Teenage Time in Romeo and Juliet Ellen MacKay, R & J 1, 7/19/14

1. Teenage Time in Romeo and Juliet Ellen MacKay, R & J 1, 7/19/14

2. Defining Our Terms TEENAGER [OED] Loosely, an adolescent. (1941) 1980   Times Lit. Suppl. 15 Aug. 908/1   Teenagers, of course, had not been invented in the 1880s. [In the print record of 1570 to 1640, “Adolescent” is very seldom used, “youth” very frequently but without any chronometric particularity]

3. The consensus of scholars is that while there were some expressions of solidarity or fraternity that united some types of early modern English youth, especially the male apprentices of London, adolescence went unmarked as a universal condition or stage in life. • ‘youth culture’ in its apprentice form: • Apprentice Riots, especially the one that brought down the Phoenix Theatre on Shrove Tuesday in 1617; • the culture of fraternal fun and license modeled on folklorized figures like Dick Whittington and Simon Eyre, medieval mayors of London. Thomas Fleet, “Dick Whittington and his Cat [?],” in a 1770 chapbook from the Boston Public Library.

4. JUST TO REPEAT: In Shakespeare’s moment, the adolescent is not a distinct type. Archie Comics originate the same year as the coinage of the term “teenager”: 1941.

5. OBSERVATION 1: AND YET IT IS A STATE THAT SHAKESPEARE SEEMS TO NOTICE AND RICHLY DRAMATIZE Sandro di Mariano Filipepi, known as Botticelli, Portrait of a Youth, 1483, National Gallery, Washington DC MALVOLIO: Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy—as a squash is before ’tis a peascod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple. ’Tis with him in standing water, between boy and man. He is very well-favored, and he speaks very shrewishly. One would think his mother’s milk were scarce out of him. (1.5.155-160)

6. TIME a. A finite extent or stretch of continued existence, as the interval separating two successive events or actions, or the period during which an action, condition, or state continues; a finite portion of time (in its infinite sense: see sense A. 34a); a period.

7. STRUCTURES AND FIGURES OF TIME IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS

8. FORTUNE’S WHEEL (Cyclical Time) Petrarch, De remediisutriusquefortunae. 1523. Courtesy of LUNA.

9. ROSENCRANTZ: The cesse of majesty Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw What's near it with it. It is a massy wheel, Fix'don the summit of the highest mount, To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortis'd and adjoin'd; which when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boist'rous ruin. (HAMLET 3.3.116-23)

10. FAMILY TREE (Successive, Linear, Genealogical Time) John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie, 1586, Courtesy of LUNA

11. EXETER: He sends you this most memorable line, In every branch truly demonstrative; Willing to overlook this pedigree: And when you find him evenly derived From his most famed of famous ancestors, Edward the Third, he bids you then resign Your crown and kingdom, indirectly held From him the native and true challenger. (HENRY V 2.2.95-101)

12. The Monument (Enduring Time) EneaVico, The Lives of the Empresses of Rome, 1557.

13. The Monument (Enduring Time) Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read, And tongues to be your being shall rehearse When all the breathers of this world are dead (Sonnet 81) VIOLA: She sat like Patience on a monument, Smiling at grief. (2.5.126-7) EneaVico, The Lives of the Empresses of Rome, 1557.

14. The Broken Monument (the End of Earthly Time) JeronimusWierix, “Ruin,” Antwerp, 1577 Courtesy of LUNA.

15. PROSPERO These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air; And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. (THE TEMPEST, 4.1.165-173) Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time. (Sonnet 55)

16. TIMEI, that please some, try all, both joy and terror Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error, Now take upon me, in the name of Time, To use my wings. (WINTER’S TALE, 4.CHORUS, 1-4) TIME PERSONIFIED TIME THE SEASONS Philippe Galle print of Martin van Heemskerk’s series of illustrations of Petrarch’s Triomfi, 1565, reissued in 1638.

17. Depicting Time in Shakespeare’s moment: A BROADER VIEW

18. Memento Mori (death is the universal future; “the readiness is all”) CornelisNorbertusGijsbrechts, Momento Mori, 1659

19. English pendant, circa 1540-1550. Ring with plaited hair and enamel, 17th century. Slide (worn on a ribbon), ca. 1640. Enamel and gold.

20. Vanitas (the ephemerality of earthly pleasures) Hans Memling, center front panel from Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation, c. 1485, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

21. Vanitas Herman Henstenburgh, VanitasStill Life, 1670s, Metropolitan Museum of Art

22. STILL LIFE (time’s hiatus) Balthasar van der Ast (c. 1593-1657), Basket of Fruits (1622)

23. TEMPORAL FRAMEWORKS Wenceslas Hollar, from his imprint of Holbein’s Dance of Death, 1651 (Death as a fraternity to which we all are pledged)

24. Rogier van Weyden, outside panels of the Braque family triptych, c. 1452

25. Perspective (one temporality in oblique relation to another) Hans Holbein, “The Ambassadors,” 1553, National Gallery, London.