The Mimesis of Time in Hamlet

Abstract

Hamlet opens on intense attention to time, as the sentries "watch the minutes of this night" (1.1.30). (1) The emphasis gains thematic depth when Hamlet formulates his predicament in terms of temporal dislocation: "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right" (1.5.196-97). The problem of time is raised to philosophical status in Polonius's rhetoric: "Why day is day, night night, and time is time" (2.2.88). The importance of time in Hamlet has provoked numerous studies, but none has approached the marter through recourse to the temporal analysis of John McTaggart, whose celebrated article on the unreality of time, published in 1908 and later republished in the second volume of his metaphysical work, The Nature of Existence, is often recognized as the seminal treatise in the philosophy of rime of the last one hundred years. (2) Though virtually no philosophers have defended McTaggart's claim that time is unreal, scores of them, in hundreds of articles and books on the subject, have addressed some aspect of his description of the two temporal series proper to time (or, more precisely, the notion of time). These two series, easily defined, can serve as powerful lenses though which to analyze and illumine the structure of rime in Hamlet. The result of our inquiry will be a new understanding of the representation of time--or, more precisely, what Gerhard Dohrn-van-Rossum terms "time-consciousness"--in the text. (3) For the elements which we shall draw from McTaggart are not theoretical (in the sense of imposing ideational constructs on reality or what actually is), but descriptive, in the sense of articulating the actual conceptual content of the notion of time--what E.J. Lowe calls the "indispensable ingredients in our understanding of what time is" and what L. Nathan Oaklander calls the "two ways in which we ordinarily conceive and talk about time." (4) Despite the fact that McTaggart's theory of the non-reality of time turned out historically to be a dead end, his succinct and penetrating analysis of what time is conceptually--what concepts are intrinsic to the very idea of time--has exercised profound and lasting influence on philosophers of time, ever since he published his formulations. Ironically, though ultimately concerned with demonstrating that time is not, McTaggart's analysis has become indispensable to many philosophers in defining what time is. But before proceeding with this investigation, brief recapitulation of earlier approaches to the problem of time in Hamlet will contextualize discussion. A convenient introduction to such considerations concerns emphasis on the Renaissance as the period when temporal awareness broke through to a new level. Georges Poulet stresses the upsurge in the sense of transience: "It is indeed true that one felt then as always, and perhaps more keenly then ever before, the precarious and fugitive character of each lived moment." David Scott Kastan elaborates on this aspect of the temporal awareness of Renaissance man: "His world is one in which the unidirectional and irreversible flow of time brings an intensified sense of the fragility and precariousness of being." Ricardo Quinones underscores this temporal insecurity by pointing to the Renaissance concern with the Saturnine quality of time, construed in terms of its "menacing and destructive" activity, analogous to that of the mythological Saturn, the god who consumed his own offspring. Other scholars foreground more positive aspects of Renaissance temporality, by focusing on the achievement of historical perspective. Erwin Panofsky, for example, highlights the role of intense philological study of classical texts which enabled the understanding of ancient civilization "as a phenomenon complete in itself, yet belonging to the past and historically detached from the contemporary world." Dohrn-van-Rossum addresses the role of nascent technology in fostering awareness of the difference between past and present: "From the beginning of the fifteenth century, at the latest, the preoccupation with inventions developed a historical perspective. …