EW approaches to a given play reveal its form and its view of reality as quickly as a study of its treatment of time. This is so because drama, above all other arts, is the temporal art. The arts may be divided for convenience into the literary, the static, and the arts. In the static arts-painting, sculpture, architecture-time plays no constitutive role, not even in such a painting as Chagall's Time is a River without Banks. For although time may be the subject of such works, its expression is assimilated totally to space, color, and geometric form. In poetry and fiction noi only is time often an important part of the subject, but -also its passage may become part of the created illusion. This potentiality in fiction has been much explored by novelists since Proust and Joyce. In poetry, the outstanding example of time as a subject is found in Shakespeare's sonnets. Except in very long poems, however, it is not easily possible for poetry to generate an illusion of passing time. In works designed to be performed before an audience, time enters art in a much more complex way. It becomes a constituent part of the artistic form itself. Music, the dance, and drama are realized as works of art only as they have duration in the time of their performance. The form of each of these depends in no small part upon rhythm and duration. Drama is the only art that is performed and that also may speak of time as a subject. (The dance and program music may do so to the extent that they introduce narrative and become dramatic, but narrative as such is not intrinsic to them.) Drama is partly a literary and partly a performing art. It is a combination (actually a fusion) of word and action. The action unfolds in time, and the word attempts to understand and comment upon the action-to reveal the mystery of action-filled time. It follows that much about the form and content of a play will be revealed by analysis of its treatment of time.' Such an analysis can be useful, for instance, in defining the view of reality given in The Tempest, and in relating that view to what we find elsewhere in Shakespeare. I shall try to show here the working of such a method. The Tempest shows a manner of imitating reality that is radically different from most of Shakespeare's earlier work. But how is it different? What new
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Jan 1, 1964
Claes Schaar 
