1In The Winter’s Tale (1611), Shakespeare’s only play featuring Time as a Choric speaker, the dramatist presents men and women who convey radically different conceptions of time. Leontes and Polixenes appear anxious about its passage, express their fear of aging, and tend to combat their awareness of the potential destructiveness of time by imaginatively regressing to childhood. They frequently count and measure the tick of the clock in terms of discrete moments and often tell, or narrate the events of their own histories by focusing on past and present concerns rather than future ones1. They appear aware of the metaphor, “time is money,” and discuss temporal matters in masculine terms of trade, commodities, and economics more generally2. The very title of Sir Francis Bacon’s The Masculine Birth of Time (1602), an unpublished philosophical treatise on natural science, similarly points to a larger cultural awareness of the gendering of time.

2In Shakespeare’s romance Hermione, Paulina, and Perdita, by contrast, focus to a larger extent on time as a composite, non-linear fusion of the past, present, and future and emphasize its cyclical, regenerative potential3. In some respects their feminine means of marking time bears resemblance to how rural folk do so in terms of the sun, moon, and stars and by attending to the calendar of seasonal festivities. On numerous occasions these women display “good timing” and dance or orchestrate events in accompaniment with lyrical or instrumental music linked to time through meter. Shakespeare’s unusual emphasis on the “good” that accompanies the passage of time and mutability for both sexes—healing, redemption, and recovery of some who were lost—largely differentiates this play from his Sonnet 12, “When I do count the clock that tells the time” in which he depicts Time with a scythe. Father Time is lacking this conventional prop in The Winter’s Tale4. In early modern England and Europe the history of ornamental clocks and watches typically owned, displayed, and worn by well-to-do men and women further contributes to the delineating of gender and class differences in relation to how individuals record, imagine, and embody time5.

3The conversation between Camillo and Archidamus in the first scene of The Winter’s Tale reveals that Leontes and Polixenes are alienated from the idyllic, pastoral landscape where they grew up as boys as a result of their positions as rulers of separate courts, adult factors that shape their masculine perceptions of time. Though they “were trained together in their childhoods,” their assuming of “mature dignities and royal necessities” at Sicilia and Bohemia requires “separation of their society” as well6. To compensate for the great gap of space between them Leontes and Polixenes shake “hands, as over a vast” and “interchange… gifts, letters, loving embassies” (1.1.28-307). Their movement away from the rural setting where they were boyhood friends parallels the growing distance from the natural world of early modern English merchants involved in the buying and selling of commodities in cities such as London8. With the rapid development of urban trade industrialists and tradesmen depended less directly on the working of the land for the accumulation of wealth or on what Jacques Le Goff describes as “the slow, cyclical rhythm of the seasons” often marked by annual, rural festivities9. Instead, money was becoming proportionate to the efficient and speedy use of time10. Urgency and the need for haste characterize this urbanized conception of time. In a number of comedies and history plays that Shakespeare wrote in the growing urban center of London characters often describe time as “swift,” compelling them to act with “haste11.”

4The opening dialogue between Leontes and Polixenes in the second scene of Act 1 of The Winter’s Tale indicates that they are attuned to and anxious about the swift passage of time. Polixenes conveys his awareness of the rapid ticking of the clock through his first gesture on stage of looking at this watch, so to speak. In his opening speech he reports that the shepherd has noted “nine changes of the watery star,” a phrase referring to the passage of nine months and the duration of his stay in Sicilia. In this courtly setting he measures time in rhetorical terms of the sky and stars as a rural shepherd would. He thereby refers indirectly to Hermione’s impending delivery and makes Leontes’ unjustified suspicion that his friend is the father of her unborn child logistically feasible:

Nine changes of the watery star hath been
The shepherd’s note since we have left our throne
Without a burden. Time as long again
Would be fill’d up, my brother, with our thanks;
And yet we should, for perpetuity,
Go hence in debt: and therefore, like a cipher
(Yet standing in rich place) I multiply
With one ‘We thank you’ many thousands moe
That go before it (1.2.1-8; my emphasis).

