Notes CHAPTER ONE 1. Benjonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938) 6, 198-9. 2. The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960) p. 83. In addition to Driver's, another study which does provocatively confront this issue is Ricardo Quinones's The Renais­ sance Discovery of Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972). Each of these has played an important role in the development of my argument, but each seems to me to consider Shakespeare in terms of rigid (and oddly polarized) notions about the perception of time in the Renaissance. Driver finds a Shakespeare who imaginatively embraces the 'Judea-Christian ordering of history' and sees in his art the fullest expression of 'the dramatic tradition of Christian culture'. Quinones turns the other way. He sees a Shakespeare reflecting the secularization of ideals that Burckhardt (called by Quinones 'our premier Renaissance historian') and others have found to characterize the Renaissance. Quinones focuses on Shakespeare's search for 'values of continuity' and argues 'that at the heart of the Shakespearean argument of time is the father-son link of generation'. 3. See V. A. Kolve, The Play called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966) pp. 57 -100; Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) pp. 54 -76; and chapters one and three of Peter Travis, Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 4. A Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian Religion, trans. Sir Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding (London, 1589) Sig. 16'. 5. Though obviously the Middle Ages do not suddenly give way to a suc­ ceeding era, new habits of mind and modes of perception do emerge, however fitfully, to justify our idea of the Renaissance. The idea of time provides one of the clearest and most important test cases, and the literature on the subject is appropriately substantial. In addition to Quinones's book, useful studies include G. F. Waller, The Strong Necessity of Time (The Hauge: Mouton, 1976); Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time, trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1956) pp. 3-18; Erwin Panofsky, 'Father Time', Studies in Iconology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939) pp. 69-94; Douglas Bush, Prefaces to Renaissance Literature (New York: Norton, 1965) pp. 65-90; Carlo Cipolla, Clocks and Culture 1300-1700 (London: Collins, 1967); S. K. Heninger, Jr., Touches of Sweet Harmony (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1974) pp. 201-37; David A. Roberts, 'Mystery to Mathe· 174 Notes 175 matics Flown: Time and Reality in the Renaissance', Centennial Review 19 (1975) 136-56; D. C. Muecke, 'Aspects of Baroque Time and The Revenger's Tragedy', in Shakespeare and Some Others, ed. Alan Brissenden (Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 1976) pp. 104-22; and Sarah Hutton, 'Some Renaissance Critiques of Aristotle's Theory of Time', Annals of Science 34 (1977) 345-63. 6. Others, of course, have chosen a different approach and have usefully examined the philosophical implications of Shakespeare's treatment of time. Fredrick Turner's Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) is primarily concerned with, in the words of the subtitle, 'Moral and Philosophical Themes in Some Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare'. See also Soji Iwasaki, The Sword and the Word (Tokyo: Shinszki Shorin, 1973) which, by way of Renaissance iconographical traditions, focuses on the idea of time in Richard Ill, Macbeth, and King Lear; Wylie Sypher's The Ethic of Time (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976), which relates Shakespeare's con· sciousness of time to the understanding of time 'in our current science, philo· sophy, and ethic'; and three essays by Zdenek Stribrny in consecutive numbers of Shakespearejahrbuch 110-12 (1974-6) on 'The Idea and Image of Time' in the early histories, 'Shakespeare's Second Historical Tetralogy', and Troilus and Cressida. 7. Ortega y Gasset suggestively considers the question of what makes a fiction 'capable of coping with present reality' in his Meditations on Don Quixote, trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Martin (New York: Norton, 1963) pp. 135ff. 8. Quoted in T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Five-Act Structure (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1947) p. 66. 9. Comeille et Ia dialectique du heros (Paris: Gallimard, 1963) p. 268. 10. The locus classicus for the distinction is, of course, Lessing's Laocoon ( 1766). Some of the critical implications of the issue are raised in Joseph Frank's well-known essay, 'Spatial Form in Modern Literature', first published in Sewanee Review 53 (1945) 221-40, 433-56, 643-53; and in the response to Frank's essay, including Walter Sutton's 'The Literary Image and the Reader', JAAC 16 (1957) 112-23; Jan Miel, 'Temporal Form in the Novel', MLN 84 (1969) 916-30; and three essays, including one by Frank himself, in vol. 4 (1977) of Cn'ticallnquiry. 