L'accélération de temps dans Macbeth - shakespeare.

Acceleration of time in Macbeth

Time is a very important notion in today’s world. It is our way to position ourselves in life. In literature time is very different. The author uses it to create different effects in the story. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, Macbeth written around 1606 revolving around the adventures of Macbeth, time is accelerated thanks to linguistic devices. After analyzing the play it seems that, nine days are portrayed in the play. For the story to be this quick the playwright used different kinds of accelerations. We can see three main types of time acceleration in Macbeth: The ellipsis, the prolepsis and the summary.

The ellipsis an ancient Greek word for omission it is a device used to skip passages in Macbeth. For the playwright it is used mainly to change time and setting during the play without having to narrate all the events that happen during that period of time, mainly because they are not important. Between the act one and two we know that there has been a change of time and place. We also as reader figure that nothing major enough has happened. This allows the story to move on much faster both on stage and in the book. The other kind of ellipses is the big, major, important ones. They are the ones that make us wonder why did the author leave these passages out of the story and only wants us to imagine what happened. Between the Act II scene 1 and 2 we know that Macbeth has murdered Duncan during the ellipsis thanks to the quote “I have done the deed”. This passage has been left out of the narration for many valuable reasons. First, is the pace of the story. Narrating the murder would take a lot of time and the story would not have this very mysterious effect. Second, killing a king on stage in Shakespeare’s time was just not possible to perform on stage in front of a king and his court. And third, it is used to build tension in the play because we don’t know how the action happened so we wonder if someone was there when the murder happened or if Macbeth left any kind of trace that he was there when Duncan died.

The prolepsis is in other words a flash-forward and the analepsis is the flashback. In this play the prolepses are mostly used by the author to write prophecies, shown when the withes are talking. The use of this technique is very useful because the prophecies are quick and still very explicit like: “All hail Macbeth, that shall be king hereafter” from this point on we all know that Macbeth is going to be the king and the playwright does not need to make anymore explanation. This allows the story to move a lot more quickly because the audience knows what is going to happen. Therefore the playwright does not need to make and kind of long explicative scene, which will only slow the play. It is also a way for the author to quickly emphasize the major upcoming moments in the play so that us reader or audience know on what we should focus and what we should expect. A prolepsis could also be seen by some people as a bad technique because it makes all the suspense disappear. When we think about it, in this play the fact that we know what is going to happen emphasizes the suspense. To make us keep on wondering the author makes the story move on very quickly because we already know what is going on. There is no need to eternize on these passages. The analepsis that is used to make the story move on is the

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