SOURCE: Toliver, Harold E. “Shakespeare and the Abyss of Time.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64, no. 2 (April 1965): 234-54.

In the following essay, Toliver follows Shakespeare's increasingly ambiguous and complex treatment of the theme of time from the sonnets and early comedies to the late romances. He calls particular attention to the dramatist's exploration of the effectiveness and limitations of different strategies of resisting time.

“For the Christian of the Middle Ages,” Georges Poulet writes in Studies in Human Time (New York, 1959), “the sense of his existence did not precede a sense of his continuance” (p. 3). His life was a journey, ideally an itinerarium mentis in deum, both a discovery of and return to the fountainhead of time and being: a discovery because he lacked complete knowledge of himself and of God; a return because his first father Adam had been “there” and the second Adam enabled him...