5As a long-term house guest, Polixenes describes the sense of obligation he feels for the hospitality he has received in Sicilia by using financial terms like “debt.” Similar to his boyhood friend, Leontes characterizes his offer of hospitality not as a gift with no strings attached but rather as a temporal, monetary transaction that eventually does demand reciprocation: “Stay your thanks a while,/And pay them when you part” (1.2.8-9). His request that Polixenes extend his visit in Sicilia is couched in rhetorical terms characteristic of those involved in a merchant economy based predominantly on the rapid buying, selling, or exchange of commodities. For such individuals the effective use of time can lead to financial gains and its misuse to financial losses.

6Leontes and Polixenes attempt to alleviate their sense of the urgency of time by counting days, weeks, and months, a means of imposing some kind of rational order, sequence, and control on events or things12. Like Polixenes, who enumerates the length of his stay in Sicilia in terms of the phrase “nine changes of the watery star,” Leontes entreats his friend to stay for seven more days and then bargains for half a week when he refuses:

Leontes: One seve’ night longer.
Polixenes: Very sooth, to-morrow.
Leontes: We’ll part the time between’s then and in that.
I’ll no gainsaying.
Polixenes: Press me not, beseech you, so (1.2.17-19).

7Leontes denotes the passage of time in largely mathematical terms; its duration can be assigned a numerical value like seven days and divided in half. Leontes’ and Polixenes’ heightened concern about time as illustrated by their counting days, weeks, and months are tied to their fears of their loss of youth and susceptibility to mortality.

8Leontes seeks relief from his burdensome sense of time by identifying narcissistically with Mamillius in an effort to restore his lost youth. Convinced that Hermione has committed adultery with Polixenes, he is comforted momentarily by the fact that he has produced a male heir and confesses, “Looking on the lines/Of my boy’s face, methoughts I did recoil/Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech’d” (1.2.153-155). Toward the end of the play he will further reflect on his and his wife’s vulnerability to aging, which Mamillius’ youthful face temporarily alleviates for Leontes at the beginning of the play, when he beholds her statuesque face, “Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing/So aged as this seems” (5.3.28-29). Throughout the play Leontes appears to equate the passage of time with danger and eventual destruction. In this way he resembled Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, whose final soliloquy is punctuated by the incessant striking of the clock reminding him of his impending damnation for all eternity in a hell mouth. The climax of Marlowe’s play includes haunting stage directions related to time such as “The clock strikes eleven,” “The Watch strikes,” and “The clock striketh twelve” and Faustus’ lament, “Oh, it strikes, it strikes13!” Shakespeare’s Richard II similarly refers to a clock when contemplating his own death in prison. He reminisces despondently, “I wasted time and now doth time waste me,/For now hath time made me his numb’ring clock.” In an elaborate conceit he compares the hammering “jar” and “bell” of the clock to his own “thoughts,” “sighs,” “tears,” and “groans” that “strike upon [his] heart” (5.5.49-51, 56-57). In this history play the tick of the clock thereby becomes a metaphor for torturous, plaguing memories of his misuse of time during his reign. In Doctor Faustus, Richard II, and The Winter’s Tale male figures often reflect about time in relation to their fears of death. In Shakespeare’s romance, however, the presence of children diminishes their masculine anxieties about time to an extent.

9Similar to Leontes, Polixenes finds his son rejuvenating and relieves his fears about the relentless passage of time leading to aging and death through memories of his own boyhood. Florizel, who is close in age to Mamillius, “cures in [his father]/Thoughts that would thick [his] blood” (1.2.170-171). Polixenes imaginatively regresses to childhood by recalling fondly that he and Leontes were “two lads that thought there was no more behind,/But such a day to-morrow as to-day,/And to be boy eternal” (63-65; my emphasis). As boys they were innocently unaware of time as an agent of change, aging, and death and assumed that what was “behind” or ahead of them was the same as “to-day.” They apparently lacked a conception of a past or future as different from the present moment and its current joys. In this seemingly paradisal, timeless setting the boys “were as twinn’d lambs” that exchanged “innocence for innocence” (67-69). Polixenes’ nostalgia for this prior golden age leads Hermione to exclaim, “By this we gather/You have tripp’d since.” He playfully attributes his and Leontes’fall from innocence to the “temptations” of their wives (75-77). Polixenes thereby implies that sexual maturity, carnal knowledge of women, and marriage prevent them from returning to this innocent, idyllic landscape. In the early modern period Eve and her eating of the fruit in the Garden of Eden are commonly associated with the advent of mortal time14. Likewise, a skull-shaped, hand-sized watch that Mary Queen of Scots supposedly received as a gift in 1587 featured an elaborate engraving of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden15. Their fall from grace leads to their loss of eternal youth. Yet in The Winter’s Tale Leontes and Polixenes attempt to recapture the fleeting, imaginary state of their own childhoods before they become aware of time as an agent of death in the stories about their youths that they tell themselves and others.

