Time
Character Description
Instead of a brief supertitle “16 years later …”, Shakespeare composes a whole speech about what has happened between Act 3 and 4 and where we are now in the story. Moreover, he lets not a neutral narrator but time itself speak this speech (originally: as chorus ). It might be out of respect for the power of time passing to bring about change – growing and aging, revealing and rethinking – to make it a person, rather than an abstract notion.
This idea is not entirely new to the play or Shakespeare himself: One major source to The Winter’s Tale, has the title Pandosto. The Triumph of Time (written 1588 by Robert Greene), and Viola in Twelfth Night invokes the power of time to change her miserable situation: “ O Time – thou must untangle this, not I”.
Time functions on the one hand as a narrator providing expositional information: change of time and place, introduction of new characters (Florizel) and report of intermediate events (Leontes’ retreat). On the other hand, Time exposes itself as a dramatic agent, a puppeteer causing events akin to the power of the playwright himself.
The role of Time was for me the challenge of presentational acting and to make a supernatural being, almost an abstract notion, as lively as a real character without bringing it too much “down to Earth”. Its most attractive aspect was for me the display of power and of meta-power: Not only to allow the change of events, but also to control the moment of their revelation to the audience.
This idea is not entirely new to the play or Shakespeare himself: One major source to The Winter’s Tale, has the title Pandosto. The Triumph of Time (written 1588 by Robert Greene), and Viola in Twelfth Night invokes the power of time to change her miserable situation: “ O Time – thou must untangle this, not I”.
Time functions on the one hand as a narrator providing expositional information: change of time and place, introduction of new characters (Florizel) and report of intermediate events (Leontes’ retreat). On the other hand, Time exposes itself as a dramatic agent, a puppeteer causing events akin to the power of the playwright himself.
The role of Time was for me the challenge of presentational acting and to make a supernatural being, almost an abstract notion, as lively as a real character without bringing it too much “down to Earth”. Its most attractive aspect was for me the display of power and of meta-power: Not only to allow the change of events, but also to control the moment of their revelation to the audience.