Shakespeare’s Time Travellers

Abstract

Elizabethans have a tendency to appear out of historical context in Shakespeare’s plays, but why is it that, in general, it is the lower class or marginal characters in Shakespeare’s plays who seem out of time? This essay suggests that there were two visions of historical time at play in early modern England and they manifest in Shakespeare’s plays as distinct “chronotopes.” The historical consciousness of the educated, which was shaped in part by the tragic vision of the de casibus virorum tradition, was linear and progressive while that of the unlettered and the poor was largely cursive. This bifurcated historical perception and representation shows up in Shakespeare’s plays in different, though co-existing, chronotopes: one, a cursive, repetitive, and therefore essentially timeless chronotope in which lower class characters are depicted not so much anachronistically as atemporally; the other an event-driven linear chronotope in which upper class characters often find themselves defined by an inexorable tragic teleology. Most interestingly, some characters, especially in the history plays, move between the two chronotopes, compelled by circumstance or inclination, and this essay traces the fates of these time travellers in Shakespeare’s plays, paying special attention to the Henriad.

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