10In contrast to Leontes and Polixenes, who are business-like counters of time, Hermione conceives of time in cyclical, regenerative terms characteristic of the passage of the seasons. Her pregnant body ties her to creative, earthly matter and to the sustained process of natural growth over the course of several seasons. In the first half of the play Hermione is directly involved in the labor of producing a child for nine months. In the second half Leontes and Polixenes ultimately agree to the marriage (or exchange) of Florizel and Perdita as if their children were commodities useful for securing and uniting their estates in Sicilia and Bohemia. Hermione alludes to her figurative role as a producer rather than distributor or trafficker of domestic goods by playfully describing laboring wives and mothers as wage earners: “our praises are our wages” (94). Visually, the pregnant Queen embodies the future by reminding viewers both on and off the stage of her upcoming delivery. Unlike Leontes, who becomes obsessed with his immediate suspicion that Hermione is guilty of adultery, she values the present moment in light of its future potential. In this way the labor of pregnancy influences her relation to time in a positive sense. Her conception of time bears a number of similarities to that of laboring shepherds who note its passage according to the sun, moon, and stars in Bohemia. In Act IV of The Winter’s Tale the midsummer sheep-shearing feast is one of many community festivals that similarly mark the passage of time in seasonal, cyclical ways.

11Hermione’s imagining of time in terms of human relationships and her emphasis on a promising future because of children enable her to persuade Polixenes to remain in Sicilia after Leontes fails to do so by arguing “too coldly” (130). She shifts the discussion on stage from Leontes’ focus on counting and extending the length of his friend’s visit by a number of days to possible, familial reasons for Polixenes’ reluctance to stay: “To tell, he longs to see his son, were strong:/But let him say so then, and let him go” (34-35). She is the first speaker on stage to mention Florizel. Unlike Leontes, who offers myopically to “part,” or split a week with Polixenes after he refuses to stay “seve’night longer,” she encourages him to consider what his present investment of time in Sicilia will yield in the future (17). Rhetorically, Hermione is a shrewd investor and teaches Polixenes how to act as one as well. Asking him “to adventure/The borrow of a week,” she promises to grant Leontes her “commission/To let him there [in Bohemia] a month behind the gest/Prefix’d for’s parting” (1.2.38-42; my emphasis). Hermione’s “adventure” is tantamount to a financial risk or speculation because the loan of time she requests from Polixenes must be repaid by Leontes16. She assures Polixenes that the extra week he agrees to spend in Sicilia will multiply into the month by which Leontes will agree to extend his visit in Bohemia. The value of Polixenes’ time will thereby increase exponentially like the interest on a loan. In this way she teaches him the value of patience and how the typical business phrase “time is money” translates into his own gains in a personal, familial context. Hermione invests her time in the growth and maturation of her children and places her trust in future generations. Ironically, she echoes Leontes’ earlier suggestion that he and Polixenes “part the time” (18) by using the word “parting” in the above lines (42), a term that foreshadows the impending separation of close friends since childhood and the violent divorce of husband and wife.

