"No, I did n't," said Minnie, with that freedom of speech which is so pleasant among near relations. I said she was rather old for that."

66

that it is very likely. I have seen a great many things of the kind, though you never open your eyes. He is always going to Markland to see what he can do, if there is anything she wants. He is almost sure to fall in love with her."

"Minnie, a married woman!"

"Oh, you little simpleton! She is not a married woman, she is a widow; and she is left extremely well off and with everything in her hands, that is to say, she would be very well off if there was any money. A widow is in the best position of any woman. She can do what she likes, and nobody has any right to object."

"Oh, Minnie!" protested the younger sister again.

"You can ask mamma, if you don't believe me. But of course she would not have anything to say to Theo," Miss Warrender said. M. O. W. Oliphant.

I PROPOSE to analyze the plays of Shakespeare for the purpose of indicating the lapse of time which accompanies the action of each of them. Separate dramas have occasionally been examined with this end in view, but I am not aware that any attempt has been made to bring together within a narrow compass the results of an inquiry concerning the dramatist's entire treatment of the element of time. I mean to refrain as nearly as may be from theories and speculations, and to confine myself to the faithful discovery and simple setting forth of the poet's own plan as it is unfolded in his text.

Certain critics have undertaken to forestall such an examination by predicting its worthlessness. Our most dis

tinguished American commentator, Mr. Richard Grant White, is one of the chief of these, his reasoning being simply this: that, as Shakespeare is obvi ously careless with regard to all such matters of form, it is vain to search his plays for evidences of intention. But my precise object is to find out just how careless Shakespeare was, and just how careful, in the particular matter under consideration. I do not believe such a question is to be settled by begging it; and though I share the general admiration for Mr. White's brilliant scholarship, I cannot allow myself to be diverted from my purpose by what he has written on this point, especially as he has taken for his special text the play of Hamlet, in which Shakespeare has

marked the progress of time with exceptional distinctness.

All students of the master-poet are agreed in recognizing the extraordinarily efficient quality of his genius. Whatever he willed to do he could do. Often he was indifferent as to matters of detail, but when he chose to be scrupulous his fineness was a marvel to the most exacting. The fact and the force of his intention are to be inferred, as in the case of any other human agent, from the character of his work. A rapid reading of his plays will discover that he paid little regard to the "unities" of the classic dramatists, and that he seldom took pains to placard his scenes with statements concerning the progress of the action. And his dramas have come down to us unaccompanied by authentic programmes setting forth the periods of time supposed to elapse between the scenes, except in some rare instance where a "chorus" plays the part of interpreter. But though he disregarded the fashion of the ancients and never knew the method of the moderns, it will be made to appear that in this as in various other matters he had his own way of working, and that the movement of time in his plays is often visible to eyes that are patient enough to exercise their function of seeing. The general result of an examination on the point in question might indeed be safely prophesied by any careful student of Shakespeare's method as a playwright: it could be guessed in advance that in a few of his dramas he would be very clear and exact in displaying the passage of time in the action; that in many other pieces he would show it with a distinctness sufficient for practical purposes; that in many he would give few or no indications of it. Upon investigation it is found that the Shakespearean dramas may be classified in just this way. The first class includes only the Comedy of Errors, Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. The second class

embraces a majority of the comedies and Othello. In the third class are all the historical plays (with which I reckon Lear and Macbeth and the Roman tragedies, except Titus Andronicus, which I have not taken into account); a few of the comedies, mostly of the earlier period; Pericles, Timon, and Troilus and Cressida. This is a rough division, and will need much explanation and perhaps some modification, as we go along. For convenience, I shall deal wholly with the comedies in this paper.

Grouping the comedies in the manner just indicated, I place in the first class, as was said above, the Comedy of Errors and The Tempest, in which the progress of time is marked with minute precision; in the second class, A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Merchant of Venice, the Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, and the Winter's Tale, in all of which the time is shown with substantial fullness and clearness; in the third class, the Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labor's Lost, the Taming of the Shrew, All's Well That Ends Well and Cymbeline, with Pericles and Troilus and Cressida, in which the lapse of time is indicated scantily, obscurely, or not at all.

