Discourse and time in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Abstract

This article explores different verbal resources for the representation of time in drama. Drama as a genre is subjected to different pressures of time, given that the fictional time spans in the dramatic world must be realized within the real time allocated to a performance, a context which a dramatic text necessarily addresses. The temporal scope of plays can be highly expanded or contracted, but whatever option is used in a play, it is the result of the strategic exploitation of different resources. Theatre provides non-verbal means, like lighting and décor, but verbal resources are more dynamic. The verbal dialogue enacts speech events, and speech events are tied to spatio-temporal contexts, which can be transformed via speech use. The article examines various verbal resources like deixis, tense and aspect, lexical choices in clock and calendrical references, and pragmatics in order to explore their productive functions in constructing the complex and dynamic temporal world of one play, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.