12In contrast to Leontes and Polixenes, Hermione appears less compelled by the urgency of time and conveys a more leisurely attitude toward its passage in part because the gestation and nurturing of a child should not be rushed. Nevertheless, she is attuned not only to her biological clock but also to mechanical clocks that tick. As she exclaims to Leontes when comparing her affection for him to that of Polixenes’ wife for the King of Bohemia, “I love thee not a jar o’ th’ clock behind/What lady she her lord” (43-44). Although the Queen’s mentioning of clock-time in the context of affectionate human relationships grants it positive, rather than anxiety-ridden overtones, the word “jar,” meaning a “harsh inharmonious sound,” innocently anticipates marital discord17. Leontes’ jealousy that ultimately leads to his violent separation from Hermione intensifies when he watches her enter an Edenic garden with Polixenes. Her parting line addressed to Leontes, “If you will seek us,/We are yours i’ th’ garden” associates her with this setting in which such clandestine meetings or affairs frequently occurred18. Conversing with Camillo in a later scene, Leontes voices his fear that Hermione has betrayed him when he imagines her and Polixenes as lovers “skulking in corners?” and “wishing clocks more swift?/Hours, minutes? Noon, midnight?” (1.2.289-290). His mentioning of the mechanized clock in these hurried lines expressive of his fears of Hermione’s adulterous desires underscores the distance and alienation of his psyche from more regular, cyclical measurements of time such as the sun, moon, stars, and seasons. Leontes’ tyrannical rage also runs counter to the natural process of Hermione’s pregnancy by leading her to give birth prematurely. In the words of Michael Bristol his anger even threatens “derangement of the temporal and cosmological order19.”

13Paulina and Leontes’ advisors share Hermione’s capacity for retrospect and foresight that prevents Leontes’ paranoid obsession with present, false imaginings from destroying his family. Through rhetoric and the manipulation of time Paulina attempts to vindicate the chaste reputation of imprisoned Hermione. Contrary to the Second Lady’s hope that Hermione will deliver the infant in “good time” (2.1.20), Emilia reveals that the Queen has given birth “before her time” in prison (2.2.25). Leontes’ slanderous accusations endanger the newborn as well as Hermione and perversely disrupt a more natural sense of timing, order, and sequence. Paulina foresees that Leontes’ generation of a false rumor about Hermione will principally tarnish his reputation instead of hers: “tyranny… will ignoble make you,/Yea, scandalous to the world” (119-120). Yet she fails to anticipate that her presenting Perdita to the King will also jeopardize the infant. Leontes conveys his myopic, debilitating focus on the present moment wrenched apart from the past and future by ordering Antigonus, “take [the infant] hence/And see it instantly consum’d with fire… Take it up straight: Within this hour bring me word ’tis done” (2.3.132-135; my emphasis). His impulsive, manic style suggests that he is attempting to beat or outrun the deadly passage of time. His counselors, however, avoid disaster by entreating the King to reconsider this barbarous command in light of their past and future allegiance to him: “on our knees we beg/(As recompense of our dear services/Past and to come) that you do change this purpose” (148-149, 155). Their ability to foresee the long-lasting consequences of Leontes’ delusional jealousy frees Perdita from immediate harm. At the trial Hermione again conveys her capacities for retrospect and foresight when attempting to redeem the honorable, future reputations of herself and her children by exclaiming to Leontes,

You, my lord, best know
(Who least will seem to do so) my past life
Hath been as continent, as chaste, as true,
As I am now unhappy; which is more than
Than history can pattern, though devis’d
And play’d to take spectators (3.2.32-37).

14His rash inclination to forget that their personal history together was based on chastity and trust and his failure to imagine their future in similar terms indirectly results in the death of Mamillius.

15In Acts 1 and 4 of The Winter’s Tale a number of figures represent time in contrasting terms of loss, mutability, and the regenerative potential of human connections. In the first scene of the play Camillo and Archidamus mention a crutch, a common, iconographical feature of the figure of Time in the Renaissance20. Camillo reports with reference to Mamillius that “they that went on crutches ere he was born, desire yet their life to see him a man.” Archidamus replies in similar terms that “if the king had no son, they would desire to live on crutches till he had one” (1.1.39-40, 44-45; my emphasis). In the next scene Polixenes refers explicitly to time when he conveys his gratitude for Leontes’ hospitality by remarking, “Time as long again/Would be fill’d up, my brother, with our thanks” (1.2.3-4). In Act 4 Father Time has “wings” and a “glass,” referring to an hourglass, but lacks a scythe foreboding death or a crutch signifying old age to which Camillo and Archidamus refer earlier (1.1.4, 16). This Choric figure voices “both joy and terror… good and bad” and serves as a bridge between the two halves of the play that correlate approximately with the onsets of winter and summer (1-2). Mamillius’ ghost story appropriate for All Hallows in Act 2, the bear that devours Antigonus as he abandons the infant Perdita in Bohemia in Act 3 and that is evocative of those that emerge from their cave to eat evil men during Candlemas, and the sheep-shearing feast of midsummer in Act 4 similarly mark the passage of time in Shakespeare’s play. These seasonal activities emphasize either the desolation of winter or the full-fledged hope of summer. Their interlacing, however, serves as a reminder of continual change and rebirth21.