11. Dramatic Structure (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) p. 25. 12. 'The Heresy of Plot', English Institute Essays, 1951, ed. Alan S. Downer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952) pp. 44-69. 13. The quoted phrases are from Dante's letter to Can Grande, though the distinction may be traced at least back to the fourth century and Evanthius' De Fabula. See Paul Wessner's introduction to Commentum Terenti, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1902-5). In the English Renaissance these were also the common terms of distinction. Consider Webbe's account in his Discourse of English Poetry (1586). There grewe at last to be a greater diuersitye betweene Tragedy wryters and Comedy wryters, the one expressing onely sorrowfull and lamentable Hystories, bringing in the persons of Gods and Goddesses, Kynges and Queenes, and great states, whose partes were cheefely to expresse most miserable calamities and dreadfull chaunces, which increased worse and 176 Notes worse, tyll they came to the most wofull plight that might be deuised. The Comedies, on the other side, were directed to a contrary ende, which, beginning doubtfully, drewe to some trouble or turmoyle, and by some lucky chaunce alwayes ended to the ioy and appeasement of all parties [Elizabethan Cn'tical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (1904; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1967) I, p. 249]. 14. See chapter three of Heinrich Wolflin, Princrples of Art History, first published in 1915 and first translated into English by M.D. Hottinger (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1932). 15. I hope it is clear that these are not evaluative but purely descriptive terms. A work is not intrinsically better for being either open or closed. Two essential studies of the nature and significance of artistic closure are Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Poetic Closure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968) and Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). 16. For one such examination see Frank Manuel, Shapes of Philosophical History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965). 17. Confessions, XI, 14, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore: Penguin, 1964) p. 264. Cf. Pascal's remark about 'time' in Opuscules: 'Qui le pourra definir.1 et pourquoi l'entreprendre, puisque tous les hommes, concoivent ce qu 'on veut dire en parlant de temps, sans qu 'on le designe davantage'. 18. The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1926) p. 122. 19. Confessions, XI, 20, p. 261. Similarly, Luther writes, 'What the philo­ sophers say is true: "The past is gone; the future has not yet arrived; therefore we have, of all time, only the now. The rest of time is not because it has either passed away or has not yet arrived"'. Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St Louis: Concordia, 1956) 13, 100-1. 20. Confessions, XI, 24, p. 272. 21. Confessions, XI, 27, p. 276. 22. Confessions, XI, 11, p. 261. 23. Quoted by Manuel, p. 8. 24. Driver, p. 7. Though I disagree with his conclusions, I have, in these last two paragraphs, made much use of Driver's discussion, pp. 6-8. 25. See David Riggs. Shakespeare's Heroical Histon·es (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) pp. 34-61. 26. Tillyard, p. 171. For similar views see Cairncross's introductions to the new Arden editions of the three Henry VI plays (London: Methuen, 1957, 1962, 1964); M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty (New York: StMartin's Press, 1961), pp. 165-206; and Irving Ribner's revised edition of The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1965) pp. 99-106. 27. Tillyard, p. 185. 28. A. L. French, 'Henry VI and the Ghost of Richard II', ES, 50 (1969), Anglo-American supplement, p. xxxvii; Brockbank, 'The Frame of Disorder: Henry VI', Early Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1961) p. 98. See also H. M. Richmond, Shakespeare's Political Plays (New York: Random House, 1967) p. 45; and James Winny, The Player King (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968) p. 20. 29. Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners, preface to The Chronicle of Froissart Notes 177 (London: David Nutt, 1901) p. 3. 30. The Union of the Two Noble Fam11ies of Lancaster and York (London, 1550, facsimile reprint, Menston, England: Scholar Press, 1970) Sig. D3• reign of Edward IV (reigns separately foliated). 31. Robert Ornstein also calls attention to the provisional context of the Hall quotation in his Kingdom for a Stage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972)p.16. 32. Hall, Sig. D3•. 33. Ed. Lily B. Campbell (1938; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960) p. 198. 34. The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) p. 113. 35. See A.