o r yet another study.

171 Throughout this study, I have been conscious of a number of methodological dangers. In the first place, in the last forty years or so, there have been a number of studies of Shakespeare in particular which have assumed the usefulness, even the inescapability, of an intellectual context constructed from various medieval and Renaissance sources as a sine qua non for a full and accurate interpretation of individual literary works. Not only may such an approach narrow the intellectual scope of a keenly philosophical play like King Lear, but also, there is L. C. Knights' useful warning against the "danger of substituting a c cumulated 'knowledge about' for a living responsiveness" to the work of art. (6*) While I have constantly been concerned with the history of ideas, I have tried to avoid this danger by demonstrating the subtle and shifting relationship between Shakespeare's and his contemporaries' works and the intellectual currents of their age. Shakespeare especially is rarely, if ever, a passive recipient of commonplaces; his works extend the sensibility of his age rather than merely reflect it. Moreover, time, as I have argued throughout, is not simply an abstract intellectual problem. It is a perplexing universal emotional or psychological preoccupation that perhaps only the great poet is capable of meeting adequately. This study, therefore, could not have been just a history of ideas: it was necessary to try to enter in to the wrestlings of the chameleon poet. In the second place, there is the danger of destroying the individual imaginative structure of particular works to turn them into documents of moral philosophy, and literary criticism into an assemblage of moral commonplaces. In what sense, indeed, can we speak of a work of literature having or implying a philosophy of life? Certainly for most literary theorists before this century, the answer would have been obvious. To embody philosophical truths, "to fayn notable images of virtues, vices . . . with delightful teaching", must, argues Sidney, be "the right describing note to know a Poet by", since the end of poetry is "to lead and draw us to as high a perfection, as our degenerate souls, made worse by theyr clayey lodgings, can be capable of. "(7*) But as George Watson has argued, the modern critical fashion for regarding a work of art, especially a drama, as a heterocosm, denies or is at least uneasy about the presence of ideas-as-truth in a work of art. (8*) Certainly it is a difficult and delicate task to analyse a poem or play and then adequately epitomize what we feel to be its central concerns. But literary and philosophical truths, as I have throughout implied, may have close and rewarding connections. The greatest works of literature make intellectually penetrating demands upon us in that we are challenged to apprehend something about ourselves, encountered in the actual process of viewing or reading the play or poem. And although with great caution, we must make the further step of, as Wilbur Sanders puts it, translating "embodied dramatic meaning into discursive meaning", a transposition of imaginative encounter into an experimental philosophical position which as he goes on, if dangerous, is "still important if the reading of literature is to be part of an integrated wholeness about the business of living". ( 9 * ) I have made no apology, therefore, for treating the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as of vital interest to our own deepest

172

philosophical concerns - with our own mortality and subjection to time. Such m a t t e r s a r e , as I have suggested throughout, vital issues in the works of many modern philosophers, theologians, and poets. We a r e still asking the same questions and experiencing similar feelings to those Shakespeare and his fellows asked and felt to be so p r e s s i n g . And I have f u r t h e r suggested, if tentatively, that in many ways Shakespeare in particular looks forward to later, nineteenth- and twentieth-century, confrontations with time. The uniqueness of Shakespeare, by comparison with Spenser, Ralegh, and even Donne, is that he faces all the unease and tragedy that his contemporaries felt so deeply before t i m e ' s passing and yet worked through to a sensitive exploration of the crucial question - what can give t i m e ' s passing meaning? For Shakespeare, statements about Eternity, Providence, the justice, fulfilment or tragedy of human events, seem to be abstract intimations of something that can be grasped and understood only in the very movement of time itself. Time is, f o r Shakespeare, in one sense not a 'problem' at all, but a mystery arising f r o m the very nature of being human, f r o m man's own self-consciousness, his drives, a s p i r ations, and f r u s t r a t i o n s . His comprehensive vision of time, especially in King L e a r and The Winter's Tale, is not only nearly unique in his age, but it is also perhaps the greatest expression in a tradition of imaginative philosophical exploration that links w r i t e r s like Bruno, Blake, and Nietzsche. Moving f r o m its tentative beginnings in his early plays, through the sonnets, histories, tragedies and romances, Shakesp e a r e ' s facing and transformation of time looks forward to the prophetic spirit of Nietzsche's exclamation that "the poets lie too much . . . the best images and parables should speak of time and becoming: they should be a eulogy and a justification of all t r a n s i t o r i n e s s " . ( 10*) NOTES (1*) And even, one might add, as the p a r i s h as a kind of spiritual family did f o r Herbert. (2*) e . g . Gosse, II, 187-188; Sermons, VI. 270. (3*) Jean-Baptiste van Helmont, Tractatus de Morbis, chapter 23, "De Tempore", XLVI, trans. Walter Fagel, O s i r i s , VIII (1948), 376. See also discussion of Gassendi's attack on the representation of time as a destructive entity in W. von Leyden, Seventeenth-Century Metaphysics (1968), 238-239. (4*) Newton, Principles, 6. (5*) von Leyden, 239. (6*) F u r t h e r Explorations (1965), 138. (7*) Sidney, Defence, Works, III, 8. (8*) The Study of Literature (1969), 193. (9*) Sanders, 320. (10*) Thus spoke Zarathustra, n , t r a n s . R. J . Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1961), 111.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