16Although Shakespeare often associates time with ruination, loss, and death in his Sonnets, the iconographic figure of Father Time in his later romance describes the past, present, and future in more positive terms suggestive of birth, regeneration, and growing strength22. As he states,

Impute it not a crime
To me, or my swift passage, that I slide
O’er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap, since it is in my power
To o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour
To plant and o’erwhelm custom (4.1.4-9; my emphasis).

17The words “growth,” “self-born,” and “plant” identify Time with the seasons of spring and summer that promise to regenerate and restore what was lost during fall and winter23. Shakespeare’s Father Time is further represented as a teller of a fruitful “tale” (14). His entreaty to the audience, “Your patience this allowing,/I turn my glass, and give my scene such growing/As you had slept between” identifies the development of the play itself and the commencement of its second half in particular with radical transformation and organic-like change (15-17). Time further states that “it is in [his] power/To o’erthrow law” and thereby implies that he is more powerful than any patriarch (7-8). Hermione, Paulina, and Perdita exhibit fortitude comparable to that of the figure of Time when they overcome the patriarchs Leontes’ and Polixenes’ impulsive rage at those they perceive as threats to their lineage. In Act 4 Polixenes serves as a reminder of unhinged Leontes in Act 1 when the King of Bohemia becomes outraged at Florizel for threatening to marry the shepherdess Perdita. Yet the women in the play ultimately triumph over the men by exhibiting conceptions of time that integrate successfully the past, present, and future.

18In Bohemia sixteen years after the initial eruption of Leontes’ jealousy Polixenes and Camillo visit the very shepherds who discover and adopt abandoned Perdita as an infant. Mirroring Leontes, whose opening dialogue with Polixenes includes monetary terms like “owes,” “pay,” and “debt” (1.1.7, 1.2.6, 9), Polixenes entreats Camillo to extend his stay in Bohemia with words containing economic nuances such as “business,” “manage,” and “profit” (4.2.14-19). Both Kings use financial discourse characteristic of those enmeshed in a market economy and describe human relationships in rhetorical terms appropriate for trading commodities. Similar to Leontes, who refers to hospitality as a service that can be bought and sold by suggesting that his childhood friend “pay” his thanks when he “part[s]” (1.2.10), Polixenes argues that he needs Camillo to “manage” his “businesses” and that his “profit” for doing so will be “heaping friendships,” or the accumulation of friendly services between them (4.2.14-15, 19-20). Polixenes’ entreaty is precipitated by Camillo’s voicing of his nostalgic wish to return “home,” the same desire the King of Bohemia expresses in Sicilia (1.2.165). As Don Wayne argues in his discussion of the country-house poem “To Penshurst,” such an “idealization of home… marks the beginning… of a self-conscious preoccupation with alienation in the modern world,” a term denoting “estrangement” in the seventeenth century24. In search of Polixenes’ estranged son Florizel, Polixenes and Camillo lessen their sense of alienation from a precapitalistic agrarian world in which time is largely perceived as cyclical and generative rather than linear and moving predominantly to an end by participating in a pastoral lyric interlude that occurs during an annual feast in Bohemia.

19Yet Autolycus’ “traffic” in “sheets” and his stealing of other “unconcerned trifles” in this country setting indicate that an idyllic, pastoral landscape free from such socioeconomic realities exists only in the mind (4.3.23-26). In such a business world—urban or rural—time is largely imagined as urgent and fleeting and connected to the specific goal of making money. Autolycus, for instance, capitalizes on the moment by stealing the Clown’s, Perdita’s adoptive brother’s money during their chance meeting on his way to buy food for the celebratory feast and by transforming the sheep-shearing festival into a lucrative occasion for peddling ballads25. In Bohemia the thieving peddler’s focus on making the most of present circumstances is tied to the larger, primitive calendar of annual feasts. In Sicilia, by contrast, Leontes’ obsession with his current suspicions of Hermione committing adultery is divorced from her past fidelity and any hope of her continued trustworthiness in the future. In contrast to Autolycus’ present interests, which are integrated into a larger temporal continuum, Leontes’ are not. As a result, his fears and anxieties about time become all the more destructive and deadly for Mamillius, who is sacrificed because of his father’s lack of faith in Hermione’s past and present deeds and their future together.

