“Call back yesterday”: Time-traveling Shakespeare

Theaters are time machines, and William Shakespeare knew it.

Only in the theater can people so persuasively journey from the present to another time and place. It’s an act of collective imagination, shared between audience and performer, in which we get to experience what it must have been like in different historical periods by watching the behavior of characters onstage. Shakespeare explains this dynamic brilliantly when the Chorus calls upon the audience to use its “imaginary forces” in the opening speech of Henry V:

Time telescopes in the theater, expanding and collapsing through the combined efforts of artists and audience. The Chorus returns at the top of Act Two to emphasize repeatedly that these historical events are happening “now,” not in some imaginary past, but right now in this present moment. And the effort of remaining in this time and place requires constant maintenance and mental diligence, as the Chorus pleads with us to “Still be kind, / and eke out our performance with your mind.”

Later in Henry V, the Chorus praises our efforts, saying, “Thus with imagined wing our swift scene flies” Shakespeare extends and personifies the notion that “time flies” by making Time an actual character in The Winter’s Tale. “Now, take upon me,” Time says, “to use my wings” to “slide” the audience over the “sixteen years” time jump between the end of Act Three and beginning of Act Four. Back when this field of science was known only as natural philosophy, Shakespeare knew that within the confines of the theater, Time has the “power to/ To o’erthrow [the] law” of physics to travel over a decade and a half in the course of a scene change.

These Shakespearean conceits actually show up in three of my favorite time travel novels. Both Jack Finney’s Time and Again and Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return (which became the film Somewhere in Time) feature protagonists who journey back to the past via a kind of self-hypnosis, the same imaginative concentration we use in the theater. (In fact, the title of Matheson’s novel is drawn from Shakespeare’s Richard II, in which a character longs for his own return to the past when he says, “O, call back yesterday, bid time return.”) Though the time travel in Stephen King’s 11/22/63 is accomplished via a sci-fi portal into the past, King borrows Shakespeare’s trick of personifying time, not as an expository character as in The Winter’s Tale, but—what else—a malevolent force that fights back against the hero’s attempt to rewrite history.

Shakespeare didn’t just understand theater’s power to journey to the past, he also seems strangely knowledgeable about the future. It’s not simply that he wrote in Antony and Cleopatra that the Egyptian queen envisioned a time in which she’d be portrayed onstage by an inadequate boy actor (“I shall see some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness”). In his sonnets particularly, Shakespeare understood that though time can destroy—youth fades, relationships wither, and legacies disappear—the timelessness of his verse provides a kind of immortality. In Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”), Shakespeare writes that his recipient’s “gold complexion” beauty and “eternal summer shall not fade” thanks to the “eternal lines” of this sonnet. “So long lives this,” he concludes in the final couplet, “and this [sonnet] gives life to thee.” He continues this idea in Sonnet 81, assuring the recipient that long after he’s “forgotten,” his beloved’s “name from hence immortal life shall have” by the power of his writing. “You still shall live,” Shakespeare concludes, because “such virtue hath my pen.”

Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson was on to something when he wrote that his friend and rival was “not of an age, but for all time.” In Reduced Shakespeare: The Complete Guide for the Attention-Impaired (abridged), I went further, explaining that Shakespeare’s sonnets—revelatory in so many ways—also proved that Shakespeare was a time traveler from the distant future (which could also explain why we’ve never found any of his personal papers or literary manuscripts in his own hand save a few collaborative pages from Sir Thomas More). That’s probably not true, nor is the recent social media speculation that Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway are both time travelers, but whatever it is—the time machine capabilities of theater, the timelessness of his verse, or his not-at-all-speculative-or-silly identity as a time traveler—Shakespeare will outlive us all.