I. Entering upon the consideration of these groups in their order, I ask my readers to note at the outset the interesting fact that there are but two of Shakespeare's plays in which the action is confined within a single day. One of these, the Comedy of Errors, stands unquestionably among the earliest of his dramatic compositions; the other, The Tempest, is doubtless one of his very latest. The former shows more of a disposition to imitate the classical playwrights than appears in any other of his pieces; the latter displays Shakespeare's untrammeled genius in its most matured and characteristic shapes. Yet though so widely different from each

other in all matters of substance and in nearly all matters of form, the two dramas are alike in this, that they alone tell their stories with such succinctness in point of time as almost to come within the bounds permitted by the strict classi cal canon. Each of them covers but a portion of one day. In Scene 1, Act I., of the Comedy of Errors, old Ægeon is condemned to death, in default of a ransom of one thousand marks; the Duke limiting to the prisoner "this day" in which to raise the sum. The hour of the imposition of the sentence is early, for in the last scene of the play the Duke alludes to the "morning story " of geon. Scene 2 begins not long after the midday dinner-time of Antipholus of Ephesus; his Dromio- after the meal had been kept waiting so long that "the capon" has "burned and the "pig" fallen "from the spit" - having been sent by Adriana to hunt up the tardy master of the house. In the same scene the "merchant" friend of Antipholus of Syracuse promises to meet the

latter at five o'clock P. M. The hour of Scene 1, Act II., is two P. M., as indicated by a remark of Adriana. Scene 2, Act II., follows close upon the preceding, or is partly contemporaneous with it, it being "not half an hour" since oue of the interviews of Scene 2, Act I. Scene 1, Act III., sharply succeeds, and shows Antipholus of Ephesus on his way home, conscious that he is late for dinner and apprehensive about his wife's temper, so that it is now about half past two; and in the same scene, Angelo agrees to meet him " an hour hence." The "hour hence," 3.30 P. M., is reached in the last scene of Act III., when Angelo tries to keep his appointment. In Scene 1, Act IV., it still lacks something of five o'clock, and Angelo is begging of his creditor a few minutes' delay, that he may collect of Antipholus of Ephesus the sum "promised" to be paid at five. The short scenes 2, 3, and 4 of the same act are either contemporaneous, or fit snugly in after

the preceding. In Scene 1 of Act V. "the dial points at five;" the characters all come together, mostly by appointment; the near doom of Ægeon is once more proclaimed, the day having expired without the appearance of a friend to advance his ransom, and in a few minutes everything is happily ended. It would not be unwarrantable to say that the last four acts are shown by Shakespeare's text to occupy about an hour apiece, the second act opening at two P. M., while the first act covers a part of the forenoon and a few minutes between one and two P. M.

The action of The Tempest consumes about four hours. The moment of the shipwreck, with which the comedy opens, is not fixed precisely in the scene itself, but on almost the last page of the fifth act the Boatswain, now restored to reason and reverence, announces,

"Our ship,

Which, but three glasses since, we gave out split, Is tight and yare."

Everything in The Tempest moves with great speed, though there is seldom any appearance of hurry; indeed, almost every incident in the piece is supposed to be fitted to every other by the magic of Prospero. In Scene 2, Act I., after Prospero's disclosure to Miranda of their checkered past, Ariel appears, and it is two o'clock; for to his master's in

quiry about "the time o' day" the fine spirit replies that it is "past the midseason," to which Prospero adds,"At least two glasses; the time 'twixt six and

now

Must by us both be spent most preciously." So that within the scant four sequent hours Ferdinand is captured by Prospero, and enslaves and is enslaved by Miranda; Antonio and Sebastian plot against the life of the King of Naples, and are foiled by Ariel; Caliban makes acquaintance with Stephano and Trinculo, and learns the joys, audacities, and inadequacies of drunkenness and the self-disgust of returned sobriety; and

there is a handsome margin of time left for Prospero to use in entertaining the newly betrothed couple with rare private theatricals, and afterward in lecturing his prostrate foes with magnificent length and splendor of diction. Some of the hints of the progress of the time are delicate, and all are interesting. In Scene 2, Act I., Caliban, who has apparently made a very long forenoon over his wood-gathering, a branch of industry to which Prospero seems to have given much vicarious attention, is snarling about his dinner, the hour (past two P. M.) being, of course, disgustingly late for that meal. In Scene 2, Act III., Caliban possesses Stephano with a plan for murdering Prospero during his master's afternoon nap, which will be "within a half hour." The fifth act The fifth act and final scene opens, as Ariel informs Prospero, "on the sixth hour," and Ferdinand is presented to his father as the accepted lover of a maid with whom his "eld'st acquaintance cannot be three hours." The shadows of evening begin to fall upon the close of the scene which ends the eventful afternoon. Prospero invites the gentlefolk to lodge with him until the next morning, and they enter his cell prepared to spend "some part of the night" in hearing the story of his thirteen years' exile; while Ariel, it is reasonable to suppose, flies off to take a twilight dash upon a bat's back, in anticipation of a speedy return to elemental freedom.

