The Wide Gap of Sixteen Years: The Performance of Time in The Winter's Tale in Britain, 2001–2017

In common with other late plays in Shakespeare's career, The Winter's Tale contains a moment of ostentatious stagecraft, the appearance of the choric personification of Time. Similarly to the arrival of Jupiter riding on an eagle in Cymbeline, and the goddesses in the masque in The Tempest, Time provides a potentially spectacular moment that can be meaningful and striking in performance. As the narrow neck between the two halves of his emblematic hourglass, the scene at the beginning of the fourth act of The Winter's Tale marks a point of inflection in the play. Time himself embodies the seasonal transition between the Sicilian winter of the first half and the Bohemian spring of the second, marking the move from tragic conflict to the hope of a new beginning. But beyond its function as a structural device marking the elision of sixteen years, a number of scholars have pointed out, Time in this play embodies one of its primary concerns: in many ways, The Winter's Tale is a play about time and its effects. As Matthew D. Wagner has stated, "No other play [in the Shakespearian canon] comes across as so deeply concerned with temporality—thematically, structurally, imagistically, and performatively—as this one" (98–99). Soji Iwasaki even declared that, as a character, "Time, in fact, is responsible for the whole action of The Winter's Tale" (261). In this respect, Time and the brief scene in which he appears has been consistently used in modern productions to focus the audience's attention on this underlying central theme. As Susan Snyder and Deborah T. Curren-Aquino noted in their 2007 New Cambridge edition of the play, far from cutting the character out in performance, modern productions have shown "an increasingly ubiquitous Time [… as] the overarching teller of the tale" (38). In his 2010 Arden edition, John Pitcher summarized the stage history of the character in the twentieth century as follows: "On the modern stage Time has been played as a wizard, with planets and stars on his robe, as a stately octogenarian (a svelte version of the Shepherd), and as a traditional Father Time, the stooping figure on weather vanes" (81). The twenty-first century, however, seems to have drawn on the Renaissance iconography alluded to in the text only selectively. The common emblematic attributes recognizable to a London audience in the early years of the seventeenth century were clearly the scythe, the hourglass, and the wings.¹ Recent productions have shown that although the hourglass is still meaningful to modern audiences, the wings and the scythe are no longer generally recognizable. The traditional depiction of Time as some kind of wise old man has also become much less dominant, and modern directors have chosen to present the character in other guises, or to double or amalgamate it with other roles in the play. And, as the most recent productions have demonstrated, Time does not need to be male. In this essay, I will be examining the different ways in which eleven major British productions—by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, Propeller, Shakespeare's Globe, and Cheek by Jowl, among other companies—have chosen to present Time in the first years of this century. They demonstrate a range of varied and stimulating approaches to the centrality of the theme in performance by presenting Time in surprisingly creative ways. As the discussion will show, with one exception, these productions have all chosen to retain the scene, and some of them have turned it into a crucial moment of revelation. This effect has been particularly striking with respect to the use of meaningful doubling with other characters. Since Time's appearance is too brief to justify, generally, the deployment of a separate actor to play the part exclusively, the choice of which other roles to double Time with is significant. As these productions demonstrate, it is entirely different to assign the part to an actor playing a major role or to give it to someone from the supporting cast...