Hamlet's "Moderate Haste" and the Time of Speech
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Abstract
Hamlet's "Moderate Haste" and the Time of Speech Thomas Ward People with a normal sense of time can count "one, two, three, four, five" systematically. I, on the other hand, would count out five as "one, two, threefourfive."1 —Marty Jezer When asked by Prince Hamlet how long the ghost of his father "[s]tayed" before disappearing into the Danish night, Horatio estimates that it was "[w]hile one with moderate haste might tell a hundred": the length of time, that is, that it would take to count to one hundred at a normal rate.2 Horatio's time estimate is followed by a brief hiatus in his story as Barnardo and Marcellus dispute the accuracy of his timekeeping: they both claim it was "[l]onger, longer," to which Horatio replies, "Not when I saw't" (1.2.237–8). In the midst of the precipitous revelation, it seems a strangely nitpicky exchange, conjuring (among other things) the bizarre fiction of Horatio, the scholar, as a dispassionate observer intellectually removed enough from the breathless pace of the opening scene to have been capable of timing the supernatural event by counting deliberately, "with moderate haste." For a play in which time is famously "out of joint" (1.5.186) Barnardo and Marcellus's intervention draws odd attention to the subjective nature of temporal experience, both that of the characters onstage and that of the theater audience. It might even prompt an especially fastidious spectator to think back and consider just how closely Horatio's timing could correspond to the actual stage time that had been taken up by the Ghost a few (clock-)minutes before. In fact, the first time the Ghost appears, it is only for the space of twelve lines; the second time, Horatio and the watchmen manage to get in about eighteen lines before the apparition stalks away. Of course, estimating the time it would have taken to pronounce some twelve or eighteen lines on the early modern stage is far from a straightforward (or, as we shall see, epistemologically neutral) matter, but we might do worse than to [End Page 911] adopt Michael J. Hirrel's figure of 21.3 lines per minute as the average pace of Elizabethan delivery.3 If this were the case, then the Ghost's appearances ought only to have lasted about thirty-five seconds and fifty seconds, respectively. Whether or not Horatio's time estimate is cumulative, a moderate count of one hundred, or even longer if Bernardo and Francisco are right, would have seemed an age—in an already long play, an almost unforgivable amount of (in this case, literally) dead time. If this seems like hair-splitting, I would suggest it is a hair-splitting that is invited not only by the brief dispute over Horatio's time estimate, but also by the heightened attention the play itself gives to time, particularly in the opening scene. Hamlet begins with a conversation involving a weary soldier who has that acute awareness of time that comes from having watched the clock while waiting for his shift to end: "You come most carefully upon your hour," Francisco says gratefully to his replacement (1.1.4). Indeed, Barnardo's observation that "'[t]is now struck twelve" (1.1.5) might suggest that the first sound the audience hears is not the famously existential "Who's there?" (1.1.1)—a question about subjects in space—but, rather, the sound of the mechanical object that regulates those subjects' activities in time. The Ghost itself seems to behave like clockwork: as Marcellus explains after its first appearance to Horatio, "Thus twice before, and jump at this dead hour, / With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch" (1.1.64–65). Barnardo's narration immediately preceding the Ghost's first appearance onstage is almost comically attentive to temporal precision: Last night of all,When yond same star that's westward from the poleHad made his course t'illumine that part of heavenWhere now it burns, Marcellus and myself,The bell then beating one— (1.1.34–38) The lines are so drawn out by introductory clauses, indicating the time in terms diurnal...