| Description |
Shakespeare's works contain many powerful reflections about time, its movement, and its effect on humankind. Some of the most poignant expressions about time's passage appear in three of Shakespeare's late plays: Cymbeline, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and especially The Winter's Tale. These plays, often classified as romances, all feature magic, improbable coincidences, characters redeemed from presumed death, and supernatural; powers. They also include some of Shakespeare's most optimistic views about a world subject to time. These plays' conceptions of time have sometimes been regarded as attempts to deny the harsher realities of life that appear so determinedly in Shakespeare's earlier works. On closer study, however, the romances-and The Winter's Tale in particular- contain remarkably balanced and subtle reflections on time's passage, as well as innovative devices for exploring how time functions both in the play and in real life. The two earlier plays, Cymbeline and Pericles, provide indications of Shakespeare's journey from the morbid view of age prominent in the sonnets and the middle tragedies to the remarkable vision of The Winter's Tale. Both plays show protagonists coping in various ways with the pressures and pain of time's passage. Both plays acknowledge the inevitability of age and death, but they also offer consolation in the form of children, the natural world, and providential design of the universe. In both Cymbeline and Pericles, finally, the playwright reinforces his reflections about time with innovative narrative devices, such the unique rapid-fire structure of Cymbeline and the narrator, Gower, from Pericles. The Winter's Tale is among the most fascinating of Shakespeare's works, partly because of its remarkable treatment of time. Spanning sixteen years, it encompasses the extremes of human life from tragedy and comedy. Significantly, Time himself appears as a choms, providing unity to the plot and authority for the reflections made about time throughout the play, Though age, decay, and death are present in The Winter's Tale, the characters nevertheless find solace in one another, in glimpsing the divine design of the universe, and in the eternal regenerative ability of nature. |
