A Wrinkle in Time: Shakespeare’s Anachronic Art

This essay proposes that the vocabulary of the anachronic might usefully be brought to bear on the complex temporality (or temporalities) involved in classical reception, which necessarily ‘remembers’ the classical past in one form or another. Nagel and Wood’s (2010) definition of the anachronic work of art could almost have been formulated with Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale in mind, a ‘late’ play in which an oracle projects the conditions for an idealised resolution, Time appears as the Chorus, and a statue apparently comes to life. In particular, the essay argues that both the oracle from Apollo and the ‘statue’ of the final scene can be viewed as operating anachronically, in ways which “fetch” or “create” (textual) memories of the classical past, projecting it into the future.