II. The second group of comedies exhibits the method of dealing with the question of time which Shakespeare practiced in a majority of his non-historical plays. It is not improbable that he was familiar with the strict rule of the classic Greek authors, and that he rejected it, with more or less deliberation, as unsuitable to his own theory of dramatic composition, or to the bent of his own genius. The only "unities " which he was scrupulous to preserve were emotional or moral. Continuous vivacity

he was

in his stories and scope for full life and free illustration in his personages were the ends which he perpetually sought to attain. If the plot was full of dramatic interest, above all, if it gave ample room for the play and progress of human passion and the display and development of human character, willing that it should sometimes fly about with his hearers, as if it were a magical Persian carpet. Yet in his pieces there is seldom any failure of entire coherence in the plot, as there is almost never any failure of self-consistency in the persons. The movement in the classic play of ancient Greece is all, as it were, upon one broad plane; in the Shakespearean drama it runs upon vast ascending spirals. On the other hand, Shakespeare knew the frequent value of concentration both in time and place, and exemplified his knowledge when it suited his purpose so to do. His own will was his law; but his will was ever guided by his sense of dramatic propriety or necessity. One strong inclination of his mind constantly interfered with any strict compliance on his part with the canon of dramatic unities: he seems nearly always to have desired that his prominent characters should act out in their own persons, as far as might be, every important event of the story; he could not abide that any essential part of their doings should be delivered at second hand. Consequently, his chief personages do not often contribute directly to the plot by telling or suffering others to tell what has happened to them; they show it all to the eyes of the spectator. This was in direct opposition to the theory and practice of the ancient dramatists. In long plays of an elevated order, it is, in fact, generally impossible that the unities should be preserved without a vast amount of introductory or parenthetic narrative. The mental habit just named, which in Shakespeare has almost the potency of an absolute law, works, as we shall see, im

portant results upon the scheme of time in his plays. If an ancient Greekor, for that matter, a modern Frenchman, of the higher classic tendency – had dramatized the story of Othello, he would have opened his play with the third scene of Shakespeare's third act, and would have narrated through the mouths of some of the dramatis personarum the history of the Moor's elopement and wedding, of his summons before the Venetian magnificoes, of Brabantio's alienation from Desdemona, and of Cassio's lieutenancy and degradation. If Shakespeare had written The Tempest in his usual mood, though of course it is easy to suggest reasons why his animus should have been just what it was in the case of this particular comedy,the piece would have begun, not with the shipwreck of the usurping Antonio and the King of Naples upon an undiscovered island, but with at least one whole act in Milan, in which the deposing of Prospero and his expulsion from his

dukedom would have been displayed; and very likely a second act which certainly would have been extremely interesting might have shown Prospero's first encounters with Ariel and Caliban, and the application of the varied arts and incantations by which he persuaded or compelled their obedience. Now this habit in dramatic construction by no means results either in a constant or in a general disregard by Shakespeare of the element of time, or in a disposition to refuse to indicate the lapse of time to the spectator; but it effects a want of uniformity among the different plays, the movement being by a series of throbs and checks, begun and intermitted at various points, according to the poet's judgment of the needs of each drama. Yet there is a certain marked similarity of treatment of the plot in a good many pieces, which makes it possible to speak of half a dozen or more of them as conforming pretty closely to one constructive type. In

the comedies and tragedies of this type Shakespeare devotes his first act — or, perhaps, as in Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure, only a few opening scenes to the introduction of some of his chief personages, and the presentation of the basis event or events upon which the main structure of the drama is to be reared. This opening act or scene seldom covers more than a few days, and sometimes occupies but a few hours. An interval in time, varying in length but never very long, next occurs, during which the characters sustain some important readjustments; and then, the terms of the problem of the piece having been stated, the solution is worked out continuously and rapidly. It is as if in a musical work the theme were first simply stated in a few strong chords, a rest of some bars followed, and then, with new resolutions of the initial harmony, the composition were developed to its close without a break. The length of the interval of time just named is in general not explicitly stated, though sometimes, as in Twelfth Night and Hamlet, pains are taken before the end of the drama is reached to indicate its extent. The lapse of time after the interval is usually made clear, and in some instances is set down with minute precision. Of this type are Hamlet, Measure for Measure, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and, with some variation, the Merchant of Venice and the Winter's Tale. Othello may also fairly be said to belong to the same order, although in its action there are two undetermined intervals which precede the final rush of the plot to its fierce conclusion. It will be correctly inferred that Shakespeare had no deep respect for the division lines of the acts with which his plays are given to us, and that his cæsural pauses were made nearly as often in the midst of an act as at its close.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is not of the type which has just been described, and to which most of the sec