SOURCE: Westerweel, Bart. “The Dialogic Imagination: The European Discovery of Time and Shakespeare's Mature Comedies.” In Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice, edited by Jean R. Brink and William F. Gentrup, pp. 54-74. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Westerweel employs Mikhail Bakhtin's theoretical model of the chronotope (literally “time-space”) to analyze temporal and spatial concepts in Twelfth Night and, to a lesser degree, in As You Like It. Westerweel identifies a variety of time-space relationships in these two comedies that help define mood and genre, but his primary emphasis is on the distinctive chronotopes of each of the characters in these plays.

The aspect of time in Shakespeare's work has received much critical attention. Book-length studies of several kinds have been devoted to the subject in recent years: to its philosophical ramifications (Turner), to its comparative context (Quinones), to its function in the structure of...