I'm not sure that there is an artist in any field that can compare with Shakespeare in terms of the depiction and understanding of time. Technically, his plays are largely the result of his treatment of it, and to get to know them from the point of view of craft, it's a vital area of study. I've mentioned it before in another context, but one of the many changes that Shakespeare made to his source material for Romeo and Juliet, Arthur Brooke's The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), was to telescope a four-month period into one of four days, while still allowing breathing room for characters such as the Nurse and Mercutio, and maintaining the audience's belief throughout. In terms of theme, time is central to many, perhaps most, of the plays, but some, such as Macbeth, are almost entirely absorbed by it: The play is perhaps best approached as a dramatic example of how people can destroy the present by obsession with the future. And in Henry IV, part Two, the king (i.e. Bolingbroke), nearing the end of his life, which was filled with civil wars, rebellions, illness, has these lines, as powerful as any in Shakespeare, about the entangled natures of life and time:

O God! that one might read the book of fate,

And see the revolution of the times

Make mountains level, and the continent,

Weary of solid firmness, melt itself

Into the sea; and other times to see

The beachy girdle of the ocean

Too wide for Neptune's hips; how chances mock,

And changes fill the cup of alteration

With divers liquors! O, if this were seen,

The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,

What perils past, what crosses to ensue,

Would shut the book and sit him down and die.

I keep learning more about Shakespeare's technical treatment of time with every play that I re-visit. In Romeo and Juliet, time is particularly important in several different ways, and over the next few posts I'll be summarizing some of what I've learned recently. For today, the first thing that must considered in this regard is the way the story has been collapsed from several months in Brooke's narrative poem (which was Shakespeare's primary and perhaps sole source) to four days in the play. But somehow it still feels entirely believable. Perhaps it's due to the fact that our memories tend to work this way as well, because when we look back on our own lives, we tend to remember the big events, the ones that changed things, rather than the cups of coffee and so forth. And many years can get turned into recollections that might take only a few moments to re-live mentally. Tomorrow, I'll write about how the play is influenced both technically and thematically by a particular time of day.