explained as a mere stage-illusion of time, if Shakespeare had required such a stage-illusion, or if he had not dated the events throughout with more exactness than the stage requires. In Painter the Friar directs Juliet to drink the potion "the night before your marriage or in the morning before day"; in Brooke, "on thy marriage day before the sun do clear the sky." Can Shakespeare at one time have intended that Juliet's soliloquy should represent the passions of a whole night, and that she should not swallow the opiate until a short time before the Nurse came to rouse her in order that she should prepare for the marriage ceremony? And was she to return to consciousness in the first glimmering of a July dawn, as soon after midnight as that might be, on the morning of Friday? The theory is in many ways unsatisfactory, but the mere passage of hours during a soliloquy need not present a difficulty to the student of Shakespeare. In Cymbeline it is midnight when Imogen is seized by sleep; Iachimo comes from the trunk, soliloquises, and the clock strikes three. Yet it can hardly be supposed that Shakespeare ever intended that Juliet should conjure up the vision of the slaughtered Tybalt in the full light of morning. Perhaps the simplest explanation of the difficulty is to admit that it was never meant to be explained; forty-two hours gave an air of precision and verisimilitude to the Friar's arrangement; it sufficed to cover two periods of night preceding two Italian summer dawns; and the dramatist knew that spectators in the theatre do not regulate their imagination by a chronometer.
Unlike the play of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet has