With such a well-studied topic, no attempt to provide a full bibliography will be made. I have t h e r e f o r e listed only a handful of e s sential modern studies that have been important to my approach. Place of Publication is London unless otherwise stated. Altizer, Thomas J. , The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1967). B a r r , James, Biblical Words f o r Time (1962). Boman, Thorlief, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek, trans. Jules J. Moreau (1960). Brandon, S. G. F . , History, Time and Deity ( Manchester, 1965). Brunner, Emil, "The Christian Understanding of Time. " SJT, IV (1951), 1-12. Elton, William R., King L e a r and the Gods (San Marino, 1966). Hamilton, William, The New Essence of Christianity (1966). Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1952). Knights, L. C. , Explorations (1946). — , Further Explorations (1965). Marsh, John, The Fulness of Time (1952). Patrides, C. A., "The Renaissance View of Time: a Bibliographical Note. " N and Q, CCVIH(1963), 408-410. Pelz, Werner, True Deceivers (1966). —, The Scope of Understanding in Sociology (1974). Poulet, Georges, Studies in Human Time, trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore, 1956). Quinones, Ricardo, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, M a s s . , 1972). Ricoeur, Paul, The Conflict of Interpretations, trans. Don Ihde (Evanston, 1974). Sanders, Wilbur, The Dramatist and the Received Idea ( Cambridge, 1968). Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology (1953-64). Turner, Frederick W., Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (1972).

INDEX

Altizer, T . J. J. 3, 10, 173 Ambrose, Isaac 24 Andrewes, Lancelot 23, 25, 37, 74 Arden of Feversham 123, 138 Aristotle 16-17, 25, 39 Atheist's Tragedy, The 138141 Augustine, St. 3, 18-20, 62, 147 Babington, Gervase 26 Bacon, Francis 62, 70 Barrow, Isaac 26, 40 Bartas, William de Saluste du 11 Beard, Thomas 138, 140, 165 Blake, William 15, 172 Bodin, Jean 62 Boethius 3, 18-19, 36, 110 Bolton, Edmund 60 Boys, John 25 Browne, Edward 23 Bruno, Giordano 3, 30, 37-41, 52, 54, 57, 94, 97, 156-157, 159, 160, 164-166 Burckhardt, Jacob 3-4 Calvin, Jean 3, 19, 21-23, 24, 31, 35, 37, 57, 74, 131, 141, 144, 164 Camus, A. 34 Camus, J . - P . 15, 20, 23, 36 Carmina Burana 48 Carpenter, John 23, 24, 35, 37 Chaucer, Geoffrey 33, 36, 49, 53, 91, 110, 162 Chew, S. C. 49 Churchyard, Thomas 20 Coleridge, S. T . 1, 4, 153 Conrad, J. 156 Cuffe, Henry 19-20 Culverwell, Ezekiel 29

Danby, John F. 140 Daniel, Samuel 51 Dante, Alighieri 2, 19, 36 Death, and Time 9, 54, 63, 69, 73-77, 127-129, 144-147 Defiance to Fortune, A 36 Dent, Arthur 21 Descartes, René 22 Diana 154 Discourse of Eternitie, A 20 Donne, John 12, 16, 23, 30, 47, 57, eh VI passim, 94, 97, 109, 114, 169, 170, 172 Dove, John 139 Duthie, G. I. 87 Edwards, Philip 87, 151 Elton, W. R. 36, 142, 173 Empson, William 71 Epicurus 37 Eternity, and Time 10-11 Eusebius 18 Existentialism, and Time 12, 15, 34, 156, 172 Fame, and Time 33, 83 Featley, Daniel 20 Feltham, Owen 15 Fortune, and Time 35-36, 54, 129 Frye, Northrop 123, 166 Gardner, Helen 71 Gascoigne, George 19, 154 Gifford, George 35, 138, 144 God, Death of 3, 10, 34, 170 Goldman, Richard 93 Greene, Robert 157-158 Greville, Fulke 20, 34, 48, 51, 57 Harding, D. W. 68, 71 Harvey, Gabriel 34

