Setting the Time Right in Shakespeare’s Denmark

This essay looks at Hamlet’s obligation to set the time right in relation to the religious divisions in England and Europe and the related transition from the mediaeval to the modern world. In particular, it explores the relevance to the play’s interest in temporal indicators of the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, which left Protestant England out of step with Catholic Europe for some 150 years. More generally, the essay considers the significance of the movement between the literal and the metaphorical, present and past, in the play’s treatment of time, relating this to the ‘regressive’ experience associated with Hamlet himself.