Multidimensionality" of Shakespeare''s time
The author analyzes a range of issues related to the artistic function of the medieval poet Gauer, the hero of the Pericles by Shakespeare. The article solves the problem of the necessity of this character, which does not seem to have ideological and compositional significance in the densely completed list of actors. Based on the analysis of the philosophical perception of time in the Elizabethan era and the comparison of Shakespeare's dramaturgy (in particular, the play Pericles and the drama Hamlet written earlier), the author comes to the conclusion that the images of the poets Horace and Gower create a kind of ''presence effect'': from the ''side'' of people who are detached from the events, but completely control them. Shakespeare binds, with such kind of ''timeless'' characters, all the actions of the Pericles in a single artistic whole, having a large temporal and territorial dispersion. The author proves that the image of Gauer, an English poet of the fourteenth century, as well as the figure of the Roman poet of the first century BC. E. Horace, creates a ''distance of time'' to remind the viewer that a person is surrounded by a past that continues to live in the present and in the future. The embedding of plays of other epochs in the plot corresponds to the Shakespearean view of the ''openness'' of historical time, according to which it is continuous and multidimensional. Time seemed to Shakespeare's contemporaries to be fragile, elusive, but the eternity - unchanged. Although these two categories are spatially separated, it is obvious that the former in relation to the second acts as relative to the absolute. Horatio and Gauer in the role of conductors create in the plays a time gap between themselves and the rest of the characters, providing a voluminous perception of what is happening. Perhaps it was a genius’s attempt to enter into a fierce dispute with time.