175 Heidegger, Martin 156, 173 Helmont, van, J . B. 170 Heraclitus 16 Herbert, George 21, 74 Heywood, Thomas 123, 137 History, and Time ch. V, VIII passim Holland, Philemon 23 Hooker, Richard 22, 25, 37 Horace 35, 48 Hörne, Robert 24 Huizinga, Johann 15 Innocent III, Pope 19, 76, 128 Jonson, Ben 33 Jung, C. G. 153 Jourdan, Sylvester 163 Kierkegaard, Sifren 10 Knight of the Burning Pestle, The 152 Knights, L. C. 1, 87, 109, 119, 171, 173 Langland, Wilham 48 Lindsay, Jack 38 Leyden, W. von 170 Locke, John 16, 25 Lucretius 37, 40, 52 Luther, Martin 148 Lydgate, John 33 Machiavelli, N. 32-33, 35, 36, 98, 99 Mannheim, Karl 31 Marlowe, Christopher 22, 31, 35, 38, 118, 124, 140 Marx, Karl 32 Meyerhoff, Hans 9 Milton, John 2 Mirror f o r Magistrates, The 31, 33, 97 Montaigne, Michael de 2, 30-31, 35, 52, 70 Morison, Richard 98 Mornay, Philippe de 11, 20, 36, 138 Mucedorus 152, 155 Mumford, Lewis 33

Newton, Isaac 9, 16, 25, 40, 67, 170 Nietzche, F. 10, 34, 40, 172 Norton, Thomas 22 Orano, Paola 38 Ornstein, Robert 147 Ovid 48, 52 P a r s o n s , Robert 23 Patrides, C. A. 61, 173 Pelz, Werner 17, 156, 165, 173 Peursen, Cornelis van 29-30 Perkins, Wilham 22 P e t r a r c h , Francesco 2, 19, 29, 30, 49 Pico della Mirandola 156 Plato 16-17, 21 Plotinus 17 Plutarch 23 Pont, Robert 24 Poulet, Georges 22 Primaudaye, P i e r r e de la 62, 142 Providence, and Time 10, 11, ch. II, III p a s s i m . , 48-49, 5455, 57, 60-64, 74, 85, 97-98, 111-112, 128-129, 130-132, ch. XI passim, 156, 159-166 Quinones, Ricardo 1-4, 16, 29 Ralegh, Sir Walter 12, 22, 33, 35, 36, 38, 47, ch. V passim, 97, 100, 102, 169, 170, 172 Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, The 152 Redemption of Time, The 24, 34, 74, 102-103 Respublica 50 Righter, Anne 163 Sanders, Wilbur 3, 12, 37, 97, 134, 141, 171 Schaar, Claes 49 Schopenhauer, Artur 148 Shakespeare, William 1, 2, 4, 12, 16, 30, 32, 38, 57, chs. Vn-XII passim, 169, 170 As You Like It 9 , 82, 106, 113, 151, 158

176

Antony and Cleopatra 109, 116120 Cymbeline 152, 153, 155 Hamlet 38, 124-129, 137 1 Henry IV 100-106, 115, 119 2 Henry IV 100-106, 115, 118, 119 Henry V 98-100, 119 1, 2, 3 Henry VI 98, 100, 116 King Lear 12, 82, 85, 116, ch. X I passim, 154, 155, 160, 161, 162, 169, 171, 172 L o v e ' s Labour's Lost 81, 8285, 151 Macbeth 116, 122, 124, 130136, 137 Measure f o r Measure 109 Merchant of Venice, The 82 Midsummer Night's Dream, A Othello 109 P e r i c l e s 152, 153-154 Richard II 101 Richard III 98, 99-100 Romeo and Juliet 81, 85-87, 113 Sonnets 4, 12, 81, 88-96 Tempest, The 152, 154, 156, 162-166 Troilus and Cressida 60, 109116, 125 Twelfth Night 82, 84, 151 Two Gentlemen of Verona 82 Venus and Adonis 51 Winter's Tale, The 4, 76, 82, 85, 152, 153-154, 156, 157162, 164, 165, 166, 169, 172 Sidney, Sir Philip 27, 35, 49, 137, 139, 153 Sir Cl.yomon and Sir Clam.ydes 152 Smith, Henry 22, 23 Soto, de, Andreas 23, 32

Spenser, Edmund 2, 11, 12, 22, 38, 39, ch. IV passim, 57, 58, 87, 91-96, 97, 162, 169, 170, 172 Strype, John 32 Thomas Aquinas, Saint 16, 19-23, 35, 39, 40, 49 Thomas, Wilham 32, 97, 102,103 Tillich, Paul 9, 15 Tillyard, E. M. W. 97-99, 103, 134, 163 Time - Ancient Views of: 9, 16-17 - Judaeo-Christian Views of: 9-10, ch. II passim, 29, 34-37 - Renaissance Views of: 2, 3, ch. I passim, 16, ch. Ill passim, 61-61, 81 - Calvinist Views of: 12, 2123, 52, 138-140 Tourneur, C. 109 Tragedy, and T i m e chs. X, XI passim Turner, F r e d e r i c k M. 1 Ure, Peter

12

Veron, Jean 21, 35, 131 Watson, George 171 Webster, John 109 Whateley, William 24 Whitehead, A . N. 10 Wilhelm, James J. 48 Wilkins, John 25 Wilson, J. D. 98 Wimsatt, W. K. 119 Yates, Frances A .

41