20In Act 4 the shepherds in Bohemia, a number of whom are duped by Autolycus, are attuned to a seasonal calendar of events punctuated by rounds of music, circular morris dances, lyrical rhetoric, and narrative or dramatic accounts of the past. In this country setting during the blooming summer season various figures exhibit relatively positive conceptions of time that emphasize the cyclical regeneration of what was lost during winter. The Old Shepherd who adopts Perdita circumvents the obliterating passage of time through narrative by recounting how his deceased wife danced “o’ th’ table” during the sheep-shearing feast (4.4.59). In early modern culture this feast was held during midsummer and included rustic performances that Perdita describes as “Whitsun pastorals” (134). In England Whitsuntide was also well-known for its popular May-games and Robin Hood plays26. The Old Shepherd’s lively tale about this festival season perpetuates his wife’s memory and even Hermione’s. His description of his wife’s “face o’ fire/With labour” recalls the Queen of Sicilia’s reported delivery of her daughter in prison (60-61). Like her adoptive father, Perdita unintentionally evokes memories of an absent figure, in this case Hermione, by mentioning the “carnation” during her famous lyrical apostrophe to Proserpina. This flower is evocative of Ceres, the mother of the mythical figure of the daughter Proserpina with whom the shepherdess intuitively identifies27. Although Perdita is an infant when Leontes brands her a “bastard” (2.3.73), she inadvertently refutes his accusation by refusing to plant “carnations” or “streak’d gillyvors,/Which some call nature’s bastards” in her garden (4.4.83-84). The shepherdess thus distances herself from the potentially incriminating nuances of carnations and gillyvors, which were commonly associated with unchastity28. In this way Perdita unknowingly redeems Hermione’s as well as her own reputation from mistaken blame29.

21During Perdita’s apostrophe to Proserpina, she verbally creates an array of emblematic spring flowers missing from her garden in early summer and thereby counters the destructive power of time through lyric. In the words of Paul Alpers, the shepherdess is “so successful that some critics mistakenly think that this scene takes place in springtime30.” Prior to this interlude, Perdita distributes flowers befitting the ages of all her guests except Florizel. The shepherdess’ apostrophe is occasioned by her “lack” of spring flowers to present to him (4.4.127). Like her adoptive father’s narrative about his absent wife, her lyric successfully recreates what is mutable and prone to decay over the passage of time. Although the shepherdess lacks the “flowers o’ th’ spring, that might/Become [Florizel’s] time of day,” they become clearly visible to the mind’s eye during her Catalogue of Flowers (114):

… O Proserpina,
For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let’st fall
From Dis’s waggon! daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength (a malady
Most incident to maids): bold oxlips and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The flower-de-luce being one. O, these I lack,
To make you garlands of; and my sweet friend,
To strew him o’er and o’er! (4.4.116-129).

22Through this lyrical tableau Perdita unintentionally recovers spots of time—Leontes’ slandering of Hermione and the shepherdess’ own loss of her birthright—from her personal history. During her dialogue with Florixel, Polixenes, and Camillo, all seasons and thus all times are simultaneously present.

23Perdita’s imaginary flowers of spring memorialize past events and anticipate future happenings. Her inclusion of the flower the “crown imperial,” for instance, foreshadows her reclaiming of her birthright when she and Florizel arrive in Sicilia in Act 5. Like Hermione, who inquires about Polixenes’ childhood friendship with Leontes in Act 1; reminds her husband of their personal history based on trust during the trial in Act 3; and believes that her own and her offspring’s reputation will be exonerated (3.2.43-45); Perdita similarly moves backward and forward in time with ease during her lyrical apostrophe. Though unwittingly, the shepherdess alludes to her separation from her mother and foretells their reunion at the end of the play. She centers her apostrophe on Proserpina, who is torn away from Ceres by the figure of Dis much as Perdita and Hermione are alienated from one another by Leontes.

