Time in The Winter’s Tale

As we enter Act IV of the play, we get something that’s very reminiscent of the Prologue in both Henry V & Troilus and Cressida.  This one seemed more like the Prologue in Henry V, as it is asking for the audience’s suspension of disbelief and is somewhat apologizing to the audience for something that may seem jarring or confusing.  The Prologue here is called simply “Time”, leading me to wonder how Shakespeare would have costumed the man playing this role.  In one of the essays in the back of our Signet edition, Sylvan Barnet claims that in one production, the man who played the bear in 3.3 came out again at this time and revealed himself to be Time.  

I thought the use of Time here as a personification was very smart on Shakespeare’s part; there are very few Shakespearean plays in which he has a passage of time like this, and therefore the audience would not be expecting it, and may have had a hard time if all of a sudden Perdita was onstage as a teenager with no explanation.  I took a screenplay writing class a few semesters ago in which we spent a long time (no pun intended) on this issue of time passage.  You can show a clock speeding up, you can show the seasons changing, you can show someone rapidly aging – but that’s all on camera.  Showing time passage onstage is a very tricky matter and I think the use of Time here works well.