The sense of time in Spenser and Shakespeare: 'The Faerie Queene', 'Macbeth' and 'Hamlet', 'The Winter's Tale' and 'The Tempest'

This dissertation is a comparative study of the human consciousness of time in Spenser's romance epic The Faerie Queene and Shakespearean tragedy in Macbeth and Hamlet and romance in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. Though time consciousness became a thematic concern of philosophy in the twentieth century, both Spenser and Shakespeare had been poets deeply and consistently concerned with time in the Renaissance. Three temporal categories are established: the linear existential, the cyclical, and the providential. These three senses of time are then used to analyze temporality as it is expressed through metric, plot, and metaphor. Both Spenser and Shakespeare use verse form, genre, and thematic and figurative language as means to create a temporal music, in which the linear existential, the cyclical, and the providential senses of time are variably muted or accentuated, relative to one another. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser accentuates the cyclical and providential, while muting the linear existential sense of time. In contrast, Shakespeare mutes the providential, while accentuating the linear existential in tragedy and both the linear existential and cyclical senses of time in romance. As a consequence, Spenserian time is Christian in its sensibility, while Shakespearean time is more Greco-Roman.