24In The Winter’s Tale, the title of which refers to a feminine kind of narrative, women from upper or lower ranks and courtly or country backgrounds tend to exhibit a positive view of time as potentially equitable. Trusting that a rejuvenating spring and summer will follow the harshness of fall and winter, Hermione and Perdita avoid the sense of an ending and fears of mortality that plague Leontes and Polixenes as these male figures become consumed by anxieties about the futures of their aristocratic lineages. As evidence of their plaguing concerns, Leontes doubts his own paternity of Perdita in Act I, and Polixenes fears that Prince Florizel is preparing to marry a shepherdess in Act IV. Telling time by the cyclical movements of the sun and moon and by the annual progression of the seasons tends to expose the artificiality of such apparent differences of rank that the King of Bohemia attempts to maintain by controlling whom his son marries. As Perdita exclaims immediately before Polixenes threatens her for daring to marry Florizel, “I was about to speak, and tell him plainly,/The selfsame sun that shines upon his court/Hides not his visage from our cottage, but/Looks on alike” (4.4.444-447). Like Hermione and Perdita, the shepherdess Mopsa during the communal, sheepshearing festival associates “time” with what is equitable and “good,” in this case the pleasing quality of music that keeps time rhythmically. When she strikes up the music during the sheep-shearing feast, she orders the morris dancers, “Now in good time” (16531). Their circular morris dance is emblematic of Hermione’s, Perdita’s, and Paulina’s regenerative conceptions of time that envision alternatives to finite endings and the diminishing of gender and class oppression.

25In Act 5 Hermione, who patiently anticipates her ultimate reunion with Perdita for sixteen years, exhibits a feminine conception of time that breaks away from the dominant masculine model in Act 1. In contrast to Leontes, who largely conceives of time in negative terms of loss and who is paralyzed by his fears of aging and mortality, she is attuned to “cosmic time,” which Julia Kristeva characterizes as an endless repetition of the natural cycles32. Such a cyclical, seasonal view of time enables the Queen, who apparently “ended” when Perdita “but began,” to see beyond the potential rupture of her matriarchal lineage and to envision the return of her daughter to Sicilia (5.3.45). Music and good timing ultimately liberate Hermione from her feigned confinement in stone and reunite her with her family. As Paulina commands, “Music, awake her; strike!/’Tis time; descend; be stone no more” (98-99). Hermione’s Easter-like resurrection and reunion with Perdita defy reason and are as marvelous and unbelievable as “an old [wive’s] tale” (117). This fantastic tale set to music necessitates faith and illustrates that science and mathematics (and empirical knowledge like numerical counting) fail to account completely and adequately for such mystical happenings in the play. Although Leontes “saw” Hermione “as [he] thought, dead,” the inexplicable fact that she is now living awakens his “faith” in what he cannot see, count, or measure (95, 139-140). He entreats “good Paulina” to

Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely
Each one demand, and answer to his part
Perform’d in this wide gap of time, since first
We were dissever’d: hastily lead away (152-155; my emphasis).

26Leontes’ use of the contrasting adjectives “leisurely” and “hastily” suggests that by the end of the play he has arrived at a relatively new understanding of time that yokes in an androgynous fashion masculine and feminine conceptions of it. His term “leisurely,” which is characteristic of Hermione’s view of time while awaiting the birth of her second child, once combined with his phrase “each one demand” is indicative of his renewed faith in the redemptive power of affectionate dialogue between individuals. This lengthy, but worthwhile endeavor often involves patience tantamount to Hermione’s33. Leontes also conveys his continued awareness of the swift passage of time to which he now responds with constructive rather than destructive action. His insistence that the company “hastily lead away” exhibits his appreciation for the brevity of life and his mature understanding that after the loss of such a “wide gap of time,” they should not waste another moment.

27The early modern history of ornamental clocks and watches similarly reveals an acute cultural awareness about time and mutability that emerged toward the end of the reign of Elizabeth I, who lacked an heir, and continued through the accession of James I and beyond. Attesting to Queen Elizabeth’s keen interest in timepieces, she possessed a large collection of clocks and watches that she had received as gifts and even had a clockmaker to keep them running smoothly34. The relatively new practice of wearing wrist watches or clocks on pendants suspended from the neck on a cord or chain further emphasized the sensitivity of rulers and their subjects to time because of the proximity of these miniature clocks to the body35. Most notably, Elizabeth I wore a watch contained in a finger-ring that had a small prong that came out and pricked her finger as an alarm warning her about the passage of time leading to old age and death. Other fashionable, miniature watches included one placed in the hilt of a dagger for which Francis I of France paid an exorbitant sum for two in 1518. These sixteenth-century watches made in France and Germany were obviously owned and purchased by a select few and exhibited the conspicuous consumption of luxury items by royalty and the aristocracy36. Although the first English-made watches are dated after 1600, the clock-making industry in London developed speedily and was so vigorous that by 1631 the Clockmakers’ Company was founded37.

