Time’s Speech in The Winter’s Tale: How the Past Can Be Undying

Abstract

Abstract The speech of Time in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is here closely analyzed as the poet’s statement of his philosophy of time. The play’s breach of Aristotle’s unity of time—the play at this point lets pass sixteen years—introduces several other breaches of received wisdom about time. Shakespeare rejects the view of time the destroyer in his sonnets, replacing it with a view of time that combines time as judge, as that which tries or tests, as maker of lawfulness and laws, as gardener and agent of growth, and as emergent consciousness. An early feminist work, the play sees the creative function of time as characteristic of female ethics and action. Most radically, time is constitutively recursive in its nature, not a simple dimension, radically unpredictable yet retrodictable once an event has occurred. Nothing is lost, though the past itself grows in meaning as new time accumulates upon it.