Regulating Time and the Self in Shakespearean Drama

In early modern England, how normal is the idea that individuals can manage their time—the idea that time belongs exclusively to them? Does Shakespeare’s drama stage and circulate this idea? Recent critical and cultural turns highlight the importance of these questions, which ask for a re-evaluation of our history of self-regulation. As has been widely acknowledged, early modernity proved a crucible for the dissemination of the idea of individual, controllable time. In attending to both time’s subjectivity and its dependence on larger social expectations, this chapter departs from, and contests, recent conclusions about time’s subjectivity in Shakespeare by examining the relationship between Shakespeare’s keen interest in personal temporal experience and the social norms he associates with that experience.