28Early modern clocks and watches exhibit distinctive gender and class resonances and are sometimes expressive of how differently those in the city or country mark time. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England women frequently embodied time38. Elizabeth I, for instance, associates herself with the allegorical concept of Time in a pageant39. She not only owned a number of timepieces but in this case becomes one. Among those she owned was a gold watch with the enameling entitled “History of Time” and another with her picture in it40. A number of ornate watches during this period in England and Europe exhibit human figures that were most commonly eroticized female nudes41. A pocket watch fashioned in 1613 by P. Combret à Lyons features a group of mythological nude women pursued by men. This watch not only strikes the hours but also includes the phases of the moon and signs of the zodiac42. A Swiss pocket watch from the nineteenth century similarly contains a pornographic picture of a tonsured priest making love to a woman that was hidden behind a spring-hinged flap above the time-telling dial of the watch43. As this pocket watch illustrates, men commonly kept time secretly in their pockets. After 1660, ornamental watches worn as jewelry were largely intended for display by women44.

29In early modern culture ornamental, erotic, and leisurely forms of time are often feminized, whereas notions of business, haste, and time-efficiency are frequently masculinized45. Interestingly, this relatively new kind of businessman who tended to equate time with money was prominent north of the Alps where the clock industry originated during the fourteenth century. By the sixteenth century in Europe those who wore watches were typically Northern European and Protestant and associated with an urban, business lifestyle46. City clocks such as the one built on the Rialto in Venice, which featured a cock that crowed three times an hour and that regulated the busy marketplace, contributed to the linking of time and money for urban merchants47. These various horological inventions—finger watches with pricking alarms, ornamental clocks and pocket watches, and city bells—reflected how differently men and women of various ranks and professions in cities and in the country measured and experienced time. During the early modern period, such time machines owned by individuals were beginning to compete with and even replace natural measurements of passing moments such as the sun, moon, stars and seasons for some middle-and upper ranking individuals who could afford to buy these luxurious works of art48. The ornate, skull-shaped, hand-sized watch owned by Mary Queen of Scots that featured Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden probably occupied a stationary place on the prie-dieu, or private altar in a small oratory, transforming it into an object of worship49. Other expensive, oftentimes large time pieces designated as a “table clock” and “English house clock” were similarly intended to be placed in private, interior settings50. Because of the growing portability and miniaturization of time pieces such as a “traveling or coach clock,” the well-to-do who were once dependent on the toll of church bells or the public clock in the town square now had clocks at home, on their wrists, or in their pockets, resulting in the privatization and personalizing of time during an age of increasing individualism and mechanization. As signs of prosperity minute watches thereby became private property for a growing number of relatively wealthy individuals51.

30Shakespeare not only alludes to clocks and watches throughout his plays and poems but also responds with melancholy to the cultural loss of more rural temporal markers such as the midsummer sheep-shearing feast in Act IV of The Winter’s Tale52. It is not surprising that mechanized clocks that were often emblems of temperance, a word that derives from the Latin word tempus, are frequently missing during this kind of excessive feast53. In many respects these country festivities that incorporated the community as a whole in a somewhat egalitarian fashion were diminishing as a result of the rise of Protestant individualism in more urban environments. Ironically, portable clocks and watches, though convenient, carried with them greater enforcement of gender, class, and occupational differences than did more neutral, cosmic, seasonal temporal markers. In The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare anticipates the loss of communal festivities and their accompanying vision of equity through the longings of both Leontes and Polixenes for the idyllic pleasures of their boyhoods in an ideal, rural landscape before they were plagued by the urgency of clock time. As adults their abilities to recount their own histories in narratives akin to winter’s tales commonly told by women are their only imaginative pathways back to timeless Eden.