Amid Shakespeare’s vast repertoire of plays, one of my favorites will alwaytimes be The Winter’s Tale due to how schizophrenic and genre-bending it appears. For most of the play, anxiety, superstition, and the internal sufferings of King Leontes’ crumbling patriarchy eat away at his psychological state. He suffers the death of his son and condemns the newborn Perdita to be given to the wilderness simply due to his baseless suspicions that she is the byproduct of his wife’s adultery. Despite this horrifying depiction of insanity consuming the play, The Winter’s Tale ends like any typical early-modern comedy. Leontes is reunited with his wife, Hermione (who suffered the death of her son, public humiliation, sixteen years in isolation, and separation from her daughter due to his bit of hysteria and misogynistic insecurity. So obviously he deserves a second chance). Meanwhile, various other marriages occur at the end of the play that really seem to trivialize and make a mockery of the kind of suffering that heavily consumed acts 1 through 3.

But there’s one other force in The Winter’s Tale that occurs with great frequency, which is the main focus of this piece: the simultaneously abstract yet physical appearance of Time, materializing before the audience in the beginning of act 4.

We all have our quirks. Little things that weigh heavily on our soul. I’m very much a slave to time. I’ve been called punctual, prepared, organized, respectful, all words with a very positive connotation, yet this neurotic tick of mine has kept me on the move since I was a child. I arrive everywhere I go hours early. Not because I need to, but because my mind allows no other option. I remember pacing the block time and time again before going to hang out with friends as a kid, afraid of arriving too early and being a nuisance to those around me. I found a sense of comfort when reading The Winter’s Tale, as Time himself says “I that please some, try all; both joy and terror/Of good and bad; that makes and unfolds error,” (act 4 scene 1 1-3). Shakespeare presents time as this complex figure that bounces between being a beneficial or harmful force in our lives. Time comes for us and sometimes the fear, the anxiety, and the worry of our obsolescence is so great that it drives us to do incredibly foolish things. Maybe that’s why Leontes gave into his jealous superstitions?

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Do I believe it validates his actions? Far from it, but I find his struggles incredibly relatable. Even in the present day, we’re worried about missing out on something because of how little time we often have.

In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare transforms Time into a character to aid in the telling of his tale. In the closing scene, Hermione returns and Paulina says, “Music; awake her; strike!/ ‘Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more” (act 5 scene 3 100-01). Shakespeare creates two worlds within the play; Sicilia, which becomes trapped in a sixteen-year stasis and Bohemia, which becomes a kind of pastoral playground for Perdita and Florizel to age, reach adulthood, and soon enough, fall in love. Shakespeare’s characters no longer become limited to their anxieties as Time itself bends to the playwright’s will.

Imagine what it’d be like to capture Time in a bottle and have him at your beck and call. Maybe then we wouldn’t be so afraid of what our futures hold. Maybe then I wouldn’t feel the need to pace the block three times over because I’m so nervous about being late. Maybe I’d be able to sleep past six-thirty in the morning because I went to bed very late and without sleep, I’m near useless. If I could command Time, I’d get all the sleep in the world. I’d never be late because it wouldn’t be weird to arrive early because I’d be the one to decide what early was. But Time is not a character in a play for us to ask for favors.

Sometimes, we’re so caught up in our futures that we miss out on moments. Suddenly sixteen years flash before our eyes and we’re sitting there dumbfounded and suddenly struck with what the real world has to offer. Paulina says it best herself in her final lines of the play, “There’s time enough for that,/Lest they desire upon this push to trouble/Your joys with like relation” (act 5 scene 3 129-31). It’s a kind of reassurance, I feel. A comfort that I’ve taken great pleasure in. The sense that even though we cannot shackle the ethereal figure of Time as Shakespeare does in The Winter’s Tale, we do not have to be afraid of letting the time slip through our fingers. Because there will always be time for joy in our lives. What you can do is not take for granted those joyous moments as Leontes does in the last line of the play as the characters are, “Hastily lead away” (act 5 scene 3 156). We’d be fools to follow in Leontes’ footsteps and repeat our mistakes, as nobody will fault us for getting a bit stuck in time considering the chaotic lives we all live.

~ Christopher LaSasso