Harris 2009

Harris, Jonathan Gil. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Palimpsested Time: Toward a Theory of Untimely Matter

"national sovereignty model of temporality" -- "Although it licenses trade between different moments (allowing, say, the 'modern' to import elements from the 'early modern' and to export others to the 'postmodern'), it grants each moment a determining auuthority reminiscent of a nation-state's: that is, firmly policed borders and a shaping constitution. As a result, any historical phenomenon tends to be regarded as a citizen solely of one moment-state. And from the vantage point of the rpesent, the past becomes a foreign country, or rather several foreign countries." (2)

"'Time' can refer to a moment, period, or age -- the punctual date of chronology. Hence 'the time of Shakespeare' can be demarcated and numerically represented as a finite temporal block (1564-1616, or the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). But 'time' can also refer to an understanding of the temporal relations among past, present, and future. In this sense, 'the time of Shakespeare' is not a historical period but rather a conception, or several conceptions, of temporality." (3)

"Contrary to our either/or habits of local and universal reading, English Renaissance theorists of matter regard it as neither an age nor for all time. Rather, they see it as out of time with itself -- that is, as untimely. In the stone tablets of religious typology, the city walls of urban chorograpy, the compounded substances of vitalist philosophy, and the matter of the Shakespearean stage -- histrionic actors' bodies, malodorous special effects, and even trifling hand properties -- time is repeatedly, to use Hamlet's well-known phrase, out of joint." (4-5)